It is common, still, to talk about Australia as a young country; but in fact it is the old who are everywhere in evidence. Senior Citizens Fortnight had coincided exactly with our sojourn in Perth. Boy scouts had been collecting for them in Kalgoorlie. And for the next few weeks – particularly when we hit the roads north to the Dead Heart – we were to meet almost no one else. The old of Australia were on the move, and because they were fit, competitive, and wealthy, there was no stopping them. They dominated the corridors of the Trans-Australian and set the tone of brave hilarity which prevailed in the dining car. ‘It’s like me,’ I heard a steel-grey woman in a state of the most marvellous preservation laugh out, even before the first coffee of the journey had been served, ‘that sounds just like me when I was learning golf.’ We were beaten from the start. All I could do, while Ros and Judith smiled at each other, and Bruce made fine distinctions between the bread rolls on our table and those he normally ate in Essendon, was look out of the window, hope to catch sight of a kangaroo, and listen to episode eighty-seven of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. ‘But our intercourse must end here,’ one of the characters was saying. ‘End here?’ ‘End here.’ They don’t write them like they used to.

After breakfast we returned to our roomettes – we had one each; all the twinettes had been taken – to compose our thoughts. In the corridor a couple of stewards were discussing the fastidious dietary stipulations of one of their new passengers. ‘He wants extra-strong tea, no milk in his muesli, and insists on having nuts sprinkled on his fruit compote.’

‘He won’t go down well.’

‘He can’t sleep on planes either. He reckons they let him into the cockpit.’

‘He won’t go down well at all.’

Now that I knew the stewards were not members of an English or German brass band I was at a loss to place them. They didn’t at all look or talk like modern Australians. They had the musty air of college porters about them, or non-militant union convenors from Carlisle. Once these two had gone from the corridor I popped my nose into Ros’s roomette and asked her for her opinion: did she think there might be some secret Australian town not on the map – say Maralinga way – where stewards were especially bred for the railways? No, she didn’t think that. She knew precisely where the stewards came from – Australia in 1950. They were the same vintage as the food they served; they went with the tinned beetroot and the shredded lettuce. But that only half satisfied me; it didn’t explain where the tinned beetroot and the shredded lettuce came from.