I was panting, although I’d walked such a short way: not so much from exertion as a sort of tightness in my chest that you could have called anxiety. Around me the bush was full of noise: an underlying hum and tick, the drone of a million insects; closer individual clicks and twitters; the birds going eep eep eep.

It was all bursting with life, but also utterly empty. I glanced back. The bushes seemed to have closed behind me, smoothly, silently, like water. Which way was the road? In making those loops and detours, which way had I gone? All around me, the shadows twitched, light and dark shifting together among trunks, bushes, rocks.

For an instant I let the idea of lost into my mind. It would be so easy to flounder on, through the formless up and down of it, the land bafflingly twisting back on itself, each ridge and gully looking like the next. In these miles of indifferent ridges, the thin wavering line of the road was the only thing made by people, and even that was invisible until you stumbled out of the bush and found yourself standing on it.

I looked down at my shoes, something familiar. I reminded myself of the idea of behind and in front. The road was behind me. If I turned, it would be there.

Back on the track I realised I’d been holding my breath. Silly. A few steps into the bush and I’d panicked. It seemed important to remind myself that my panic wasn’t a moral shortcoming, but an interesting thing to know. Wiseman didn’t have that track. Not behind, not in front. He had a whole continent stretching away around him, and those birds that made the place sound so very empty.

After the miles of dry ridges, the campground in the hollow was an oasis: a big clear area with soft bright grass, scattered trees, sunlight glancing between the trunks. A swift creek caught the light as it ran over plates of rock.

The silence was broken only by the occasional smack of whip-birds and the warbling of magpies. It was easy to imagine that nothing had changed here for two hundred years, even two thousand. Just the creek and the grass, and the breeze in the branches above me. I felt like the first human in the first, perfect garden.

I took off my shoes to walk along the creek. The water on my skin was cold and clean. Under my feet I could feel bumps in the rocks, shallow grooves the length of a hand. When I squatted down and looked sideways I could see that they were the colour of the rest of the rock but not part of its natural form. There were dozens, hundreds, all over the flat rocks.