Thurgoona means ‘darting bird’ and if, rather than drawling it, you exclaim it suddenly – something like ‘TH’GUNA! – it sounds rather apt. There is no man-made ambient noise here at all. At all.

A few years back, I wrote about the experience of realising that my identity was wound around my friends. Being here makes me wonder how much of identity is born of place. Here, I can sit and look at a paddock for two hours and not feel that any time has been wasted. I’m not even real country-folk – I’m just an interloper townie being amazed by sheep and fairy wrens (and local fashion), and, yeah, I thought it was pretty exciting when a kangaroo hopped past. But even the townie has, just in a few days, shed some of her anxieties. And even though I have electricity and running water and evaporative cooling, so am not even like an Australian of fifty years ago, much less like a desert father or mother, I still understand why the fathers of the desert fled the cities to pray. So much that was important two weeks ago is not important now, while neglected values, trailing like bits of loose string, are suddenly noticed, caught, and rewoven into the fabric.