I woke up at 3.30am on Sunday morning, ready for the plane to Adelaide. I was staying with my friends Clare and Bob. Bob, who’s an engineer with Qantas, was taking me to the airport on his way to his morning shift. I was already awake before he knocked on the door. I used the old hypnotism trick and kept thinking 3.30am, 3.30am before I fell asleep. I don’t think I slept all that well, I was consumed with fear that Bob would forget, that the plane would be delayed, that I’d forget my luggage.

We took my car, which had the luggage in it, and Bob dropped me off outside Departures at 4.30am. Surprisingly, I wasn’t the first. I opened Harry Potter and began to read, hoping to pass the time till the Qantas staff came to work. By 5.15am I was in the Qantas Club with a selection of breakfast goodies before me. I wanted to sleep but was afraid I’d miss the plane.

We boarded at 7.10am and I told myself I would sleep on the plane. I adjusted the chair and lay back. I shut my eyes. I made myself comfortable. Five minutes later I was sitting up, afraid that I would miss something. I opened Harry again and passed the flight reading. By the time we reached Adelaide I was completely exhausted and wide awake.

I was one of the first to arrive at Keswick Railway Station. The train was already there. It looked kind of ordinary, just a metal train with the logo of a camel and ‘The Ghan’ rivetted to each carriage. I’m not sure what I expected, I’ve wanted to travel on the Ghan since I first heard of its existence. Maybe the idea of travelling up the middle of Australia appealed to me, or the notion of following the route taken by Afghan camel-herders. Afghanistan was one of my favourite countries, but that was because I read in my stamp album that it was one of the few countries in the world that had no railways. When the refugees started coming and I asked an Afghani about that, he just shrugged. It is full of mountains, he said. At the age of seven, Afghanistan seemed far away and unknowable. My desire to travel on the Ghan probably came from a mix of all these things, fuelled by those beautiful tourist photos of a train crossing a bridge at sunset.

It was 9.30am at Keswick and, unsurprisingly, there wasn’t a romantic sunset to be seen. I met a man from Melbourne in the café. His name was Gary. I kept thinking he looked like he could be my father, then realised he was probably a few years older than I was. Or perhaps younger. I sat in the waiting room and read Harry, then went outside to take pictures of the train, then sat outside and read Harry. Finally, at midday, they let us board.

Because I wanted nutritious food over the two days of the journey, I booked Gold Kangaroo service (first class). My cabin was just over a third the width of the carriage, big enough to contain a comfortable chair with a very narrow cupboard next to it. On the other side were a stool and a wash basin. In the middle was a small square table. It went up at night and the bed came down. When the bed was down, the door wouldn’t open fully. To get out, you needed to be sure your legs were up on the bed before you opened the door. Very confusing if I woke up at night to go to the bathroom.

The cabin opposite me was occupied by an American woman named Mary Ellen. She had spent the last fourteen years working as a social worker with the American army in Germany. She was interesting to talk to and we seemed to get on so we went down the corridors to lunch together. By this time the train was rolling and the corridor zigzagged. I felt I was lurching from one side to the other and was really glad I wasn’t drunk.

At lunch we met Norm, a salt-of-the-earth 73-year-old, who told stories about his mates and his travels in the outback. They were typical country bloke stories and I suggested to Mary Ellen that many of them were probably untrue. I thought the train employed him to keep the tourists entertained.

Norm’s grandfather owned a cattle station in the corner where South Australia meets NSW and Queensland. His father died at 28 years of age, hit by something when working out on the station. Norm’s grandfather took control and forced his mother out of the picture. Norm can’t remember his mother and didn’t seem to have much to say about her. He was brought up to take over the cattle station. He didn’t seem to like it much, he travelled all over the Northern Territory, as well as South and Western Australia, and hung out with the men, even though, as he told us, he didn’t drink, smoke or gamble.  He talked about his women in Adelaide: the Maltese one who was Catholic and had four sons and the other, who was the wife of his old mate, Joe. Joe, as it turned out, did drink and smoke, and in the end, the drinking killed him. Though Norm said it was the smoking that would do the job.

Of course, we didn’t hear all this at the first lunch. Norm turned out to be in the cabin next to Mary Ellen. I woke up from my afternoon sleep to find him camped out in his cabin telling his stories. He was a constant companion. Mary Ellen was distressed by his comments on blacks but it seemed to me he was just your average opinionated country bloke. I pointed out that, while I agreed with her thinking, Norm was the only one of us who’d spent time with blacks. I’d met a few, but usually in academic situations, where we all worked hard to ensure we didn’t appear prejudiced and nobody acted naturally.

Sleeping on the train turned out to be harder than I expected. The bed was comfortable but the train rocks constantly, then stops for an hour or two. Each time the motion changed I woke and had to re-adapt. The rocking motion made everything a test of balance and control, from pouring water at lunch to sitting backwards on the toilet seat.

Outside the scenery changed slowly. No outback towns flashed by, most of them were miles away from the track. The landscape outside Adelaide was like most of south-eastern Australia, trees and dull green grass which brightens to green and brown when it rains. After Port Augusta, it was mostly white sand and low grey-green bushes. The white sand became red sand and an occasional tree appeared. There were mountains and rock formations in the distance and a few rusted upside-down cars near the track. By the first afternoon we were being asked to conserve battery power by closing blinds when we weren’t in our cabins, especially on the west side of the train, and next morning on the east side, where the sun was. It made me think about what could happen if the train broke down in the middle of nowhere and the refrigeration and air conditioning failed. While I’m sure there’s contingency planning for this type of event, it makes you realise exactly how vulnerable you are in the middle of Australia and how great an achievement it was for the early explorers, black and white, who crossed this land.

Next morning I found a rubber train in the souvenir shop. It made train noises like ‘chuff, chuff, chuff’ and ‘whoo whoo’ when you squeezed it. It sounded exactly like you’d expect a train to sound, though I’m not sure trains actually do sound as expected. I bought two of these trains, supposedly for gifts, but mostly because I liked them. I squeezed them several times to hear the train noises. I also bought a stuffed camel with a sign saying ‘Ghan’ around its neck. It had a baby camel too.

As we came into Alice Springs Mary Ellen noticed a Kmart and was disappointed to find a large American chain store in the middle of the desert. Norm and I told her there would probably be a McDonalds as well. The ubiquity of American franchises hasn’t surprised me since I discovered a Starbucks in the Forbidden City in Beijing. I’ve always thought of American foreign policy as all about making the world safe for bad coffee, preservative laced fries and crispy chicken.

Once we stopped at the station we were greeted by the Alice Springs town crier, a man in a funny vest waving a bell around, repeating ‘Welcome to Alice Springs’. Mary Ellen said goodbye and left to find her hotel. I had five hours to kill so I signed up for a helicopter ride.

We were driven out to the helipad outside Alice Springs, weighed and divided into two groups. There were three others in my group, the pilot and a couple from Western Australia. It was explained that you approach a helicopter from the front and should not go past the back door, because the tail rotor is hard to see. A guide took us on to the landing field and took our photos (maybe to identify us if we miss the tail rotor). My stomach was wondering what the hell I’d signed up for. I distracted it by taking photos. We took off slowly, at an angle, over the Flying Doctor airfield.

Alice Springs is between two high, thin ridges. The top of each ridge appeared from the helicopter to be about a metre across. There were more than two ridges; I saw three or four lined up like a set of dinosaur ribs. The pilot said these were formed when two geological plates crashed into each other, like the Himalayas, but a million years earlier. They have eroded into ridges you could easily fly over in a helicopter. Gaps have been worn away making it easier for people cross between each ridge. One such was Simpson’s Gap, another presumably was Pine Gap, a set of round white domes we were told not to look at. It was amazing, very much worth seeing and looked like it could be billions of years old. No doubt, billions of years ago, it looked very different.

Back on the train, I’d barely sat down before Norm came to visit. He’d spent the five hours on the train because, he said, he’d seen it all before. About fifteen or twenty minutes into whatever story he started telling, he noticed my eyes glazing over. “I’m tired,” I said, and threw him out so I could sleep.

Since Mary Ellen had raised the question of blacks and prejudice, I’d been thinking about the recent intervention by the Howard government following the Little Children Are Sacred report. The report emphasized the widespread abuse of children and suggested that it was a result of social problems, exacerbated by alcohol. It also suggested indigenous Australians were unwilling to solve their problems and help their children, and that getting children to school every day might keep them safe and educate them about sexual abuse. Howard chose to emphasize the alcohol connection, by introducing restrictions on purchase of alcohol and on consumption on aboriginal land. He chose to force school attendance by withholding income support and family assistance payments. Amongst a series of other restrictive measures, he (or persons in his government) also decided they should acquire five-year leases on prescribed communities. I wondered what that meant, I thought possibly the word they wanted was ‘proscribed’ and perhaps Howard was hoping to open the door to reacquisition of aboriginal land, by linking it to moral rectitude. I decided it might be interesting to ask people.

At dinner I met a woman who lived in Darwin and worked for the railway. She told me she was a proud Territorian. She had been born in Kalgoorlie but lived in the Territory for most of her life. It was comfortable talking to her and she seemed like someone who thought about things, so I asked her what she thought about the situation with Aboriginal children and Howard’s intervention. She thought it was appropriate and that blacks were drunk and violent. She described an incident where she and her partner were riding their bikes, when they were threatened by a black woman brandishing a piece of broken glass. She also thought that Howard’s measures were to protect all children, black and white. My reading of the report, and the Howard government response, indicates clearly that it is aimed at black communities, though the restrictions on purchasing alcohol have been applied to everyone.

Shortly after breakfast next morning, Norm yelled out to me to come quickly and bring my camera. He showed me a herd of Brahman cattle running alongside the train. Brahman cattle are resistant to heat and to ticks and thrive in the Northern Territory where other beasts are stressed. They have a hump on their backs behind their heads.

By 9am we were in Katherine. Norm decided not to wait on the train this time and walked with me along the platform. He puffed along slowly, his breathing rough: “Due to damage to my lungs,” he said. I was afraid he would fall over and die right there. “Just roll me in a ditch,” he said. I said I would do nothing of the sort (he was a nice old guy even if his constant presence could be annoying). He told me the names and numbers of his women in Adelaide were in his wallet and I told him if anything happened I would contact them.

I’d booked the gorge tour in Katherine. There are actually a string of gorges, separated by impassable rocks. Because you had to climb between the gorges, Norm took another tour. I found it awesome to sit in a little boat with high cliffs on both sides but what I found truly awe-inspiring was the Aboriginal artwork between the first and second gorges. It was high on the cliff and enormous; a faint red picture of what I think is a kangaroo and joey. I’m not sure how the artist could have painted it; he (she?) would probably have had to climb up and down, checking the work from below. Maybe, like hunting, painting was a group activity, with someone on the ground telling the painters how things were looking.

Within minutes of leaving Katherine, Norm was back in my cabin with stories of his past and his women. At lunch he was introducing me to people as his daughter. Nice old man or not, it was beginning to be too much. I like a bit of time to myself and I was still reading Harry Potter. So after lunch, I told Norm I was going to read my book and to make sure he understood I shut the cabin door. I stared out the window for a bit and read a bit. When I finally came out Norm looked so forlorn.