We spent most of our time in the art gallery, or in the offices of the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia, or in Hindley Street, where the Italian coffee shops and Montenegran restaurants were clustered. In the art gallery we found H. J. Johnstone’s Evening Shadows, Backwater of the Murray, an elegy on the passing of the Aborigines, all wistfulness and twilight, once the most reproduced of all Australian paintings. And we listened to a gallery guide who specialized in popularizing aesthetics for parties of schoolchildren – ‘Whack that down in your notebooks. Picasso didn’t hang about, he got stuck in. Matisse the same – wallop!’ Things were altogether more sedate at the Automobile Association on whom I called twice a day to see if there were still 214 kilometres of unmade track to negotiate on the road to Alice Springs. ‘People do get through,’ one of the girls told me, ‘but we don’t recommend the road.’ She gave me a collection of strip maps to study and some leaflets detailing the hazards of outback motoring and wished me luck unconvincingly.

We fell into a Lebanese café in order to digest this information and do some route planning. ‘Not very busy,’ the proprietor said. ‘Taking leetle rest after Festival.’

‘You are?’

‘No. They. In Festival very busy. 6,500 dollars a week. Now quiet. 3,400 dollars a week.’

‘So people are having a break after the Festival?’ I oughtn’t really to have encouraged him. I could see him gearing up to tell us the whole story of his business life without verbs but anything was better than what I was reading. Who would study instructions for making a desert ‘still’ out of a tin can and a plastic sheet – enough to gather a thimbleful of water – if they could talk turnover to a Levantine instead?

‘Break after Festival yes,’ he said. ‘At home. Television. Sandwiches. Not bothered eat out.’

‘But when the Festival is on you do well?’

His face lit up. He had an intriguing scar, like a knife wound, from the left corner of his mouth down to the cleft in his chin. ‘Oh, Festival! Very nice people. Like Lebanese food. Like good food.’

I asked him how he did on alternate years, when art gave way to grapes, and the Barossa staged the festivities. He screwed up his face, thereby deepening his scar, and shaped a wine glass with his hands. It was a contemptuous gesture implying fastidiousness, connoisseurship, non-liking of falafel. ‘But Grand Prix . . .’

‘Good?’

‘Bloody good! 7,000 dollars a week.’

He took us to see a room he’d recently opened in the back of his establishment as a special facility for Grand Prix customers. He’d called it the Las Vegas coffee parlour. It was fitted out with smokey glass tables and photographs of Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone on the walls. ‘Good, eh?’ he wanted to hear me agree. ‘Beautiful, eh?’

‘It’s nice,’ I said. ‘It’s got a good Grand Prix atmosphere.’