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of Texas, as big as France, Spain, and Italy combined, but with a more reasonable population—only 160,000. Most live in or near Darwin and Katherine, long behind me. I neatly button
my shirt, but who will stop for a fanatic on a bicycle festooned with garbage bags?
    Dave Hawcroft. He’s only going to the next town, Larrimah, but I’m confident we’ ll make it in his rotting yellow Datsun with a hole where the radio should be. He’s returning from a hundred-mile grocery run to his bachelor hut, and I can hardly do better than a friendly man with a car full of food. “Computers used to be my business. That’s what I did in the Solomon Islands before I came back to Australia.” I tell him what I’m doing, and then he tells me what I’m doing, literally, since I didn’t understand how I was sending my stories and pictures on something called FTP.
    â€œFile transfer protocol,” says Dave. “Allows you to hook up your computer directly with another. We can do it at my place.”
    Dave’s place in Larrimah, population 7, is a trailer set a comfortable distance from the charred ruins of his former neighbor’s trailer. Dave’s “caravan” escaped the fire, but the inside appears to have been struck by a miniature cyclone that scattered books and mustard jars and two clarinets.
    I connect on his fiber-optic hookup, wow him with my 24 megachomps of rambunctious memory, and show him my story on the Aborigines at Kakadu. He kindly feeds me Polish sausage and tells me a thing or two about the natives.
    â€œWe’ve got to face up to the fact that the Aborigines are not a museum exhibit that should be kept on lands they really don’t own. They’re twentieth-century Australians who’ve been psychologically baffled and buggered by our prevailing social attitudes and systems. Would you like some mustard on that sausage? There’s more orange juice. Watch their children sometime, listen to them, see what they paint—it’s just like kids all round the world, and they want and need the same things as other kids. But we want the blackfellas to stay in their old ways, to paint snakes and dots—a million snakes and dots, over and over.”
    On other matters Dave is an optimist. “It’s either hot and wet and miserable or hot and dry and miserable. So things can only get better in Larrimah.”
    Still raining at 4:30 when a bus pulls into Larrimah and takes me two hours down the road to Elliot. It’s hell on wheels. Twelve inches from my
head is a speaker carrying the sound track to the video True Lies . The racket of Schwarzenegger dispatching bad guys drills into my brain like a jungle parasite, and I vow not to ride a bus again.
    And I don’t. After a night in a “demountable”—a roadhouse hotel whose rooms are steel boxes with bed, light, shelf, and air-conditioning—I hitch a ride with Carl and Tess in a doorless Jeep. I must share space with bedrolls, five fuel cans, sheepskins, soot-blackened camp pots, a 12-gauge pump shotgun, a 30-30 rifle, and Sonny the border collie. Carl, with his fantastic beard and dreadlocks, looks as safe as a cannibal, so I strap my bike on the front and wiggle into the back. Once we get moving, Sonny drools on my leg, but he’s better looking than Schwarzenegger.
    More worrisome is a large bloodstained towel down by my feet, wrapped around something bigger than Sonny. Part of my brain alerts me to the possibility of a Northern Territory News headline reading “BLOODY BICYCLIST IN BITE-SIZED BITS!” But the rest of me is happy to be delivered from the tropics and Olivia. Already the land is sandier and the trees sparser.
    â€œWe work on the Aboriginal lands in western Australia,” Carl yells over the rush of wind. “Helping them get grants and such. Tess and I are moving from Cotton Creek to a place near the Giles Meteorological Station, so we took the