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has brought with him so that the stills we take reflect the aspect ratio we will see in the movie, Brian has two special loves: the tracking road and thelucky shop. Whenever we see a good stretch of road on which to shoot an exterior of the bus, he automatically checks to see if there is a corresponding dirt track on which he can take a tracking vehicle. The lucky shop is his name for anywhere with betting facilities or slot machines, and it is his first port of call in each town we visit.
    Hawker, in South Australia — to which we have driven along a track so extraordinary in its changes of landscape that we have been changing countries, from Switzerland to Scotland, every hour — does not have a lucky shop open on a Friday night, but it has a hotel with a pool table. Consistent with custom, Brian places some small change on the corner of the table, signifying his place in the queue to play. A gang of locals arrive and take over the table in a kind of group commando action, leaving him without a game. For a moment, he is prepared to take them all on in what would probably be a hideously bloody confrontation involving the entire bar, but Stephan dissuades him. Hawker, they decide, may be the home of the six-fingered washing-up glove.
    I hear about this the following morning. I have missed the showdown by returning to my room to attempt to track down Tony Curtis, a casting idea we have had over dinner, at which Stephan has treated us to an account of a holiday visit made by him and his sister as children to their Uncle Adrian’s hog farm. One night they are woken by their mother and told to come and witness the miracle of birth. In their slippers and dressing gowns, they are taken to the resting place of a large sow and watch in wonderment as she gives birth to piglets. As the last one pops out, Uncle Adrian examines them. ‘Shit,’ he says, ‘they’re all runts.’ Then he picks up the tiny piglets by their trotters and smashes them against a wall, to the horror of two screaming, traumatised youngsters. This, we agree, may have been his turning point.
    From there we begin our trek north into the Conradian heart of darkness of the Flinders Ranges and the Oodnadatta track, the part of the journey where human sightings will be rare and luxuries, we feel sure, will become absurd sentimental memories. We have been advised, in particular, to look out for camels, the most dangerous of all desert animals at night on the road. Hit one with your vehicle at full speed and it will be the last time you make that mistake, or indeed any mistake.
    The sealed road turns to dirt track again. There are abandoned, rusting cars with no doors or wheels, and dead animals — none of them camels — by the side of the road. It is a wonder that any animals at all can survive out here, and these have done so only to collide with one of the half-dozen motor vehicles that will pass this way on any day. We travel through and past places of myth, places that are part of the dreamscape of Australia: Marree, where the people we meet are doing mining surveys in a light aircraft; Lake Eyre, an enormous salt lake which retains sufficient moisture under its crusty edges to leave our vehicle stranded in the mud for ten minutes in which we could have become a tragic outback case history; and Beresford, a complete building in ruins, a desalination tower, a flowing water-hole and more cockatoos than it is possible to imagine in a single place.
    By the time we reach William Creek in the late afternoon it is like a mirage in the dust. Here the flies, which have been increasing in abundance along the way, have practically taken over. When we drive out to take photographs of the desert sunset, they are an unavoidable mass: in the eyes and ears, up the nostrils, down the throat. We cannot open our mouths to speak, and it is fatal to use vowels, which require an increased aperture. Brian and I, in defiance, are attempting a ventriloquised conversation about great