The resort turned out to be on an even bigger scale in the daylight than we’d supposed driving in at night. It lay claim to being the third largest community in the Northern Territory, losing out only to Darwin and Alice Springs. But it always looked more like a holiday camp than a town. The central complex – the hub of all the fun – was constructed of pink stone, canvas sails (made in Switzerland for some reason) and high tension wires. The justification for these nautical references in the dead centre of Australia was lost on me, but the pink worked well enough, graduating from an almost rusty red on the buildings closest to the service roads to softer and more diminishing shades as the town receded modestly into the desert. I didn’t object too strenuously to the proliferation of amenities either; perhaps an 800-seater amphitheatre which showed continuous promotional films of where we were wasn’t entirely necessary, but I could see the usefulness of a tavern and a snack bar and a newsagent’s and a police station. What was wrong with Yulara was not its facilities but its tone. The place was rent with faction – domestic tension, family disagreement. A staff of 500 underlings lived cheek-by-jowl with their overseers, the officials of the Yulara Corporation. Neither side had any privacy from the other. So the usual resentments and rivalries of the workplace were magnified; the staff muttered and conspired, the management flounced and gave itself airs. As a member of a merely transient touring public – here today and gone tomorrow – it wasn’t possible to buy a newspaper without feeling that one had intruded.

On our first late-starting morning in Yulara we found the entire resort in a pet. The boys behind the bar of the Ernest Giles Tavern were seething. The coffee we ordered at the Old Oak Tree coffee shop (‘Relax under the sails or take away’) came to us cold in thumb-marked paper cups, and tasted like granulated Stuart Highway. We pushed aside polystyrene cartons of other people’s untouched food, dead when it was served, and spat on the table to clean it. Overdressed women in supervisory positions ponced across the concourse, kicking up sparks with their stilettoes. Even in the Aboriginal Artefact Shop and Boutique the air crackled with remembrance of injustices past. ‘And then on top of that she tried to make me wear a skirt. I said, no way. There’s no way I’m going to wear a skirt when I’m doing a man’s job. So I worked from 6 to 10.30 at the bar then she calls me into the office and says they’re one short at the coffee shop. I had to go home at 10.30 and put on a bloody skirt!’

‘Let’s go and find the Rock,’ Ros suggested.