The towns mean nothing to you. They all look the same, merely names on a map; black dots are joined by red lines but no picture emerges. Town maps consist of pink blocks and white lines. There are grey dots to mark special points of interest for the tourist. Green patches indicate the presence of nature. Water is blue.

As you approach the towns, billboards stand like sentinels beside the road advertising fast food and fuel, caravan parks and o’nite accommodation. You are overwhelmed by the sad optimism of the signs. They glide past silently, melancholy promises of a place down the road where your desires can be fulfilled.

You roll through towns split by the highway, an endless procession of Drive Thru Happy Stops, Kwik Snax and T-Marts. You pass wooden houses balanced on piles of bricks as if wary of touching the land. Television aerials reach higher and higher until they are twice as tall as the houses, a forest of steel poles and rods all facing the same direction, stretching up to touch a layer of signals. You are disturbed by such a public display of the need to connect. A man walks slowly along the street carrying a newspaper and a carton of milk. Clumps of children grow by the roadside.

The towns are like film lots which buzz with activity and then lie deserted. There is no depth behind the facade of the main street. Sometimes out of curiosity, you turn off down a side street but it quickly turns out to be a dead end and you come face to face with the vast unmoving backdrop of paddocks and distant dark hills. You hurry back to the highway.

Every town requires a different approach. You can burn through on the highway, jumping reds and cutting up the locals. You can hit and run, raiding a service station for supplies and taking off again with spilt petrol still dribbling down the side of the car. You can cruise slowly down the main drag, hanging out of the window and eye-balling all the decent, hard-working townsfolk. You are new in town. You have unfinished business here. You’re not looking for trouble.

Vague fears and suspicions fill the air like a factory smell: this is the town where the cops are real bastards; this is the town where those two kids went missing; this is the town where they had that accident; this is the town where those bodies were found. It was near here anyway.

A pleasant tidy town provides you with the opportunity to take a break and stretch your legs. You park carefully at a 45 degree angle outside the post office. You walk on the shady side of the street and note with approval the orderly, well-regulated functioning of daily life. You check out the local shopping centre and treat yourself to a pot of tea and an apricot slice at the Tasty Tucker coffee house. You start to wonder what it might be like to live here.