I enjoyed it for all that. We woke early in the mornings to the sounds of warfare – turquoise parrots and galahs coloured the same grey and pink as a camper’s sleeping-suit, fighting for every tree. High above us the mountains were tipped blood-red like the blades of halberds. As the day wore on the red would become orange and then brown and then purple. By which time I would be ready to go looking for firewood and my friends the euros. The first smells of cooking would waft across to us, filtered through the more pungent aroma of eucalyptus. Then it was music time – pop from transistors, Beethoven from cassette players. ‘What a friend I have in Jesus’ from the Christians on a holiday weekend retreat, gathered for prayers and hymns in their canvas chapel. Pulped into a thing of sentiment I wandered around the camp, between the fires, muffled, like Henry V before Agincourt. A little touch of Howie in the night.

Before finally heading out of the Flinders Ranges we thought we might head just a little further into them. Once again we took the hint from our tourist literature: ‘a drive of 52 km north from Wilpena leads to the township of Blinman where copper was mined for thirty years from 1862. You may inspect the old mine workings, then call at the quaint bar of the 120-year-old North Blinman Hotel.’ Blinman turned out to be 200 yards of bitumen on what was otherwise a dirt road. If we’d had the right vehicle we could have turned left and driven west for a bit, turned right and driven north for a bit, and eventually we would have come to Lake Eyre, and Sturt’s Stony Desert, and Cooper’s Creek. Instead we called in at the 120-year-old Hotel. There was a quaint old bar there right enough, but it was squeezed by the refurbishments – a dining lounge large enough to feed several hundred, and a pool room, I mean a swimming pool room, in which I saw a sign that said, ‘No swinging from rafters, splashing, or bombing. Save water.’ Once again I was face to face with one of the great mysteries of Australian tourism. We were in a remote spot; we had negotiated what were virtually mule tracks to make it; we had not seen another vehicle for two hours; and yet here we stood in a pub that was patently pushed to handle the considerable business that came its way. How and when did its customers get here?

Seeing me looking perplexed, a couple sitting quietly at the bar drinking south Australian lager and lime gave me a smile. ‘Hot, eesn’t eet?’ they said. They were from West Bromwich.