At dawn, we scraped the ice from the windscreen and fled Quorn: a name redolent of the shires, as was the congealed gravy on the overcooked lamb the previous night, but inadequate for the immensities of the Willochra Plain, magnified by the winter light and punctuated by the stumpy teeth of the Flinders Range — 'zu Raum wird hier die Zeit'. Melrose was prettily sleepy and closely shuttered: the possibilities of both Zeit and Raum senza cappuccino loomed. A shriek from the back seat alerted us to a curl of smoke rising from the low roof of the Old Bakery, Wirrabara, and we ground our long-suffering Mitsubishi to a halt.

The baker's wife looked suspiciously at the invading quartet of foreigners and informed us that today's bread wouldn't be out of the oven until eleven but that yesterday's would make good toast. She had both cappuccinos and bacon and eggs: what's more, a wood fire crackled in the parlour. On reading 'Unsupervised children will be sold as slaves' above the mantelpiece, we knew we'd come home. Where else but in Australia is the England of the 1950s still alive and kicking — in an entirely Australian way, of course; unlike America, Australian openness hasn't been tainted by the culture of euphemism.

Surrounded by genuinely home-made jams and sauces made by a genuine old lady from Port Pirie (rush to find her, because she's going to cease production soon), we feasted on bacon that evoked Saturday mornings doing the family shopping in Sainsbury's, with the rashers being cut by ladies wearing muslin hairnets and white shoes as I stood on the sawdust-covered tiled floor under the eagle gaze of the cashier in her glass booth. Margaret, the baker's wife, and Dennis, the baker, sat with us and talked of the local populace's indifference to their enterprise and opposition to the tourists, so handsomely catered for in this rambling shop-cum-museum, which they have been forced to put on the market.

So our genuine rural experience was as contrived as the Jack Buchanan tape that played throughout breakfast, and we shouldn't have been surprised when a rare novel by Trollope's mother, set in the birthplace of my German companion, found on the parlour bookshelves, was given to him by Dennis. So a little piece of Wirrabara will end up in Westfalia, a distant memorial when the last loaf has been baked in the store oven and the last pie sold to an unwelcome tourist.

Despite the cold, the clientele of the Prairie Hotel, Parachilna, was gathered outside the bar: a marvellously male team of railroad workers here to work on the Old Ghan, bright Sydneyites intent on experiencing some carefully censored wilderness, and sundry other tourists, all treated with equal forthrightness by Jane, our trim hotel proprietress. Most of us were pretending to be in the back of beyond, but our jacuzzi worked in our 'executive' suite.

In fact, we spurned the outback by refusing the feral grill at dinner: skewered wallaby and wild camel sausages reduced one American in our quartet to a potential vegetarian — shades of Parsifal Act I. Ian, a retired technology teacher, and Andrew, his son, an alarmingly bright expert in some very advanced sort of modern communication, asked to join our table and tucked into these exotica while scaring the vegetarian with tales of snakes and spiders, and enchanting me with visions of the flowers in the Simpson Desert. I am gradually getting used to being talked to by complete strangers at the drop of a hat: my uptight Britishness, probably a sign of my advanced years, has been eroded at a pace I can hardly believe. In the street, I even risk smiling at people, who invariably smile back. It seemed natural that Ian and Andrew, setting off on their epic desert trip — the real back of beyond — left behind a sense of loss, as if we were farewelling longstanding friends. Even the ritual exchange of e-mail addresses held a twinge of unlooked-for emotion.

We paid Jane and soon were delicately nudging our wildly unsuitable saloon over the boulders of the Branchina Gorge, our own private wilderness. We felt very brave, and at one with everything. Then we hit a kangaroo. I remembered Gurnemanz's rebuke after Parsifal kills the swan, and we all felt ashamed of our little charade.

Despite landing in a near-hurricane, wisely unannounced by a taciturn Qantas captain, our last days in Sydney before leaving for Adelaide were unforgettable: the city sparkled as it should, one ate imaginatively, and the parrots flew from tree to tree on Observatory Hill as we watched the mad pay good money to be terrified on the girders of the Bridge. I had been equally terrified by the pictures of nebulae inside the Observatory: the glass-like chords that radiate through Parsifal suggest an infinity that I can accept (despite the dubious metaphysics) but those galactic clouds send me scurrying for the homely.

Adelaide supplies the latter in abundance, and as we drove from the airport past the trim bungalows and the Hove-like elegance of North Adelaide, I knew that I was safe to concentrate on the Master, as I had done three years before. I walked into the rehearsal studio: the raked stage was still there, Stephen Moulds was at the piano and the pie-lady was coming at one-thirty. Work could begin!