A queer look of self-satisfaction passed over Arthur’s face. He wiped his hands on the jacket of his grey track-jamas. ‘Well she’s my wife’s niece. She plays a Yamaha.’

Five minutes out of Port Augusta we passed a circus rehearsing in a field. We were expecting to see wildlife on the Stuart Highway but we hadn’t counted on the first animal we saw being an elephant. But an hour later we were rewarded with emus; first a family of seven, apparently aware of the hazards of the highway and actually looking left, right, and left again before dashing out directly in front of us; then a more flighty pair who danced across the road with clumsy grace, like netball players on the razzle, their knees knocking, their fur stoles ruffling at their scraggy necks. They reminded me of a girl I’d once gone out with, uncannily enough called Thin Doreen, who had worked at the pet-food counter in Boots. She had the same uncertainly balanced head, the same burning red eye, the same darting sideways look. She had even owned a black feather boa which rose and fluttered when she ran exactly as the emus’ did. Thereafter I wasn’t able to see an emu come lolloping out of the scrub, looking vaguely guilty as if she’d just misbehaved (surely all emus are shes), without thinking fondly of Thin Doreen.

According to our maps we were now in salt lake country – the vast Lake Torrens to the east, the smaller lakes, Finniss and Dutton and Macfarlane, to the west; but from the road there was no break in the monotony of the scrubby plains. Occasionally there would be a track and a sign pointing to a homestead, otherwise there was nowhere to go. In a clearing in the bush we suddenly saw an encampment of thirty or so Mad Max bikers. Men in beards and singlets looking up from what they were doing – mending, polishing, sharpening – disturbed by the sound of our engine. Washing was slung between the trees. Fires were burning. And outside every tent a bike was waiting, like a tethered horse. They looked like the last remnants of a marauding horde; warriors and refugees at one and the same time; all that was left to pillage and be pillaged after the final holocaust.