He wasn’t convinced that the marker indicating the best place to appreciate the Pound from had got it right. He found an alternative spot, a yard or so away, and called her to it. ‘This, in my opinion, is a better view. Here. Come here. Look from my rock.’ He took the binoculars she’d been using and then handed them back to her. ‘Now that they’re focussed you might be able to see something with them,’ he said. ‘That’d be the furthest point, I would suggest, of the whole bloody shebang. There – where that moss is.’

‘That’s not moss.’

‘I don’t mean moss in the sense of specifically moss – but you know what I’m talking about.’

‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know what you’re talking about.’

He suddenly flew into a fury with the apple he’d been eating. ‘This apple core is rubbish,’ he said.

We let them descend before us. ‘I’ll go first,’ he told his wife. ‘You put your feet where I put mine. No – no – NO – on the edges. I may be wrong but I think it’s better.’ A couple coming up asked him if it was far to go. ‘No, you’re nearly there. You’ll find a marker telling you where to look from but there’s a rock just before it. I think the view’s better there, but you judge for yourself.’

At the bottom, just past the Settlers cottage, we ran into them again. He had found an unmarked track he wanted to follow. ‘It’s bound to lead bloody somewhere,’ he was saying.

‘I’m going back the way we came,’ his wife said. ‘I’ve done enough walking. I’ll see you at the car-park.’

He snorted. ‘You bloody hope,’ he said.

Although I was not yet initiate in campsite mysteries I knew that much of what I saw men doing at this one – shaving in cold water when there was an abundance of hot, washing what wasn’t dirty, wearing bobble hats – I could have seen anywhere. But there could be no doubting the specific Australian content of every conversation that concerned a gas cylinder or a barbecue or a Mitsubishi Pajero Superwagon. The knick-knackery of camping spoke unambiguously to the gender differentiation anxiety which troubles the heart of every adult male Australian not in his dotage, and the anxiety spoke loudly back, theorizing and dogmatizing and brutalizing. ‘Ah, yeah,’ I heard from every corner of the compound, ‘Ah, yeah, I’ve been there . . . Ah, yeah, I once tried that . . . Ah, yeah, but I’ve always found . . .’ But they didn’t fool me. I knew a bunch of Girl Guides playing at being Boy Scouts when I saw one.