But it wasn’t all swearing in the park, or at least it wasn’t only swearing. A couple of men in their middle thirties, who looked as though they might have belonged to a serious rock group, sat around in the afternoons making billy tea and smoking and tackling the big issues head on. The one who did most of the talking had screwed-up eyes and a small button nose, flattened with years of being pressed up against the wrong side of the glass of life. ‘The only place in the world I’d go to,’ he said, ‘is New Zealand. Why go somewhere else to get shot? It’s stupid. Why be blown sky high in Melbourne? All you need is a couple of hectares of scrub and you can forget the fucking world. If you get nuked, you get nuked. If you get zapped, you get zapped. You’ve no choice in the matter. You might as well be in New Zealand.’

His friend was quieter and more ruminative. A jazz pianist, maybe. ‘It’s a pretty crazy world,’ he said.

‘Who likes it? If I went up to Ronald Reagan tomorrow and said, “I don’t like what you’re doing,” he’d say, “Fuck off!”’

‘That’s right.’

‘Some silly prick presses some silly button and she goes bang! And we can’t do a damn thing about it. I dunno, there’s so much power in so few fucking hands. It’d be better if we went back to bows and arrows.’

‘Yeah, well, I think we should abandon the whole notion of technology.’

‘I’d go further. I’d say ban fucking electricity. We’re an over-electrically oriented society. And you know what electricity leads to? More electricity. Some people blame the Japanese. I don’t. They’re doing what they’ve got to do. They know that there was no way in the fucking world – logistically – that they could have won that war. Not as long as New Guinea held . . .’

There were a couple of Japanese in the caravan park; one of them almost certainly the demon of self-sufficiency we’d seen chugging up the highway to Woomera, the other surely the figure who had come roaring out of the desert on his Honda, just as the sun was about to incarnadine the Rock. The second of these had turned up a few nights after us and been allocated the site next to ours. It was an awkwardly shaped patch of grass and dust whose precise boundaries were difficult to distinguish. We’d had troubles ourselves over territorial rights here and had learnt that you had to fight for every inch. So when we saw him scratching his head, and then pacing out what might or might not be his, we went to his rescue. ‘That’s all yours – all that there,’ Ros said.

‘And that,’ I added.

‘And that bit there,’ Ros said.