It was exciting – it gave me a little frontier thrill – thinking of everyone’s wages depending on the state of the creek bed thousands of kilometres away or the whim of some drunken drover. But I didn’t fancy the idea of the abattoir. While the fantasy of living like this for ever was upon me I kept half an eye open on the appointments vacant sections of the newspapers, but only three even vaguely interesting opportunities cropped up. One was for a Drug Abuse Prevention Officer to work amongst Aborigines, with special reference to petrol sniffing. The second was for a Cricket Manager to breathe a bit of confidence back into the dispirited national team. Applicants were required to have first-class cricket experience, the ‘ability to coach and impart cricket knowledge in all respects’, the wherewithal to ‘communicate effectively’, and would preferably be under fifty. I was under fifty. And the third was for an Actor Comedian (male or female) with ‘extensive experience in Egyptian comedy theatre, radio and TV’ – applications to be sent to the Egyptian Theatre in Australia, P.O. Box 41, Emu Plains 2750. I remembered an old English music-hall comedian called Nat Jackley, who used to stick a fez on his head and do the sacred neck dance of Osiris, and I wondered whether this was the sort of experience they were looking for. Not that I had that either.

I’m not sure that I ever found Alice Springs itself as interesting as I found the caravan park. The idea of it as The Alice – no Town Like Alice: wasn’t that the point? – waterless, rough-mannered, isolated, equally far from everything that had become soft-centred in Australia, Alice with red dust in her hair as the promotional slide show at Yulara described her – the idea was more intriguing than the actuality. As with Darwin, part of the trouble was the clean-up, the gentrification, a cosmetic that automatically, blindly, comprised a casino and a Sheraton and a mall. ‘Visas for tourists jetting into Alice Springs for a taste of some outback Aussie magic,’ the journalist Ross Irby wrote in the Centralian Advocate on our very first morning in town, ‘should carry the warning: Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More . . . She has disappeared in the clouds of dust beneath the tracks of bulldozers.’