With the single exception of snakes, nothing on this personalized trek so far had caused me as much concern as Neil’s wardrobe. I couldn’t work out where in the Toyota he stored so many sporty little shirts and the impeccable crimplene shorts that matched them, nor how he was able to change so often without our noticing. The night before, at the Archers, he had astonished us by turning up in a powder-blue safari suit and white Italian sandals. He had even changed his navigator’s watch, which tweeted on the hour, every hour, for a gold-faced cocktail number which had the manners not to tweet at all. This morning, though, he was back in the gear which befitted a 4-wheel driver, always excepting, of course, the clinging crimplene shorts.

We called in to say goodbye to the Archers on our way out of Camballin, and had a brief conversation about the Boab tree in their front garden. Fearing for its survival in the frequent floods, Louise had trimmed its top, cut back its grizzled locks and twiggy fingers, in the hope that it would the better hold its own against the waters. For our last view of them, the Archers fell into a sort of tableau:

Louise on the verandah in her bikini, glowing; Arch, his arms crossed upon his chest, his khaki shorts bundled like a bag of marbles, manful; Pamela aerosoling herself, comically-hysterically; the baby brown and naked on the lawn; the dog Kalinda, in the sand pit, licking herself attentively; the feral Aboriginal cat up to her gums in Kalinda’s jugular; a brahmin bull, just visible in the field behind, pawing the red dust; and in the foreground, as ancient as a maypole, the denuded Boab, erect, engorged, and circumcised.

So, from Camballin back to Fitzroy Crossing, and then north towards the Napier Ranges, the King Leopolds in the far distance. We were in rugged country now, not at all unlike that wherein George Grey once more encountered hostile Aborigines, ‘each tree, each rock, [seeming] to give forth its black denizens, as if by enchantment’. No denizens of either colour here now, though. Just an endless, all but invisible dirt track running through broken boulders and dried-up creek beds; and fierce, forbidding outcrops of rock on either side of us, softened occasionally by the presence of punky-looking bottle trees and Boabs, smooth the whole way up the trunk and then suddenly foliated on top, like the young unemployed you meet in Sheffield.