We had no definite plans in relation to Adelaide ourselves. It had never loomed significantly in our preparations, precisely I suppose because of its reputation for culture; I didn’t really see how being in a place that had poetry readings the way other cities had robberies with violence could be counted much of an adventure. But it was also the case that we had known from the start that the moment we got to Adelaide we would have other fish to fry. It was from here that we would begin our great thrust northwards to Alice Springs and then Queensland; so it was here that we would have to decide what we were going to thrust northwards in. Ros favoured hiring a van and simply lighting out in it, just us against the unknown, the marauding savages, and the hundreds of kilometres of unsealed roads. All along I had fancied the train, arguing that on a train you met people, but we had just come off a train and my theory was in tatters. We would rest up in Adelaide for a few days and consider.

In fact we were up and running the following morning. We’d had a pleasant stroll around the city the evening before, enjoying the bustle of late-night shopping and willingly conceding that yes, Adelaide did indeed have an open, airy quality, a something at once mellow and vibrant, as my tourist guide said, an atmosphere of communal, lingering, street-consumerism that one associated more with a European city than an Australian. We had even found a red-light district, or at least a red-light block, where, to low Balkan music, we had eaten a Serbian mixed grill in an enticingly lurid establishment – to which nobody but us had been enticed – called Montenegro. But it was still all a bit too like Perth for our immediate taste. Something about the city was flat. More mellow than vibrant. And we weren’t alone in feeling it. According to a report on local television, Adelaide was in the throes of post-Festival tristesse; it lay on its bed every evening smoking cigarettes and staring dreamily out of the window, unable to find the will to stir. It was culture-sated. It didn’t have a clap left in it. Not even Lauren Bacall as Bel Lago in Sweet Bird of Youth could get it to rise. God knows if anyone had turned out for Svetlanov. I watched the musicians returning to the hotel – this time in dinner jackets and Ukranian baseball hats – and saw no sign that they were any more animated than they’d been when they’d left it. We smiled and nodded at them again, so that they shouldn’t think all Westerners were like Sid and Nancy, and in the morning we sped out of town in a little rented Pulsar.