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thing’ll blow and you’ll be stuck out there.’
    He jumped out and handed us the keys. ‘There’s twenty-five litres of spare diesel in the back. That should be more than enough if you go wrong.’ He looked at us again, more carefully. ‘I’ll get you some more diesel,’ he decided.
    ‘Did you understand any of that?’ I whispered to Trevor when he had gone.
    ‘Not past the putting the key in the ignition part.’
    I called to Len: ‘What happens if we get stuck or lost?’
    ‘Why, you die of course!’ Actually, he didn’t say that, but that’s what I was thinking. I had been reading accounts of people who had been lost or stranded in the outback, like the explorer Ernest Giles who spent days wandering waterless and half dead before coming fortuitously on a baby wallaby that had tumbled from its mother’s pouch. ‘I pounced upon it,’ Giles related in his memoirs, ‘and ate it, living, raw, dying – fur, skin, bones, skull and all.’ And thiswas one of the happier stories. Believe me, you don’t want to get lost in the outback.
    I began to feel a tremor of foreboding – a feeling not lightened when Sonja gave a cry of delight at the sight of a spider by our feet and said: ‘Hey, look, a redback!’ A red-back, if you don’t know already, is death on eight legs. As Trevor and I whimperingly tried to climb into each other’s arms, she snatched it up and held it out to us on the tip of a finger.
    ‘It’s all right,’ she giggled. ‘It’s dead.’
    We peered cautiously at the little object on her fingertip, a telltale red hourglass shape on its shiny back. It seemed unlikely that something so small could deliver instant agony, but make no mistake, a single nip from a redback’s malicious jaws can result within minutes in ‘frenzied twitching, a profuse flow of body fluids and, in the absence of prompt medical attention, possible death’. Or so the literature reports.
    ‘You probably won’t see any redbacks out there,’ Sonja reassured us. ‘Snakes are much more of a problem.’
    This intelligence was received with four raised eyebrows and expressions that said: ‘Go on.’
    She nodded. ‘Common brown, western puff pastry, yellow-backed lockjaw, eastern groin groper, dodge viper . . .’ I don’t remember what she said exactly, but it was a long list. ‘But don’t worry,’ she continued. ‘Most snakes don’t want to hurt you. If you’re out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes.’
    This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I had ever been given.
    Our extra diesel loaded, we climbed aboard and, with a grinding of gears, a couple of bronco lurches and a livelybut inadvertent salute of windscreen wipers, took to the open road. Our instructions were to drive to Menindee, 110 kilometres to the east, where we would be met by a man named Steve Garland. In the event, the drive to Menindee was something of an anticlimax. The landscape was shimmering hot and gorgeously forbidding, and we were gratified to see our first willy-willy, a column of rotating dust perhaps a hundred feet high moving across the endless plains to our left. But this was as close to adventure as we got. The road was newly paved and relatively well travelled. While Trevor stopped to take pictures, I counted four cars pass. Had we broken down, we wouldn’t have been stranded more than a few minutes.
    Menindee was a modest hamlet on the Darling River: a couple of streets of sun-baked bungalows, a petrol station, two shops, the Burke and Wills Motel (named for a pair of nineteenth-century explorers who inevitably came a cropper in the unforgiving outback) and the semi-famous Maidens Hotel, where in 1860 the aforementioned Burke and Wills spent their last night in civilization before meeting their unhappy fate in the barren void to the north.
    We met Steve Garland at the motel and, to celebrate our safe arrival and recent discovery of fifth gear, crossed the