Nullarbor

The great huge empty dry flat plain nothingness in the way from Adelaide to Perth, crossed by the straightest 478km of railway track in the world.

Staring out of the window while crossing it has a certain hypnotic effect. A rough mat of greenish gray covers the reddish floor. No tree or house or any other point of reference in sight, just the same cloned scrub at irregular intervals on a flat flat plain, stretching to a heated blurry horizon and the infinite unknown nothingness behind. This same landscape keeps repeating itself, rolling on in front of your eyes, again and again, like a conveyor belt, on and on, until it starts revolving around itself, and becomes a whirling disc of scrubby shrubs and red dirt, and the horizon is a wobbly mirage, you can see the sea and almost the surfers and the disc is spinning, and now it's you that are going in circles around it all, in a huge infinite merry-go-round that will take you nowhere and never let you go, until your bones too lie spinning in the sun, clean and white, on the red red earth.

But the spell is broken when the train stops at a place that only exists as a name on the map and a bent signpost by the track, where people have gathered because the coming of the train is the big event of the week, probably of the month, possibly of the year. Aboriginal people, coming from a rumoured settlement over the horizon, driving the same white utes, with the trunk full of kids, coming for a free one-hour concert.

Then comes Cook, the ghost town in the approximate middle of the very precise nowhere, with abandoned buildings, rusting old wrecks, and a population of 2, who run a souvenir shop. There you really realize how far away you are from anything whatsoever.

Then the disc starts spinning again.