The population has declined to either three or four, not that we managed to sight any obvious locals as the passengers of the train wandered around the deserted buildings. Most of them were presumably engaged with the store, which opens while the train is in town. We took a clockwise circuit around the outskirts, getting a good look at what remained.
Madam's photographic interest drew her away from the crowd, and as I watched and waited I found my imagination moving into Hercule Poirot Murder on the Indian Pacific territory. Over the next week and a bit I managed to put together a workable plot line, but it's one that'll have to wait its turn in Hughesy's queue of fiction projects. We were back on the train soon after the blast on the town's fire siren signalled an impending departure, and once we'd set off and signs of human occupation were gone I found myself pondering matters metaphysical.
There's a line in a Fred Dagg monologue about the Australian novel referring to the stark hostility of the very land itself, a line that draws its inspiration from fictional descriptions of an environment that doesn't offer room for the niceties of a comfortable suburban existence.
Alternatively, you could wax poetic along the Dorothea Mackellar I love a sunburnt country lines, but out here that doesn't really wash either.
Concepts like beauty, in the sense of being attractive to look at, go out the window. Although the stark hostility of the very land itself may be going over the top just a little, as the train continued through a landscape that relentlessly refused to offer any variation whatsoever, I decided that it wasn't so much a case of hostility as a supreme indifference to the day to day existence of humans and other life forms.
It's there. It's always been there, and for a long time it's been just like this and it'll still be like this long after Madam and I and the other occupants of the train and all their descendants are gone.
There's a sense of timeless indifference and if I hadn't been in the middle of an all-Australian playlist on the iPod I could have gone for repeated replays of Warren Zevon's The Vast Indifference of Heaven, though here it wasn't heaven but the vast, empty and unchanging earth.
The straight stretch ended at Nurina, some five hundred kilometres and six or seven hours after it had started during breakfast time, but the landscape continued to refuse to incorporate a vertical dimension.
Shortly afterwards we passed the site of an old prisoner of war camp, and a little further on at Rawlinna we stopped and a couple of stockpiles from the nearby limestone mine provided a break from the unrelieved flatness, though some six hours after we came into the Nullarbor there was still no change on the skyline.