On the coast 900 km north of Perth along the North West Coastal Highway. If you’re travelling north from Perth, your arrival here brings you into tropical latitudes and a tropical climate. In summer it can get as hot here as anywhere in Australia (and that’s saying something). Just to add to the fun, they have the occasional cyclone and flash flood, too. Otherwise nothing much happens. Prawns, bananas and sheep are the main business here – but when you walk down the wide, empty main street you half expect to see John Wayne strolling towards you in a ten-gallon hat. (Carnarvon does have cowboys, but of a different sort: the itinerant labourers who do their best to drink the bars dry.)

A hundred years ago this was where the camel trains used to arrive from the interior, on the long trek from nowhere to nowhere. According to local lore, Robinson Street (the main drag) was built so wide to allow the camel trains to turn around – which sounds unlikely enough to be true.

The Carnarvon Visitor Centre is at the north-eastern end of Robinson Street (www.carnarvon.org.au). Here they’ll tiredly try to interest you in something to see in Carnarvon. You can try a conducted tour of a local banana plantation, visit the nearby Bibbawarra Bore (thermal springs with water even hotter in than out). Or head off to The Carnarvon Space and Technology Museum, which is in two parts, on different sites: one is the former NASA Satellite Tracking Station, about 10 km south of Carnarvon; the other, 4 km north, is the former OTC Satellite Earth Station. Both operated in the 1960s. Or you can admit defeat and just go and watch the fishermen on One Mile Jetty.