There’s nothing quite like a long slow train journey, a languid meander through the contours of a landscape, carved where it would let 19th century frontiersmen through.

I’ve done this before. In Peru, sitting on the plate of a packed locomotive threading its way back from Machu Picchu to Cuzco after hiking and camping along the Inca Trail. Waking up just past Arrochar on the overnight sleeper from Kings Cross to Inverness, the highland vistas just becoming apparent. It’s not something I do easily, just sitting and merely being, under someone else’s control, moving at a pace I have no say in, adhering to someone else’s timetable. It takes real effort. But again, for you, my faithful readers… 

This week, we’re in The Outback, having taken a 13 hour, 1,150 mile train journey west from Sydney. I’d love to report it was a colourful old carriage, full of walnut, linen and crystal in keeping with my status as a colonial traveller. Alas, first class was no better than London’s First Capital Connect. All plastic seating with ersatz cloth, packaged white sandwiches in the buffet, creaking undercarriage where the stock hasn’t been maintained well. And a whole day without wifi….

I put some Chick Corea and Gary Burton duets on my headphones and settled down with a safe brioche from our favourite bakery. Like a Last Breakfast, I thought. We left Sydney at 6.18am, passing through Parramatta and the dreaded Penrith, starting an hour later to climb up high through the familiar Blue Mountains with their huge drops and deep views, and expansive bush. All this we knew well, spotting roads we’ve driven along, and areas we have walked in. As we came away and down from the mountains, the bush thinned out, and gave way to pasture. Those early settlers who came across the mountains were rewarded with land they could tame and live from. The train wandered slowly between the hillsides through smaller villages with wooden stations to Bathurst, a country hub. The ground became the parched green of a late hot English August and the few cattle were huddled in creeks or were sitting in the narrowing shade. The number of houses and farm buildings dwindled. Australian magpies sat on fence posts, the cuttings changed from sandstone to baked sandy earth. TC saw two birds of prey devouring a carcass by the trackside. More and more trees were parched or dying. The earth became harder, drier, more ochre than brown, the buildings now with rusting corrugated roofs mirroring the earth.

You know where this is going. Ever more to the west, away from water sources, more red than ochre, sandier, fewer farms, fewer settlements, cows with hides the colour of dust, the occasional flash of a favourite bird like Crimson Rozella and pink Galah. Noon. The track grew straighter, the views wider and flatter, pulling past smaller ramshackle outposts each with its own uninhabited Railway Station Hotel… Blayney, Orange, Molong, Parkes, Condobolin, Euabalong West (but alas not East) and Conoble Creek.

Stock fencing had given way to chicken wire fencing to none at all, gum trees provided sparse shade. Then squads of emus and families of kangaroos in wild open spaces, as the train chunted along 200 miles of dead straight track, no diversions, no bends, under an unrelenting harsh blue sky. In the final few hours, Ivanhoe (with its Jehovah’s Witness stand – ah just like Bounds Green) and Menindee.

By sunfall we were at our destination, Broken Hill, with it still 35c. This town is now a sleepy place, with its grid of empty wide streets overlooked by the zinc, silver and lead mines which brought it prospectors, wealth and sharp growth in the 19th century. The town has slowed down, become less of a hub, and the economy survives on the remaining seams still mined – and of course tourists. Of which we saw two others.

It’s Weird. Really Weird. A small town of large contrasts, almost inexplicable oddities and uncertain logic. There is, for example, a large number of truly hideous art galleries, and a terrible sculpture trail. There’s a memorial to the Afghan Muslim camel herders who were so important to the development of Australia. What do you mean, you didn’t know?

A government website says that ‘the solution to the problem of finding suitable transport for inland exploration and travel was to bring in camels….The introduction of camels and the so-called ‘Afghan’ cameleers proved to be a turning point in the exploration and development of the Australian interior.

‘For a short period of time from the 1860s to the early 1900s, these cameleers and their ‘ships of the desert’ became the backbone of the Australian economy. They accompanied exploration parties, carrying supplies and materials where horses and oxen could not. They carted supplies, mail and even water to remote settlements.’ Well I never.

But that is nothing, my friends – for here, in the desert, there were, yup – Jews. For several decades in the middle of absofrigginglutely nowhere, there was a Jewish community, with a synagogue and a couple of rabbis. The pictures could have been taken in London, New York, Manchester or anywhere else sensible. Oh, so scrap Manchester. These people could be my family. But this place is one thousand miles west of Sydney. There is not one bagel shop en route. No smoked salmon farm. No wonder they gave up. But if you think I’m just testing you’re awake, check it out…

http://www.brokenhillaustralia.com.au/explore-and-discover/outback-museum/synagogue/mineralwealth/

This is a town where the men are men, and so are the women. But then there’s The Palace Hotel – run by two gay guys at the bar, and the place decorated with pastiche murals of works by the great Italian masters, plus hideous paintings of mermaids and idyllic riverside scenes, which, being the desert, were commissioned to give people a smile. This place was – fittingly – used in the campest road movie of all time, Priscilla Queen of the Desert.

There’s the mineral museum, a wonderful place showing all sorts of beautiful rocks mined here. And – of course – it’s run by J, a gay guy from Birkenhead.

Just north of Broken Hill, there’s the dead settlement of Silverton, where countless ads and movies (Priscilla, Mad Max) have been shot and which you will know from something you’ve seen, because it’s the quintessential image of Outback Australia. Vast red spaces with scrub, and the Mundi Mundi plain stretching out across hundreds of miles of The Interior. As you stand on the edge of the world at Silverton, looking out on the Mundi Mundi in late afternoon, you can see the curvature of the earth, it’s so vast. It was also so hot – touching 40c at 6pm. I pictured the rabbi standing here welcoming the Sabbath. Or a camel, drinking in the view.

We took a guide for a day to the Menindee Lakes. M, a former miner, showed us his beloved Outback. The lakes are empty. Spoiler alert: politics ahead! Yes, the politics of water are as acute here as any poor dry country. The water has been diverted upstream to feed cotton plantations. The constituency of Broken Hill, staunchly Labour (and unionised), has been hugely expanded until it included a majority of Conservative voters, so that ‘big business’ can get its way, with the help of a few backhanders. The lakes are huge, and they are mostly arid. The inland holiday area of Sunset Strip cuts a sorry sight, looking out over a vast lake of empty flat desert, boats and fishing tackle locked away in garages. The few vineyards have all been cut back and are up for sale. The stone fruit does not grow any more. The watercourses, including the massive Darling River, are dry. A little of this is to manage what small amount of rain and water there is, but mostly it’s the politics of water at work, the little guy disenfranchised, the poor locals with no bargaining chips kicked literally into the dust.

Except… we met an elderly academic who happens to be the world expert on the biodynamics of kangaroo jumping. He told us he’s been coming here for decades, and Broken Hill people make up their own special myths, just for them, the chief one being that everyone is out to get them and steal their water. That’s cobblers, he gently implied. It’s really about global warming, with less and less water available and more and better ways of conserving it necessary. The electoral boundary changes are just another example of a small town’s paranoia. It’s a town which young people don’t come back to after college so numbers are falling. Mostly it’s visiting mining execs, oddballs and people who have never moved away.

This place is really just full of mischief – and hidden depths. A few days here is not enough to plumb them and determine the real story. For example, it’s just chance I’m sure, but we’ve been told there’s been no rain for months on end. Yet last night and today there have been electrical storms, and where at first we couldn’t step outside for the heat, right now we can’t for the rain.

I’m really not sure what I believe now, or who. Camels, Afghan Muslims, Jews, gay subculture, hard working men’s clubs, emus, rain… I don’t know if I have given in to the weirdity, and I am creating my own stories. Maybe. It might be the 40c of course. Or more likely, it’s all true, every last contradictory, diverse raindrop of it.

Tomorrow, we take a 6am flight back to Sydney for our last few days there. I am really not looking forward to saying goodbye to the city. In many ways I have come to love it, and that is not something I expected one little bit. So, next week, more about Sydney maybe…