Leaving the pub was a bad decision. It often is. But the expedition leader’s naturally cloudy foresight had been further dimmed by eight schooners of Tooheys New. The locals sniffed the wind and told us rain was certain, and they wouldn’t travel the road we were about to travel if they were us. But the radar told our expedition leader otherwise. I said to him, “Let’s trust local knowledge. The locals know.” He raised his phone at me and replied, “Do you trust science? Or pinheaded barflies?” And he swept his hand at the mirror behind the bar where we sat in reflection.

So we went. And we rolled our swags out under mulga on black soil. The thunder began in the west at about 3am, just as the locals said it would. It was wonderful crashing, grumbling thunder; a profound symphony of promise and threat reaching across the plains. Promise to a farmer; threat to a traveller. The rain hit the swags like a John Bonham solo and the expedition leader squealed, “Boots and saddles, boys”. The black earth started to cling to our boots as we rolled and packed and picked and tumbled our gear into the cars and skedaddled across the plain lashed by rain and lightning and remorse.

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Grey mud packed between our tyres and wheel arches until the wheels couldn’t turn and we had to continually stop and dig them free. Slipping and sliding and fighting to stay out of the table drain, we hammered those cars until a pretty galaxy of multicoloured lights appeared on each dashboard describing a litany of impending disasters. Smoke began billowing from one vehicle. Both smelt like factory fires. We were cutting up the road, but we beat those cars like borrowed mules and about midday we found an abandoned homestead for refuge.

She was a thing from another time, her tank stands and windmills atilt and her flywires piecemeal, bottle swallows nesting under her eaves. But inside she was fully furnished, everything coated in fine red dust. We rolled out our swags on beds in different rooms to dry. Outside, fork lightning shattered a purple sky.

The house had a ghostly air. All the cherished belongings of its once-upon-a-family were in place, ready for life to resume and the squeals of her children to be answered by cautions from her adults. But her family had already returned to dust elsewhere.

She felt something like the Mary Celeste, abandoned in haste, some siren having lured her people away. The city perhaps. It’s usually the city. Sydney, at a guess. Crockery and cutlery, books and letters and photographs and portraits, MAD magazines, clothing, four dolls sitting at picnic. We were stranded in a remnant of 1970 with the road closed and the whole shire for hundreds of kilometres in every direction locked down by rain.

A yellowing black and white photograph of the man of the house dressed in a beret with a rising sun cap badge stares down the length of one room. He was a handsome fellow, but sad-eyed with war. Occasionally, thrillingly, he must see a mouse cross the threadbare carpet through the dust. I sat all day in an armchair and read Kurt Vonnegut with him for company and by mid-afternoon we were friends and he didn’t mind my trespass.

And that’s where we are now. Five of us. In a ghost house cooking meals on a wood stove from cans that ghosts bought. Outside the storms come and go. The expedition leader is as unrepentant as Robert O’Hara Burke. Yesterday I searched the outbuildings for food. In the lee of the shearers’ quarters a stonemason had begun a number of headstones he never finished. Jonathon Sheed awaits his. Hugh Urquhart, Dearly Beloved Husband, lies in a naked grave, his full epitaph traced but only three words cut into his stone.

I walked a kilometre in mud to a shearing shed that moaned coldly as the wind blew through its torn tin. On the ramp where they once loaded the wool I discovered a mysterious patch of connectivity. We all phoned our lady friends and they said we were stupid, but to stay safe. And that ramp is the place from which I am filing this column. The place from which we will likely call the chopper when the food of our ghostly hosts runs out. We toast them every night with a nip of gin and water. They were beautiful, and we are glad to have met them.