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Home’. ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ was just finishing when we arrived and was swiftly succeeded by ‘Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye’.
    ‘Interesting choice of music,’ I observed drily to the young couple opposite me.
    ‘Yes, lovely!’ they replied with simultaneous enthusiasm.
    Suppressing an urge to shriek, I turned to the man beside me – an educated-looking older man in a suit, which was striking because everyone else on the train was in casual wear. We chatted about this and that. He was a retired solicitor from Canberra on his way to visit a son in Perth. He seemed a reasonable and perceptive sort, so I mentioned to him, in a confiding tone, my puzzling conversation with the schoolteachers from Queensland.
    ‘Ah, Aborigines,’ he said, nodding solemnly. ‘A great problem.’
    ‘So I gather.’
    ‘They want hanging, every one of them.’
    I looked at him, startled, and found a face on the edge of fury.
    ‘Every bloody one of them,’ he said, jowls trembling, and without another word took his leave.
    Aborigines, I reflected, were something I would have to look into. But for the moment I decided to keep the conversation to simple matters – weather, scenery, popular show tunes – until I had a better grasp of things.

    The great if obvious feature of a train, as compared with a hotel room, is that your view is ever changing. In the morning I awoke to a new world: red soil, scrubbyvegetation, huge skies and an encircling horizon broken only by an occasional skeletal gum tree. As I peered blearily from my narrow perch, a pair of kangaroos, flushed by the train, bounded across the foreground. It was an exciting moment. We were definitely in Australia now!
    We arrived at Broken Hill just after eight and stepped blinking from the train. An airless heat hung over the land – the kind of heat that hits you when you open an oven door to check a roasting turkey. Waiting for us on the platform was Sonja Stubing, a good-natured young lady from the regional tourist office who had been sent to collect us from the station and take us to pick up a rental car for a drive around the outback.
    ‘How hot does it get here?’ I asked, breathing out hard.
    ‘Well, the record’s forty-eight.’
    I thought for a minute. ‘That’s one hundred and eighteen degrees!’ I said.
    She nodded serenely. ‘It was forty-two yesterday’.
    ’Another brief calculation: 107 degrees. ‘That’s very hot.’
    She nodded. ‘Too hot.’
    Broken Hill was a positively delightful little community – clean, trim, cheerfully prosperous. Unfortunately this was not at all what we wanted. We wanted proper outback: a place where men were men and sheep were nervous. Here there were cafés and a bookstore, travel agents offering enticing packages to Bali and Singapore. They were even doing a Noel Coward play at the civic centre. This wasn’t the outback at all. This was Guildford with the heat turned up.
    Things took a more hopeful turn when we went to Len Vodic Vehicle Hire to pick up a four-wheel drive for a two-day jaunt into the baking wilderness. The eponymous Len was a wiry old guy, energetic and friendly, who looked asif he had spent every day of his life doing tough stuff in the out of doors. He jumped behind the wheel and gave us the kind of swift, thorough rundown that people give when they assume they are dealing with intelligent and capable listeners. The interior presented a bewildering assortment of dials, levers, knobs, gauges and toggles.
    ‘Now say you get stuck in sand and need to increase your offside differential,’ Len was saying on one of the intermittent occasions I dipped into the lecture. ‘You move this handle forward like so, select a hyperdrive ratio of between twelve and twenty-seven, elevate the ailerons and engage both thrust motors – but not the left-hand one. That’s very important. And whatever you do, watch your gauges and don’t go over one hundred and eighty degrees on the combustulator, or the whole