Wallaby

It was a foul winter night in mid-June, 2003. Rain streaked the picture window that dominated one side of our sleeper. As the train gathered momentum and racketed through the city’s industrial back alleys, there was a faint clang of level crossing warning bells, a flash of blinking lights and headlight queues in blurry diagonals. Then blackness stole the view. As I stared into the gloom, I found myself reflecting that my first experience of the Indian Pacific was also likely to be my last…