He rubbed his hands. He was optimistic, truly jaunty, in a style which was supposed to have gone out with the First World War. Hope danced in his eyes. I could see my own reflection in the gleam of his moustache. ‘Soon will be,’ he said. ‘Once the word’s out. Our friends from Pemberton and Manjimup know we’re opening, and they’ll be heading down.’

His impossible high spirits lay like a dead weight on ours. It will take a hundred men a hundred years to get this place right, I thought, and even then there’s no reason to believe that anyone will ever find it. Ros and I didn’t so much as exchange a glance over the question of our staying for the night; it was too desolate even to consider. And the cowboys at the bar were beginning to eye us as if we were tender cuts of rump steak.

But Fred was no more disheartened by our premature departure than he was by anything else. We stood with him on the deserted street and shook his hand. ‘Good luck, Fred,’ we said. Tragic operatically.

‘Oh, I won’t be needing any luck,’ he assured us. In his mind’s eye the road from Manjimup was already congested.

He pointed us in the direction of Walpole and warned us, since it was getting dark, to be on the look-out for kangaroos. Then he rapped on the bonnet of our car and waved us off. ‘Pop in again the next time you’re in this part of the world,’ he shouted.

The only other sign of life in Northcliffe was a motorcyclist wearing a fringed jacket and Hell’s Angels sunglasses kick-starting his engine in the dust.

After about thirty kilometres the road between Northcliffe and Walpole becomes The Highway, route No. 1 around Australia, and is nothing other than a clearing through dense forest. It was on this road that we were to see that burning battlefield of vast uprooted trees, but until then the drive was marvellous. A warm vegetable breeze blew through the forest. With our windows open we could feel the damp on our cheeks. Low Wordsworthian breathings came after us. We couldn’t only smell green, we could hear it. And then the first wisps of smoke, and the first lick of flame.