Then I read the words, AAT KING’S ADVENTURE TOUR – CAPE YORK, KAKADU, KIMBERLEY, AND AYERS ROCK, and at the same moment there emerged from the troop-carrying section an assortment of designer-desperadoes of both sexes, the women in frameless spectacles and pastel-coloured espadrilles, the men in executive jogging shorts and vacation beards. I gathered from the way they were still getting to know one another that they had not driven in over sandhills from CAPE YORK or KAKADU but had in fact only joined the bus in Alice Springs for a half-day excursion to the Rock.

‘Yes, well, I work with a firm of management consultants in London,’ I heard one girl say as she climbed up on to the roof of the Unimog.

‘And what’s the name of this firm you work for?’ a voice from New Jersey asked her.

‘I said with not for.’

‘Loretta,’ someone else called, ‘Loretta, have you got my other lens?’

The driver of the vehicle stood apart from his party, smoking. He was done up to be on safari, with a knife and several leather pouches attached to his belt. He wore a long, frontiersman’s beard which had just a touch of self-denying religiosity about it. Whatever Loretta was up to on the roof of his Unimog he wasn’t allowing it to spoil the adventure of the mind that he was on.

Just as the Rock began to change colour a N.S.W.-registered Ford drew in and five little girls, ranging in age from seven to twelve, spilled out. They took one look at the phenomenon they’d rushed their supper to see and expressed a unanimous though not quite simultaneous disappointment.

‘That it?’

‘That it?’

‘That it?’

‘That it?’

‘That it?’

Their father took it upon himself to come across to me to find out. ‘That it?’ he asked.

I gave him more than he bargained for. I was a seasoned sunset-viewing connoisseur by now. I took him through shade and shadow, through chiaroscuro and definition. I pointed out hollows and configurations he had no chance of discerning on his own. I showed him prismatic freaks and unsurpassed chromatic bravura. ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ he called back to his kids.

‘That yours?’ he asked, pointing to the Unimog. I laughed and pointed to the Shiralee. ‘So where’ve you been in that?’ he wanted to know. He must have been younger than me, though he looked more tired and had more lines across his forehead on account of having fathered five disappointed girls.

I told him where I’d been, then he told me where he’d been, and we met in Coober Pedy. He’d loved it. I’d loved it. We both said we rated living underground, though whereas I didn’t and was only being companionable, I had the feeling that he too was being companionable but also did.

‘Been to Lightning Ridge?’ he suddenly asked.

‘No.’

‘It’s bettah.’