For one reason or another we ended up staying over a week at the Stuart Caravan Park and I spent most of my time there squeezed into the tiny toilet cubicle listening, or slinking between the tents and the campervans making notes. It wasn’t just that I was in a receptive mood, although I had reached that stage of a journey where you become sick of your own observations and prefer the workings of absolutely anybody else’s mind. What really turned me into a bit of a snooper was the caravan park itself. Because it wasn’t like any of the others we’d stayed at, where the elders of Australia bent on reconquering their homeland, and the odd Belgian diplomat’s family domiciled in Canberra, and us, dropped in for the night prior to chewing up more highway in the morning. Those were just pretend caravan parks. Here people were living semi-permanent lives. They had gravel paths leading to their caravans, small tended lawns, patios, pergolas, even dividing walls. They set off to work in the morning, some of them, waving their wives goodbye, and arrived home again at six to find an apéritif waiting for them on a table laid with a cloth under a lean-to. They sustained running feuds with neighbours, stealing an inch or two of territory whenever they drove in, and losing it again whenever they drove out. They collected mail from the front office. At the weekends they threw parties.

So I suppose what I wanted to hear from them was this: were they happy? For all its discomforts, in other words, I was getting used to the campervan and wondering whether I didn’t have it in me after all to make a go of it as an itinerant myself. I’d need a more sophisticated set-up of course. A Toyota probably, pulling a Jayco. And that was something else I was doing creeping around the park with my pencil between my teeth – I was peering into people’s mobile homes, getting an idea of how big they could be, how much storage space they could provide, whether there would be room for a typewriter and a small library of reference books.

I believed I’d need the typewriter. I’d stood in the queue for the open-air telephone and listened to the newly arrived describing their first impressions of the employment market to the folks they’d left back home, and I wasn’t cheered by what I heard. A rather slow teenager with a diminutive girlfriend hanging on his arm shouted down the receiver to his old deaf dad in Wollongong. ‘Yeah, the abattoir – the ABATTOIR! It’s great, they even pay you adult wages once you’re eighteen. But it’s only part-time at the moment because the stockmen can’t get the cattle in. The CATTLE!’