As they raised their faces we saw an indifferent hostility, a sort of replete malevolence, in every eye. It was as if we were being given leave to pass, permission to live another day, simply because they weren’t hungry right now. ‘I feel as if we’re being looked at by lions,’ Ros said. I would have preferred lions. There might have been some advice on how to handle lions in the RAA outback safety and survival literature I carried; but I knew there was no mention of how you mollify a biker. I put my foot down hard on the accelerator and didn’t come off it until we reached Woomera.

At one time you would have needed a permit to enter Woomera. But by 1982 it had been officially declared a South Australian country town and was now open to you to visit provided you didn’t intend hanging around too long. Although the barriers were up, I assumed that the sign on the checkpoint building was meant to be taken seriously: ‘Residency restricted to Defence Related Employees.’ Not that anyone would have wanted to reside there. It was a town of barrack-like accommodation, corrugated metal houses, drab blocks of flats built in the town council style of the 1950s, and demolition sites. Almost the first thing we saw when we drove in was a prettily painted collection of bombs and rockets, variously described as a Heritage Centre and an Aircraft and Missile Park, thereby proving that there is no past that can’t be made our proud inheritance, and no weapon that can’t be made a toy. I took a stroll around the exhibits and found an MK-10 1,000 lb S.P. bomb fitted with a type 117 retarding tail, a Seaslug, a dinky little MK-82 250 kg High Drag bomb with a nifty tail section known as a ‘snake-eye’, a Skylark (what larks) high-altitude research rocket with a pencil-slim body and a silver nose, together with an assortment of Meteor MK 7 jets and MK 12 Bofors guns and sundry small rockets and baby bombs. After which I would have liked a lie down. Decorated in fun colours and tilted at rollicking angles though these objects of our heritage were, they still gave the lie in their every lineament to any claim that they might in themselves be morally non-committal. Even without their engines and their warheads they were malevolent. ‘The playthings of Satan,’ I said to Ros, which surprised her as I am not normally given to Biblical expression.