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road to Maidens and joined the noisy hubbub within. Maidens’ long bar was lined from end to end with sun-leathered men in shorts and sweat-stained muscle shirts and wide-brimmed hats. It was like stepping into a Paul Hogan movie. This was more like it.
    ‘So which window do they eject the bodies through?’ I asked the amiable Steve when we were seated, thinking that Trevor would probably like to set up his equipment for a shot at chucking-out time.
    ‘Oh, it’s not like that here,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t as wildin the outback as people think. It’s pretty civilized really.’ He looked around with what was clearly real fondness, and exchanged hellos with a couple of dusty-looking characters.
    Garland was a professional photographer in Sydney until his partner, Lisa Menke, was appointed chief warden of Kinchega National Park up the road. He took a job as the regional tourism and development officer. His territory covered 26,000 square miles, an area half the size of England but with a population of just 2,500. His challenge was to persuade dubious locals that there are people in the world prepared to pay good money to holiday in a place that is vast, dry, empty, featureless and ungodly hot. The other part of his challenge was to find such people.
    Between the merciless sun and the isolation, outback people are not always the most gifted of communicators. We had heard of one shopkeeper who, upon being asked by a smiling visitor from Sydney where the fish were biting, stared at the man incredulously for a long moment and replied: ‘In the fucking river, mate, where do you think?’
    Garland only grinned when I put the story to him, but conceded that there was a certain occasional element of challenge involved in getting the locals to see the possibilities inherent in tourism.
    He asked us how our drive had been.
    I told him that I had expected it to be a little more harsh.
    ‘Wait till tomorrow,’ he said.

    He was right. In the morning we set off in mini convoy, Steve and his partner Lisa in one car, Trevor and I in the other, for White Cliffs, an old opal-mining community250 kilometres to the north. Half a mile outside Menindee the asphalt ended and the surface gave way to a hard earthen road full of potholes, ruts and cement-hard corrugations, as jarring as driving over railway sleepers.
    We jounced along for hours, raising enormous clouds of red dust in our wake, through a landscape brilliantly hot and empty, over tablelands flecked with low saltbush and spiky spinifex, the odd turpentine bush and weary-looking eucalypt. Here and there along the roadside were the corpses of kangaroos and the occasional basking goanna, a large and ugly type of monitor lizard. Goodness knows how any living things survive in that heat and aridity. There are creekbeds out there that haven’t seen water in fifteen years.
    The supreme emptiness of Australia, the galling uselessness of such a mass of land, was something it took the country’s European settlers a longtime to adjust to. Several of the earliest explorers were so convinced that they would encounter mighty river systems, or even an inland sea, that they took boats with them. Thomas Mitchell, who explored vast tracts of western New South Wales and northern Victoria in the 1830s, dragged two wooden skiffs over 3,000 miles of arid scrub without once getting them wet, but refused to the last to give up on them. ‘Although the boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us,’ he wrote with a touch of understatement after his third expedition, ‘I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.’
    Reading accounts of early forays, it is clear that the first explorers were often ludicrously out of their depths. In 1802, in one of the earliest expeditions, Lieutenant Francis Barrallier described a temperature of 82.5 degrees F. as ‘suffocating’. We can reasonably assume that he wasrecently arrived in the country. His men