In the best traditions of Royal visits, the train at last pulled out across the plain with the Prince driving the engine, leaving the Aborigines to turn to the feast of roast sheep and flour and tobacco that ‘their King’s son’ had given them. As for Daisy Bates, she returned to her goat van but was too excited by the exertions of the day to sleep. By the light of a solitary candle she sat up all night and read Our Mutual Friend.

Daisy Bates is out of favour today. Her humane pessimism jangles modern nerves. It feels indiscreet to delight as she did in the childlike qualities of a broken people stumbling in an alien tongue. And the essentially commiserating, elegiac nature of the task she set herself – ‘I realized that they were passing from us. I must make their passing easier’ – makes her an irrelevance in the politics of Aboriginal reform. But in the history of heroic English eccentrics, studying the classics a long way from home, she has her place. And she offers an alternative to being crook as a reason for stopping off at Cook.

It was the briefest of stops for us. We were allowed to stretch our legs for fifteen minutes, that was all. But at least we were able in that time to enjoy a night of the most spectacular beauty. I had never previously understood what travellers or poets meant when they described a sky as domed or vaulted; the heavens over Cook, though, were precisely that, curved and overarching, and studded like a ceiling with silver. As we were gazing upwards the sort of person who knows about such things showed us Halley’s Comet. All I could see was a vague smudge in the middle of the Milky Way, but I pointed it out to other people as the Comet and they seemed satisfied. Who needed a Comet anyway? A sky of the deepest black vaulted us. A cool wind blew off the desert, ruffling our collars. We picked peppercorns off a handsome peppercorn tree and bit into their aromatic pungency. A couple of junkies from the wrong end of the train lit up in the darkness. God looked down and said that if it wasn’t exactly good it was the best we could ever expect. So who needed Halley?

Ros had told me that for her the best part of the journey across the Nullarbor was going to bed and watching the desert from a horizontal position. She was right. I lay on my side and stared interest back into the plain. I discerned strange shapes. I caught the reflection of queer lights. I saw things move. On a long journey, I realized, it wasn’t unremitting Nature that caused monotony, it was unremitting cultivation. And of course human beings. I went to sleep happily, counting emus.