‘Better than Coober Pedy? Lightning Ridge?’

‘Yeah. They live in chook pens there. They live in car-bonnets. Tin boxes. Old tyres. Whatever they can find. Ground’s no good, you see. They can’t make dugouts.’

I wasn’t planning to go there but I asked, anyway, ‘Where’s Lightning Ridge?’

He knelt down and with his finger drew me a whole map of Australia in the dust. ‘There’s Coober Pedy, right? There’s Broken Hill. That’s the Birdsville Track. Here’s us. There’s Lightning Ridge.’

It was impossible to miss.

I noticed that we were being photographed from the roof of the Mercedes tank. We were what they’d come all the way from Battersea to see – a couple of dinky-di bushwhackers on their hands and knees comparing tracking techniques. We even got a look not far removed from longing out of Loretta.

‘Anyway, must go,’ my new friend said. ‘The girls are playing up. We’ve got no lights on our tent.’

Even while he was saying it the girls had started.

‘Dad!’

‘Dad!’

‘Dad!’

‘Dad!’

‘Dad!’

I could see why he wanted to live in a chook pen.

Back in the Yulara amphitheatre they were showing the same slides they showed every night. As we already were in the Northern Territory it was a bit hard to understand why we were being exposed to promotional material designed to make us want to come here. Maybe the clue was in the inane lyric which accompanied the slide show –

That’s the Northern Territory, that’s the great outback.

There’s no place more Australian,

It keeps you coming back.

We’d gone to make merry on our last night in the resort without any wholehearted anticipation of success. We would have settled for half an hour just listening to Mr Castor on his synthesized didgeridoo but even he wasn’t to be found tonight. At about nine o’clock, after a couple of ruminative beers at the Ernest Giles Tavern, we decided to drive back to the campsite, a distance of no more than a kilometre or two but along a road that was black and deserted, the dividing line between civilization and the bush. Halfway there our headlights picked up three dingoes crossing from the one into the other, returning to the wilderness, it appeared, after a night on the town; and giving themselves plenty of time to get home too, like a party of drunks in an uncertain single file. It was only when we slowed for them that we saw it was the middle one alone who was actually unsteady and that the reason for this was not alcohol but terror – sheer quivering terror – because he wasn’t a dingo at all, he was just a dog, an ordinary domestic dog, somebody’s pet mutt, being led off – literally led from the front, and nipped and harried from behind – into a lifetime of captivity. If he was lucky.