I didn’t catch his reply, but I guessed from their silences that what he had was so good that it told them nothing about their own chances. The minute he left, the owner of the Jayco said, ‘Well, you could drive up bloody Kosciusko with that.’ And the owner of the Statesman, seizing this fatalistic chink in all the self-congratulation, said, ‘I’ve heard that where we’re going is worse than bloody Kosciusko.’

Fortunately for them I came out of my shower cubicle sooner than I should have. And they took immediate advantage of my good manners and my youth. ‘Where you off to?’ they asked me. When I told them that I was going where they were, they insisted on knowing what I was hoping to go there in.

‘Oh, just a campervan,’ I said. ‘A Shiralee.’

‘A Shiralee?’ They exchanged fiery glances. Even through my wet hair I could see their spirits rising again, like red dust above a Coober Pedy dug-out. Or steam from an overheated Shiralee. ‘We’ll look out for you,’ they said. Which in Stuart Highway caravan park code meant that they expected to find me overturned in the dirt, with all four of my tyres punctured, and the steering column protruding from the broken chassis, just millimetres from my brain.

And that didn’t differ in any material regard from what I was expecting myself.

14 ‘An Interesting Place With Lots of Sandhills’

Fourteen
 
‘An Interesting Place With Lots of Sandhills’

Although we were on the road by 7.30 we were still the last to leave. Way ahead of us we could see a cloud of red dirt, a pillar of fire, such as only a waggon train of caravans could throw up. ‘The old farts have beaten us,’ I thought, but I kept the sentiment to myself. As I did the dishonourable hope that we would come upon them by and by, their tow bars splintered into a hundred pieces.

The gravel didn’t start immediately. We had about an hour’s grace before we reached Pootnoura Railway Siding, then the bitumen suddenly stopped and we were on bare rock. Had I been offered the choice then between jagged boulders and drifting sand I would have jumped at sand, but once the highway became a blackened beach and we began slithering from one side of it to another I found myself pining for jagged boulders. As well as being unnavigable, the country was hideous, the dust thrown up from the road having strangled the vegetation and murdered even the soil. Only occasionally did something silvery and shimmering appear before us – a mirage, not of water but of bitumen. At the speed we clocked up after our second hour out of Coober Pedy I calculated that we’d be in Ayers Rock in a little under a fortnight.