Earlier in the day we had seen wedge-tailed eagles in ones or twos, scavenging by the roadside and flying off when we approached, but as the afternoon wore on and we drove further north they hunted and dined in bands of six or more and were wholly untroubled by our presence. One, who caught me comparing his feathered trousers to the leg-warmers the girls had been wearing in London when we’d left, actually outstared me through the window of the Shiralee.

About fifty kilometres out of Marla we met the famous Oodnadatta Track. For people with time, courage, an appropriate vehicle and a pass to enter Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal Land, this could have been a moment of indecision. To our right was Mt Mystery and Mt Alberga and eventually, had we wanted them, the Finke River Flood Flats; to the left was Mt Chandler and a track leading to Indulkana and Mimili and Fregon. As if to capitalize on the temptations of a crossroads at once so inviting and so deserted – truly a place for Oedipus to have scratched his head over – Adam and Lynnie Plate of the Oodnadatta visitors centre, some 250 kilometres away, had erected a grand hand-painted sign, pointing in their direction. ‘Oodnadatta sure is a horrible place,’ the sign said, before going on to list such counter-attractions as living in the rough, far from garbage-disposal dumps and town councils. But it was the great ode to itself that I liked, even though I vaguely felt that I’d heard something like it somewhere else before.

OODNA-BLOODY-DATTA

This bloody town’s a bloody cus,

No bloody trains, no bloody bus,

And no one cares for bloody us,

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Just bloody heat and bloody flies,

The bloody sweat runs in your eyes,

And when it rains, what a surprise!

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

The best place is in bloody bed

With bloody ice upon your head.

You might as well be bloody dead

In Oodna-bloody-datta.

Ros took over the driving from here and decided that skipping the corrugations at speed, as Neil had done on our trip from Derby to Camballin, was in fact the only tolerable way to travel. I measured our distance from the Northern Territory border by counting off dried-up creek beds – Tarcoonyinna Creek, Agnes Creek, Eateringinna Creek, the Marryat Creek. Not one of them looked as though it had any recollection of the feel of water. Cracks wide enough to drop a child through had opened up in the clay, like gaping wounds. But, drought or no drought, the country was changing. We could smell the Territory. The sand was becoming redder, the scenery almost various. Even our strip map waxed poetical: ‘In the vicinity are numerous large rocky outcrops, some of which rise to 61 metres above the surrounding country which is lightly timbered with myall and corkwood trees.’ Bloody corkwood trees! Rocky bloody outcrops!