We camped for two nights at Wilpena Pound, making bonfires and throwing ourselves into all the other attendant rituals with as much gusto, I am ashamed to say, as the psychomotor retarded axemen in the tents around us. Except that because I had no axe to call my own, because we hadn’t yet been to Port Augusta to pick up a machete, I had to rip dead trees apart for firewood with my bare hands. On one of my trips into the undergrowth a pair of feeding kangaroos stopped what they were doing to watch me, even let me gather within twenty yards of them, but didn’t offer any help. Their proximity exhilarated me, though, and I kept a fraternal eye open for them, calling them my kangaroos until some pedant told me they were euros.

‘You should allocate at least two hours to walk far enough into Wilpena Pound to appreciate the grandeur of this vast amphitheatre (16 km long × 6 km wide), surrounded by towering peaks,’ a leaflet issued by the Flinders Ranges Tourist Services suggested. ‘We recommend that you walk past the deserted Settlers cottage then take the track on the right which leads to the lookout area on Wangara Hill. From here you can appreciate the vastness of the Pound and obtain a peep over its outer rim.’

We did precisely as we were instructed and were rewarded at last with a peep over the outer rim of an Australian marriage as well. Even before it came into view we could hear it puffing up the hill, fracturing the silence. ‘Didn’t I tell you you’d be at the top before me?’ we heard him say. ‘I told you you’d win. I told you it’d be the case of the tortoise and the hare.’ He was wearing a red shirt, grey flannel trousers and black business shoes. He was middle-aged, raw-faced, and had the indomitable complacency of a failed father, husband and friend stamped upon him. She was prematurely hunched, in slacks that were both style-less and impractical and one of those ill-fitting satin blouses that put-upon women always seem to wear, not giving her enough room even to breathe in. I take it to be the modern equivalent of a hair shirt, and I took it that what she was doing penance for was him. Because even she, who was of course the last to know, now did know that she had listened half her life away to the opinions of an oaf.

‘Like a great big bloody drive-in, innit?’ he said, looking out over the vast amphitheatre (16 km long × 6 km wide), surrounded by towering peaks.

She flinched – ashamed that we were there to overhear him.