Just outside Blinman was a depressingly bare and shadeless cemetery containing a memorial to William Darton Kekwick, born London 1822, died Blinman 1872 – ‘In admiration of his pluck, endurance, and loyalty to John McDouall Stuart, as 2nd in command from 1859–63 when the British Flag was placed in the Centre of Australia 22nd April, 1860 and on the shores of the Indian Ocean, 25th July, 1862.’ After all that tearing about the continent Blinman seemed a cruelly quiet place for Kekwick to have finished up. Later on, and in another context, I learnt that Stuart himself is buried in Kensal Green. On the principle I formulated at Bethany, that it is preferable to lie not too distant from the living, I would say that the leader is enjoying a happier retirement than his deputy.

Since we were doing death we called in at Kanyaka, one of the many pastoral ventures of the 1850s and ’60s which were destroyed by drought and whose crumbling remains are still just visible on the road between Quorn and Hawker. Some are mere piles of rubble, but Kanyaka was in the process of being restored. You could make out the men’s quarters, the cart shed, the stables, even a cobbled street. Soon the window frames would be back in and the chimney stacks would be repaired, and maybe even a coffee shop would be installed – the Carysfort, perhaps, after the Earl whose son, Hugh Proby, took out the original lease. But the best part of Kanyaka would always be its doom – the signs pointing to Death Rock and the Black Hole, the creek which had once given hope but was now only a bone-dry gash in the earth, the little graveyard in the baking clay, where even the one solitary tree was dead and the forgotten headstones were simple crosses made with rotten logs fastened together with rusted fencing wire.

Back in the van we cheered ourselves up by turning on the radio. Mrs Thatcher was saying that she wouldn’t bow down to dictators or truck with terrorists. I suddenly felt ashamed of the Kanyakans for giving in so easily to mere starvation. The other item of interest related to the discovery by Melbourne scientists of shellfish remains on a man-made site which they’d carbon dated as 80,000 years old. So far it had been assumed that man went back no further than about 45,000 years; now it seemed as though the Aborigines could nearly double that, making them the oldest homo sapiens in the whole world. Another first for Australia. I remembered an earlier observation of Ros’s that Australians were perpetually marking themselves and writing themselves reports. So – 10 out of 10, Australia! And well done those blackfellers!