Looking for somewhere to have coffee we found a sort of prefabricated shopping precinct which might have been the old mess quarters. I was taken aback by the glamour of the people using it. Given the vast nothingness that surrounded Woomera, and the howling desert wind that blew through it, and its state of dilapidation and dismantlement, you didn’t expect to see sleek black G.I.s with glossy moustaches and hats tilted rakishly walking through its streets. Nor were you prepared for officers’ wives in high city chic or sharp subalterns with murderous creases in their pants. It was all a bit like being on a film set watching a Twilight Zone remake of From Here to Eternity.

We went into the Woomera Community Store, a long milk bar where people were eating chips from paper buckets and black American service wives sat sipping milkshakes and looking suicidal. While I was getting coffee Ros found a place next to Alitha, an eight-months-pregnant Mississippian, wife of a U.S. airman here on a three-year stint. She counted out her fate on her fingers for us. One done, two still to do. Woomera? ‘It’s a trip,’ she told us. I’d always thought a trip was a good thing, but it wasn’t the way Alitha said it. She was a big, lively eyed woman, rendered comatose by life in the desert and kept verbally inchoate by being born an American. As far as I could make out Woomera was getting worse from a social point of view because its service personnel were being cut back. There used to be about 14,000 people here, now there were only one or two. And everybody knew everybody else’s business. ‘You hear a whole bunch of stuff about what’s happening here – I tell you,’ she said. ‘But I dunno. Like I said, it’s a trip.’ She was so bored that she couldn’t get un-bored long enough to join the other wives on their big-treat shopping expeditions to Port Augusta. It was the journey she couldn’t face. ‘Just a whole bunch of road,’ she said. And any day now her mother was due to arrive. She was dreading it. Not dreading seeing her mother but dreading her mother seeing Woomera. ‘If all she sees is here, she’ll think – Australia? – Wow! I’m coming from where I’ve got everything to where I’ve got nothing.’

Ros said that she had taken it for granted that American bases were always well stocked with everything Americans were used to. Alitha did something extraordinary with her lips and cast her eyes comically around the Woomera Community Store. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘this isn’t a base. It’s classified as a site.’