I knew I was never going to get across as far as High Bluff Point, to the south of Brunswick Bay, where Grey first came ashore in order ‘to familiarize the natives with the British name and character’ but ‘not altogether prepared to behold so arid and barren a surface’; though of course I would have loved to be able to stand where he and his landing party of five men and three dogs stood, oppressed with ‘thirst and lassitude’ and contemplating the two pints of water which was all Grey had thought to bring to Australia to serve the lot of them. I did have hopes, however, of reaching the Prince Regent River, into which Grey had plunged to avoid the spears of natives unimpressed with what they’d so far seen of the British name and character, and where he’d come close to drowning when his military cap filled with water and floated away, thereby all but throttling him with the chin-strap which was still wound around his throat. And I wished, also, to try to find the very vertiginous mountain path responsible for the collapse of Grey’s pony – a spot, incidentally, which I had already renamed the Ian MacKillop Ascent, in honour of Ian MacKillop Esq., of Sheffield, a gentleman of soaring intellect but with no head for heights, the very reverse, in other words, of Governor George Grey, whose account of his struggles with his pony I now quote:

There it lay . . . on a flat rock, 4 or 5 ft wide – a precipice of 150 ft on one side of it, and the projecting rock against which it had struck on the other – whilst I sat upon its head to prevent it from moving. Its long tail streamed in the wind over the precipice; its wild and fiery eye gleamed from its shaggy mane and forelock; and, ignorant of its impending danger, it kicked and struggled violently, whilst it appeared to hang in mid-air over the gloomy depth of this tropical ravine. Anxious as I felt for the safety of my pony, I could not be unconscious of the singular beauty of the scene . . . .

Grey’s capacity to find time, in his tribulations, to ponder the beauty of landscape ‘as lovely and picturesque as impetuous torrents, foaming cascades, lofty rocks, and a rich tropical vegetation could render it’, is an example to all travellers. A lover of Wordsworth myself (the chasmal Wordsworth, anyway), you can see why it was my ambition to go where Grey had been.

But when, on our first morning in Kununurra, we rose with the kookaburra and set off to secure transport and advice on the local conditions, we met with a double disappointment. We were a week or so too early; the Wet was a week or so too late; and all tracks to the inner Kimberleys were impassable. Besides which there were no cars available for hire anyway. They’d all been hired.