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ever increasing numbers, and those locals who have developed a taste for focaccia and cappuccino. Despite a magnificent desert sunset outside, Roland is in his dugout sounding like Ingmar Bergman on a rainy day in Stockholm. I make a joke about the flies and the ‘dragnets’ we have been obliged to hang over our faces to prevent insects from making kamikaze dives into our mouths. ‘I will not wear one,’ he declares with sombre finality. ‘I cannot look at the world through a net.’
    Just outside the town we find three locations which perfectly reflect our idea of making the Australian desert resemble the topography of a bizarre planet. The Moon Plain — on which one can look in any direction and see no horizon, nothing but the sparkle of gypsum — is where we will shoot the sequence in which the young drag queen performs an aria perched in a giant silver shoe on the roof of the bus. Equally lunar in a different way is the Olympic mine, where we can film a campfire scene at night and the following morning’s departure, its configuration of earth mounds by each mining shaft giving it an eerily galactic quality. Most arresting of all are the Breakaways, which, seen at dawn, look sublimely like the islands in the sea they once were. The middle section of the film — the aftermath of the bus breakdown — will be shot there. To compensate for their lack of star power, independent films must have at least one unforgettable sequence which everyone talks about. Priscilla, I feel confident, will have several.
    Driving north again, we discuss the music in the film. As well as the Shirley Bassey references, there are also Kylie Minogue jokes and a finale which involves her, or at least an impersonation of her. Because she is one of those figures whosetopicality fluctuates according to whether or not she has recently reinvented herself, I feel that a pop act whose tacky qualities are more timeless would be better. When Abba emerge as one of these, I tell Stephan a story I once heard about an Abba fan on a cruise boat who entered a toilet that Agnetha was leaving and, finding one of her stools at the bottom of the bowl, bottled it and took it home. I also play Charlene’s ‘I’ve Never Been To Me’, which I first heard driving across Arizona with Andrena and nearly had to stop the car. We repeat it several times because the lyrics defy belief at a single hearing. (‘Me’ is a sort of comfort station of stabilising banality, to which one returns after having too much fun.) It is the kind of song which tends to be performed towards the end of wedding receptions by singers so enraptured by their own queasy sincerity that they practically fellate the microphone. It also represents a genre of goofy melodrama that is raw meat to a drag queen. It is perfect, except it is on Motown Records and almost certainly unaffordable to us.
    We also play movie scores, and the three of us have a competition to establish if we are able to hum the analogous main themes of Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia and John Barry’s Born Free scores in sequence without transposing any notes between melody lines. At a madhouse by the turn-off to the Painted Desert, we are having breakfast at a window table when we see a Japanese motorcyclist approaching a petrol pump. Despite the heat, he is wearing a large quilted jumpsuit, which makes him look like an oriental Michelin Man, and there is hardly an inch of him that is not covered in logos. He must be the first of a new species: the sponsored traveller. We name him Logoman and decide that he is probably working for Bond-villain Mario, helping to track his transmitter-implanted eagles around the country.
    Since their residents are captives after sunset, none of the hotels are cheap at the resort village created to provide a base for Uluru tourists. We stay at the cheapest, the one with the communal showers and bathrooms. The rock is a remarkable place — the Olgas, the neighbouring formation, even more