We were at some remove from the comforts that had always comprised paradise for me, for all that Neil’s Toyota was fitted out with a fridge from which we could help ourselves to ice-cold beers or cokes whenever we needed them. The country was rugged and remote. The track which Neil insisted on negotiating at great speed, ‘to ride the corrugations’, was often barely a track at all – just an approximate clearing in the bush. Goannas frequently raced across our path. Hawks circled the sky. On the ground as on the map, Camballin seemed a long, long way from anywhere. All I’d heard about it, apart from Neil’s having chosen it to invest in, was that it possessed the highest mean temperature of any inhabited spot in Australia. Something like pride waged war inside me with something like fear. I suddenly remembered how, as a student, I’d won a competition at a party to find the title of the shortest book that could ever be written with Lives of the Jewish Explorers. Yet now here I was, giving the lie to my race’s trepidity, the only Jew for thousands of miles, penetrating further into Northern Australia, for all I knew, than any Jew in history.

With such thoughts revolving in my head I simply assumed I was mildly hallucinating when I saw the sign telling us that we had arrived in Camballin.

LIVERINGA STATION

and CAMBALLIN FARM

WELCOME

It was only after we’d driven past and Neil had remarked, as it were by-the-by, ‘Notice the Hebrew?’ that I realized I had in actuality read what I thought in actuality I had not.

‘That really was Hebrew?’

‘Oh yeah, the Israelis own a lot of this country.’

‘The Israelis?’

‘Sure. It’s an interesting story. I’ll tell you later.’

There wasn’t time now. We’d reached the house of Alan Archer, foreman of the West Australian irrigation scheme in the Liveringa and Neil’s co-director in whatever project it was that Neil had going here in this corrugated-tin town of forty inhabitants, an undisclosed number of whom spoke modern Hebrew.