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through the white fellas’ land, and then out to the wilderness beyond. If I don’t get a ride before dark I’ll camp somewhere out here, beneath a cedar tree perhaps.
    I see the landscape differently now. For the past few days, I’ve kept my eye trained on the distant horizon, hoping for something more interesting than the bleak, monotonous foreground. Hazel has shown me that there’s often a gem right there out the passenger window. All you need is someone to show you how to turn it to catch the light.

5 …
The Sheep’s Back
           I t is in the nature of epiphanies that they go “piph” and disappear. The magic glow that embraced me at dusk evaporates in a paddock at dawn with a nudge from a policeman’s boot. “Private property, mate,” the trooper says. I have gone to sleep in Hazel’s yumba and awakened back in the white fellas’ Queensland.
    The officer checks my driver’s license while I pull on pants and shoes. “Carrying any of that funny stuff, mate?”
    I assume he means marijuana. “No sir, Officer. No sir.” This is Queensland after all, Australia’s answer to Alabama. “Mostly just books, Officer.” I hand him T. S. Eliot, Patrick White, Woody Allen.
    His official face falls away. “I’m headed up the road for a cuppa tea,” he says. “Want a ride?”
    So much for big bad Queensland.
    We pull up beside a trucker—called a “truckie” in Australia—who is poking his arms through the wooden siding of a road train, trying to unlock the horns of two butting sheep. I watch him wrestle for a moment, then ask if he’s headed north. He nods. I ask if he’s got room for a rider. He shrugs. I climb into the cab and we rumble off through the mulga.
    There are 160 breeding rams in the two trailers behind us. All must be delivered by day’s end. Apparently, it is a job requiring intense concentration.For the nine-hundred-mile round-trip from his home in New South Wales, the driver, a part Aboriginal named Paul, carries nothing more than a bedroll, a waterbag, and an Elvis Presley cassette. There is room for me but not for conversation.
    “A bloke has to keep moving when he’s hauling stock,” Paul says after half an hour of silence. It is the last word he utters in the three hours until midday.
    The scenery’s not too lively either, so I start combing the library stacks crammed inside my pack. This time I pass over T. S. Eliot for a more prosaic text—a tourist commission brochure entitled “Outback Queensland.” The first glossy page tells me that Charleville, through which we are about to pass, is home to the Steiger Vortex Gun. Apparently, townspeople became so hot and bothered in 1902 that they fired six homemade cannons to move the air and draw in a raincloud.
    Nothing happened. So they retired to the bar instead. Charleville was already a “ten-pub town” by the turn of the century, the brochure says. A rather strange way to measure population; but then, much stranger yardsticks lie ahead.
    The tourist guide is less effusive about the next dot on the map. “Augathella,” it reports, “is 50 miles north of Charleville.” That’s all. This obscurity is compounded by a new highway having recently bypassed Augathella, which is 750 miles from Sydney and about 500 from Brisbane. A plaintive sign now beckons from the distant road: “Do not pass us—call in!”
    We go one better, depositing ten stud rams in the town’s empty main street. The sheep are earmarked—literally, with red and pink ear tags—for a man named Tony Wearing, who owns a property out of town. He and his son, Clint, are to meet us in Augathella at midday.
    I assume the Wearings will be dressed like New South Wales cockies, in shorts and singlets and elastic-side workboots. Instead I find myself at high noon, face-to-face with Marlboro Man and Marlboro Boy. Lean and ruggedly handsome, the two cowboys saunter toward me in stiff jeans, riding boots, and wide-brimmed hats. I’m not sure whether to say