I wondered how that could be if there was nowhere you could drive them. But the girl in the town’s Visitors Centre treated me to an inscrutable squint. ‘Blame the diamond mine,’ was all she would say to me.

‘Is there a diamond mine here?’

She laughed. ‘Largest deposit of diamonds in the world just down the road,’ she said.

You have to watch Australians with that ‘in the world’ clause: they affix it to just about everything their country possesses or produces. But I wasn’t going to get into technicalities. The issue wasn’t how big the mine was but that they’d hogged the cars.

‘They’ve got all of them, you say?’

‘They have today.’

‘And there’s absolutely no one who would take us out?’

She made a few phone calls. No, no one was prepared to chance their vehicles far-afield. But a girl called Sue – an experienced guide and lovely person – could do us ‘A Half-day Agricultural’ that afternoon and ‘A Full Morning Irrigational’ the following day. Alternatively, we could sell everything we owned and hire a plane to fly us over the lost world of Bungle Bungle for twenty minutes. I wondered why we would want to do that. Indescribably beautiful country, apparently. Unreachable by road at any time. Some of the oldest conical sandstone landforms in the world. But don’t get too excited because it was always possible that the diamond mine was using all the planes. So we settled for the Afternoon Agricultural, taking a look in the meantime to see if Kununurra came up as well in the daylight as it had in the dark.

It didn’t. Without the dying sun on them the surrounding crumbly hills looked undramatic, not so much hills as ‘the ruin of hills’, to borrow a phrase from Grey. I wasn’t pleased, either, to discover that the previous night’s spectacular South American peak was known as Kelly’s Knob. I immediately changed its name to Gabriel Jacobs Pike, in honour of a friend I hadn’t seen for many years. But it was the bungalow modernity of the town –its wholly untropical architectural idiom – which most disappointed. Beneath its inappropriate corrugated roofs the whole place just seemed to cower from the baking heat.

The bottle-shops had not changed from the night before, however. They were still busy supplying the Aborigines who once more turned up in numbers on the backs of trucks. There was drinking going on in the park too, even at this early hour, though it was of a relaxed and friendly nature.

‘Yous ’avin a walk-around?’ a young Aborigine asked us as we ambled past.

I told him that I’d heard there was a nice boab tree in the park and that we were looking for that.