The last few kilometres of gravel ran alongside the new as yet unopened highway. Now that we were almost home we could spare a passing contempt for all those who would do this journey after us, the easy way. In shower rooms all over South Australia I had heard men saying that, although the road was a mongrel, the adventure would go out of it once it was given its pedigree. I had listened to such nonsense with astonishment; now I knew what they’d been getting at. ‘Wouldn’t have missed the adventure now we’ve had it,’ I said to Ros, as we crossed the border at last and felt the feather touch of bitumen beneath our tyres.

But her appetite, it seemed, had been merely whetted. ‘Then let’s not stop the night at Kulgera but drive straight through to Ayers Rock.’

I consulted my watch: it said 6 p.m. I consulted my map: it said 335 kilometres. It also warned about night driving, and straying wildlife. But Kulgera didn’t look inviting, and we could always drive slowly. We had become adept at that. So we took it in turns, grinding to a halt every ten or fifteen minutes so that another mesmerized kangaroo could think again about dashing out in front of us, and at 10.30 we arrived at the lights of what we expected to be a humble camping ground at the foot of a rock but which turned out to be a little city – the Yulara Tourist Resort – with a Sheraton Hotel and an airport and a shopping precinct and banks and a campsite large enough to hold 4,000.

We weren’t strong enough to take what the Americans call an attitude. We had been driving for fifteen hours. Attitudinizing would have to wait until the morning. We found ourselves a power point and went immediately to sleep. Intermittently we were woken by the howls of dingoes, sometimes close, sometimes distant, carried in on an evil wind, foreboding harm.

The money to build Yulara Tourist Resort was being raised at about the time the dingo took the Chamberlain baby. It doesn’t require a fanciful imagination to guess the attitude of commercial interests to any imputation that wild beasts roamed the area they were promoting. Though of course they should have seen that the very danger would itself constitute an attraction. One ought never to underestimate the ghoulish curiosity of men and women; the murderousness of the dingo has now passed into the mythology of Ayers Rock and is another reason for visiting it.