“Red Dog travelled the 900 kilometres to Broome, a magical tropical town where there are tata lizards that wave to you every few seconds, where there is Cable Beach, whose waters in the summer as a warm as a bath, where the raindrops are as big as plums, where divers bring pearls from the bottom of the sea, and where there are salt-water crocodiles in the mangrove swamps, who like nothing so much as to swallow a nice plump dog.”

“Red Dog called in on the new vet in Roebourne, and then he went to Point Samson and Cossack. He visited Jocko, Peeto and Vanno at Hamersley Iron, and afterwards he went and stayed for a night at the Walkabout Hotel at Karratha, where the chef was one of his providers. Finally, he surprised the women by turning up at Exmouth three days later… He seemed pleased to see them, but by the next morning he had hitched a lift to Onslow.”

“The pair of them set off for Dampier beach, just when the western sky was beginning to turn gold at the edges… Man and dog made their way down to the beach, where a gentle swell was dropping wavelets onto the sand. Opposite was the strangely named East Intercourse Island, and south-west of that you could see Mistaken Island huddling in the sea, though no-one seemed to know who had originally been mistaken about what, in order for it to have earned itself such a quirky name. The beautiful islands of the Dampier Archipelago lay strung out across the ocean.”

“Don worked for Dampier Salt, the company that had transformed the landscape of the area by digging out huge, shallow rectangular pits that they filled with seawater. The water then dried away, leaving behind it the gleaming white carpets of salt that sparkled and shimmered in the bright sunshine.”

“If you stood on the high ground outside Dampier, you could look across the saltfields and see a great white mountain in the distance, where the company had heaped their harvest high, in preparation for processing.”

“Red Dog called in on the new vet in Roebourne, and then he went to Point Samson and Cossack. He visited Jocko, Peeto and Vanno at Hamersley Iron, and afterwards he went and stayed for a night at the Walkabout Hotel at Karratha, where the chef was one of his providers. Finally, he surprised the women by turning up at Exmouth three days later… He seemed pleased to see them, but by the next morning he had hitched a loft to Onslow.”

“Red Dog called in on the new vet in Roebourne, and then he went to Point Samson and Cossack. He visited Jocko, Peeto and Vanno at Hamersley Iron, and afterwards he went and stayed for a night at the Walkabout Hotel at Karratha, where the chef was one of his providers. Finally, he surprised the women by turning up at Exmouth three days later… He seemed pleased to see them, but by the next morning he had hitched a loft to Onslow.”

“It was a red-hot day in February, which in Australia is the middle of the summer, and all the vegetation was looking as if it had been dried in an oven. […] It seems as if the heat is going straight through your shirt, so you go as fast as you can from one bit of shade to another, and everything looks white, as if the sun has abolished the whole notion of colour. Even the red earth looks less red. Visitors to that place can’t believe that the mining companies are actually allowed to leave all those heaps of red stones and red earth all over the place, without caring about it at all, but the strange fact is that all those heaps and piles were put there by nature, as if She had whimsically decided to mimic the most untidy and careless behaviour of mankind itself. The difference is that nature managed to do it all without the help of bulldozers, diggers and dumper trucks. Through this ungentle landscape galloped Tally Ho [a name by which Red Dog was known], raising his own little plume of red dust in the wake of the greater plume raised by Jack Collins’ car.”

Seven kilometres away the car stopped outside the perimeter fence of Paraburdoo airport, and Tally Ho was let out.

“He hadn’t liked Perth all that much, with its bottle-brush and peppermint trees, its pretty yellow sourgrass, its military-looking Norfolk Island Pines, and its shiny modern buildings. He preferred the tougher life up north, with its poverty bushes, its Brahminy kites, its silvery river gums, its rock wallabies, its Ruby Saltbush, and its deep red stones. Besides, he had been to Perth before, with John, to that very same beach.”

“Red Dog called in on the new vet in Roebourne, and then he went to Point Samson and Cossack. He visited Jocko, Peeto and Vanno at Hamersley Iron, and afterwards he went and stayed for a night at the Walkabout Hotel at Karratha, where the chef was one of his providers. Finally, he surprised the women by turning up at Exmouth three days later… He seemed pleased to see them, but by the next morning he had hitched a loft to Onslow.”

“A long hot journey of about 350 kilometres, along a difficult, rutty dirt-track. In some places there are water-courses that cross the road, so that your vehicle can get buried up to the axels in mud, and you get completely stuck there until another vehicle arrives to pull you out […] The road runs alongside the railway line that takes the iron ore from Mt Tom Price to Dampier, and often you see trains so long that you cannot possible count the number of wagons, heaped up with red earth, that need three vase locomotives to pull them slowly through that immense wilderness.”

“The sun poured scalding light onto the flat grassland, creating strange mirages of islands floating in water above the horizon. […] When they finally did arrive in Port Hedland after nearly four hours’ driving across that harsh landscape, he felt as if he had already been to the moon and back.”

“There is a sharp bend on the road coming into Dampier, and the turning is very abrupt in the place where John had to turn off. In the undergrowth around the verges are heaps of the great red rocks that make the landscape of the Pilbara so particular. John never made it around the bend of the road.”

“Red Dog called in on the new vet in Roebourne, and then he went to Point Samson and Cossack. He visited Jocko, Peeto and Vanno at Hamersley Iron, and afterwards he went and stayed for a night at the Walkabout Hotel at Karratha, where the chef was one of his providers. Finally, he surprised the women by turning up at Exmouth three days later… He seemed pleased to see them, but by the next morning he had hitched a loft to Onslow.”