I looked out of the window. Since the journey had begun I’d counted three separate instances of cars parked half-way up a tree, at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizontal. Now I counted a fourth. It was as if the driver, sent crazed by the sun and the isolation, had tried to drive his car up the first tree he’d seen in hours, had failed, and had left it there. Other sights on the Nullarbor surprised me. Meticulous rock piles. Sudden stone circles. Disused mine shafts. Inexplicable towers and pylons, apparently attached to nothing, feeding nothing, receiving nothing, offering a panoramic command of nothing. Despite the vast monotony of the plain, there seemed to be very little of it that hadn’t at some time been turned over. But then that was only the view from the train.

The woman behind me had moved on to a description of the breakdown she’d recently suffered. ‘I wasn’t able to lie down and breathe,’ she said.

The tallest of the WRANs had reached the sweepingly general stage of idle conversation. ‘You’ll find that New South Wales girls are the worst,’ she told her companions-in-small-arms. ‘Western Australian girls are friendly. Queensland girls are friendly, Tasmanian girls are very friendly, but New South Wales girls are a cut above.’

I fought down my need for another apple pie and ice cream and returned to my roomette. Where I read in my train brochure that we were now on the longest stretch of straight railway in the world – 478 kilometres without so much as a wobble. As Bruce said, you’d have to be keen.

Just off the railway sidings at Cook, South Australia, was a large metal water tank with a painted message on it for visitors – OUR HOSPITAL NEEDS YOUR HELP. GET SICK. IF YOU’RE CROOK COME TO COOK. We didn’t see the tank itself; it was too dark when we pulled in to Cook. But resourceful youngsters were in a booth selling postcards of their two famous landmarks. The other was the Old Gaol. This consisted of a pair of tin sheds, the size of dunnies, standing side by side, like His and Hers, in the desert.