Listening to the ripping open of tent flaps even before the dawn had shown her rosy cheeks above Mt Ohlssen Bagge, high in the Flinders Ranges, I framed a nice philosophical distinction between real life and camping – real life was not held together by Velchrome.

Then, watching the earliest risers returning from their tree-hacking expeditions with armloads of firewood, it occurred to me that I, who professed no protective feelings towards Nature, had done less to damage it in a lifetime of indifference than some of these mad axemen did in a morning of enthusiasm. Yet again, I said to an incurious galah, the only truly virtuous man is the sceptic. Contented with which idea I strolled over to the shower rooms – the one person on the campsite not wearing a grey towelling tracksuit for pyjamas.

Strictly speaking we were not supposed to be in the Flinders Ranges at all. They hadn’t figured in my original itinerary. The plan had been that we would motor gently out of Adelaide, getting the feel of the van and so on, spend the first night in Clare in the area known, with some shortfall of cartographic inventiveness, as Mid North South Australia, load up with necessary provisions at Port Augusta – ten litres of water each, according to the RAA, enough food for every person in the vehicle to survive five days on, several sheets of plastic, a machete, salt tablets, an aluminium space blanket, a tube of Bostik – and then head on up the Stuart Highway to Coober Pedy. Well, the Clare part had gone according to schedule, but after that the languorous landscape of Upper Mid North South Australia had begun to work a dreamy sort of charm on us. The town of Gladstone was flat and silent but we drove round and round it, transfixed. We crawled like snails through the pretty settlements of Laura, the birthplace of C. J. Dennis, author of The Sentimental Bloke, and Wirrabara, a honeypot surrounded by forests and overlooked by Mt Remarkable. By the time we’d come out the other end of Telowie Gorge with its hills of Black-boys, spears raised against the sky, and glowing gum trees striped like tigers where their barks had peeled and flaked, we were at the mercy of the distant mountains. A couple of kilometres before Port Augusta we took the road to Quorn instead of Woomera, and within the hour found ourselves at yet another 150th birthday party. This time in the dusty playground of the local school.