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Eventually the train pulled into Cook, a town where there truly is nothing any more.
We climbed down to take pictures of this no-place. Once a busy railway centre, now it is only a source of water for the train and just a photo opportunity for us.
Upon disembarking we were immediately hassled by persistent small sticky black flies which clustered unpleasantly around our mouths. There were no birds, only these horrible flies, and two large brown butterflies sashaying casually around as if they had no idea of just how lost they were out there. Some people took advantage of the rare shopping opportunity to buy dusty souvenirs in a shadowy hut on the platform whilst others wandered away towards the edges of the desert as if it were the perimeter of some red shore. We photographed the dead straight rail running in both directions and walked up and down the length of the train, trying to get a conceptual fix on the mechanical body which had already nurtured us for three days.
There was a powerful urge to step out into the scrub and just keep walking. But this was nothing like the romantic dunes and rocks of the Walkabout film, this was just clumps of saltbush and sand. What would it be like to be lost out there? To be so far out that even the flatness would not shown up a single distant building?
