‘My name’s Warren, but you can call me Spike,’ our bus driver said, at the very moment, according to my strip map, that we crossed the tropic of Capricorn. Also according to my strip map the small settlement of Ti Tree, which we came to a couple of hours after leaving Alice, was ‘mentioned in various factual novels on these parts’. It didn’t ring any bells and in fact I didn’t see any settlement; only a roadhouse, claiming to be ‘The most Central Pub in Australia’. It was certainly the liveliest. Under a sign which said ‘Flo’s Bar’, men with bruised and bleeding faces, with tattooed ears and pierced nostrils, wearing bandanas and, I swear, feathers, fought and shouted and poured beer unremittingly down their throats as if they were gargoyles in reverse. Warren had only allowed us a ten-minute refreshment stop at Ti Tree but we were all back on the bus in five, and that included the couple we’d originally stopped to drop off here, who returned with their suitcases pleading to be allowed back on board. As we drove out we saw police making three arrests. What puzzled me was how they chose.

It was an uncomfortable journey. The temperature in the bus kept changing, making it impossible to go to sleep. The stops were all in the wrong places and at the wrong times. And there was nobody much to talk to. The German nursery tree and shrub cultivators in the seat in front of ours were pleasant enough in their rabidly curious way; but we had to close our ears to Steve and Simon, the two English boys from Frensham Heights who’d cut their shirts off at the armpits in order to look like Aussies, and couldn’t get over what a ‘gid taim’ they were having; and Terry, across the aisle from us, whose mind would only work associatively backwards, so that he couldn’t so much as eat a chocolate bar without being reminded of the last occasion on which he’d eaten something similar. ‘Reminds me of the time I was in Noosa,’ he suddenly said, for no other reason than that we were now in Tennant Creek.