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up a little speed as we entered the Blue Mountains, where the houses thinned out and we were treated to long end-of-afternoon views over steep-sided vales and hazy forests of gum trees, whose quiet respirations give the hills their eponymous tinge.
    I went off to explore the train. Our domain, the first class section, consisted of five sleeping carriages, a diningcarriage in a plush and velvety style that might be called fin de siècle brothelkeeper , and a lounge bar in a rather more modern mode. This was provisioned with soft chairs, a small promising-looking bar and low but relentless piped music from a twenty-volume compilation called, at a guess, ‘Songs You Hoped You’d Never Hear Again’. A mournful duet from Phantom of the Opera was playing as I passed through.
    Beyond first class was the slightly cheaper holiday class, which was much the same as ours except that their dining area was a buffet car with bare plastic tables. (These people apparently needed wiping down after meals.) The passage beyond holiday class was barred by a windowless door, which was locked.
    ‘What’s back there?’ I asked the buffet car girl.
    ‘Coach class,’ she said with a shudder.
    ‘Is this door always locked?’
    She nodded gravely. ‘Always.’
    Coach class would become my obsession. But first it was time for dinner. The tannoy announced the first sitting. Ethel Merman was belting out ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ as I passed back through the first class lounge. Say what you will, the woman had lungs.

    For all its air of cultivated venerability, the Indian Pacific is actually an infant as rail systems go, having been created as recently as 1970 when a new standard-gauge line was built across the country. Before that, for various arcane reasons mostly to do with regional distrust and envy, Australian railway lines employed different gauges. New South Wales had rails 4 feet 8½ inches apart. Victoria opted for a more commodious 5 feet 3 inches. Queensland and Western Australia economically decided on a standard of 3 feet6 inches (a width not far off that of amusement park rides; people must have ridden with their legs out of the windows). South Australia, inventively, had all three. Five times on any journey between the east and west coasts passengers and freight had to be offloaded from one train and redeposited on another; a mad and tedious process. Finally, sanity was mustered and an all-new line was built. It is the second longest line in the world, after Russia’s Trans-Siberian.
    I know all this because Trevor and I sat at dinner with a pair of quiet middle-aged teachers from rural north Queensland, Keith and Daphne. This was a big trip for them on teachers’ salaries, and Keith had done his homework. He talked with enthusiasm about the train, the landscape, the recent bush fires – we were passing through Lithgow where hundreds of acres of bush had been scorched and two firefighters had lost their lives recently – but when I asked about Aborigines (the question of land reforms had been much in the news) he grew suddenly vague and flustered.
    ‘It’s a problem,’ he said, staring hard at his food.
    ‘At the school where I teach,’ Daphne went on, hesitantly, ‘the Aboriginal parents, well, they get their dole payment and spend it on drink and then go walkabout. And the teachers have to . . . well, feed the children. You know, out of their own pockets. Otherwise the children wouldn’t eat.’
    ‘It’s a problem,’ Keith said again, still fixed on his food.
    ‘But they’re lovely people really. When they’re not drinking.’
    And that pretty well killed the conversation.
    After dinner Trevor and I ventured into the lounge carriage. While Trevor went to the bar to order I sank into aneasy chair and watched the dusky landscape. It was farming country, vaguely arid. The background music, I noted with idle interest, had gone from ‘Much Loved Show Tunes’ to ‘Party Time at the Nursing