ABOUT TEN KILOMETRES south of Hungerford, I get out of the car and start walking. Hungerford sits on the New South Wales-Queensland border more than two hundred kilometres northwest of Bourke. It’s a one-pub town divided by a gate in a rabbit fence which must be opened and closed to cross the border. This is the true outback – a land far removed from the narrow coastal strip and the big eastern cities where most Australians live.

It is so easy to forget what the land beyond the Great Dividing Range – that ‘great grey plain’ as Henry Lawson called it – is really like. If you spend your life with a view of tall buildings, surrounded by urgent people who talk and drive too fast on sealed roads, even if you once experienced the unforgiving reality of the bush, chances are you will have forgotten.