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had been before, but that day would come. Meanwhile, I had a night’s sleep to get and a train to catch.

I believe I first realized I was going to like the Australian outback when I read that the Simpson Desert, an area bigger than some European countries, was named in 1932 *3 after a manufacturer of washing machines. (Specifically, Alfred Simpson, who funded an aerial survey.) It wasn’t so much the pleasingly unheroic nature of the name as the knowledge that an expanse of Australia more than 100,000 miles square didn’t even have a name until less than seventy years ago. I have near relatives who have had names longer than that.
    But then that’s the thing about the outback – it’s so vast and forbidding that much of it is still scarcely charted. Even Uluru was unseen by anyone but its Aboriginalcaretakers until only a little over a century ago. It’s not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is ‘the bush’. At some indeterminate point ‘the bush’ becomes ‘the outback’. Push on for another 2,000 miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that’s Australia.
    And so, in the company of the photographer Trevor Ray Hart, an amiable young man in shorts and a faded T-shirt, I took a cab to Sydney’s Central Station, an imposing heap of bricks on Elizabeth Street, and there we found our way through its dim and venerable concourse to our train.
    Stretching for a third of a mile along the curving platform, the Indian Pacific was everything the brochure illustrations had promised – silvery sleek, shiny as a new nickel, humming with that sense of impending adventure that comes with the start of a long journey on a powerful machine. Carriage G, one of seventeen on the train, was in the charge of a cheerful steward named Terry, who thoughtfully provided a measure of local colour by accompanying every remark with an upbeat Aussie turn of phrase.
    Need a glass of water?
    ‘No worries, mate. I’ll get right on ’er.’
    Just received word that your mother has died?
    ‘Not a drama. She’ll be apples.’
    He showed us to our berths, a pair of singles on opposite sides of a narrow panelled corridor. The cabins were astoundingly tiny – so tiny that you could bend over and actually get stuck.
    ‘This is it?’ I said in mild consternation. ‘In its entirety?’
    ‘No worries,’ Terry beamed. ‘She’s a bit snug, but you’ll find she’s got everything you need.’
    And he was right. Everything you could possibly require in a living space was there. It was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included a comfy built-in seat, a hideaway basin and toilet, a miniature cupboard, an overhead shelf just large enough for one very small suitcase, two reading lights, a pair of clean towels and a little amenity bag. In the wall was a narrow drop-down bed, which didn’t so much drop down as fall out like a hastily stowed corpse as I, and I expect many other giddily experimental passengers, discovered after looking ruminatively at the door and thinking: ‘Well, I wonder what’s behind there?’ Still, it did make for an interesting surprise, and freeing my various facial protuberances from its coiled springs helped to pass the half hour before departure.
    And then at last the train thrummed to life and we slid regally out of Sydney Central. We were on our way.
    Done in one fell swoop, the journey to Perth takes nearly three days. Our instructions, however, were to disembark at the old mining town of Broken Hill to sample the outback and see what might bite us. So for Trevor and me the rail journey would be in two parts: an overnight run to Broken Hill and then a two-day haul across the Nullarbor. The train trundled out through the endless western suburbs of Sydney – through Flemington, Auburn, Parramatta, Doonside and the adorably named Rooty Hill – then picked