I left with 50 books – picked up a few gems at no cost from Gleebooks the day I left. So, as you can imagine I’m a travelling book store .. problem being that there’s no one out here who reads my sort of rubbish. The Gnomads have created this rule that books MUST be swapped. Must. So I’m likely to have a pile of Donna Hay magazines swapped for my copy of Wheen’s Karl Marx, in fact I’d probably only get one mag for the book! Once again it’s all about value.

I left a pile of five good books on a table at the rest area in Walgett, since, while they’d all take the books I don’t like the MUST swap game so much, and watched as the ancients sneakely pored over them – the only thing taken was a book on the Skaf Rape trials – did I say good books? Looks like it was swapped for an old copy of Off-Road magazine. So the rest I drove away from hoping that they’d be snatched up as I disappeared into the distance. By the time I reached Bourke I had 3 more and there is no book shop or travellers library in Bourke – of course. But they build up, the books, and I have no room for them and I like to think that some young aboriginal kid will pick one of them up and learn something .. perhaps read some of it before they use it for fire-starters. I like to think.

So I thought, I’ve got to get rid of these and took a little walk about the camp at Bourke firstly to see if I could get rid of them, and secondly to see if there was someone with whom I could make a good swap – if I must. Getting rid of them is not really a problem .. walking away without a pile of shitty old magazines is! Anyway, one old fella gets quite excited about one of my books, The Reign of Iron (a really good rip roaring read of technical history) .. as good as any Mills & Boon, not that I’ve ever read one. He says, I’ve got some non- fiction I’ll dig it out and bring you up the swap. Mmmm, me thinks, could get lucky?

A little later he comes up with his swap. Two big books. Non fiction. ‘Evil Psychopaths’ & ‘Mass Killers’ .. I’m not joking. What can I say? There’s no chance this fellas not going to let me swap, I’ve told him he can keep the Reign of Iron without a swap. No chance, buddy, swaps been made.

So now, as he rightly explains, I have two new books that are worth swapping and as I write this, the cops are making a high speed run through the camp – no doubt on the lookout for potential evil psychopaths and mass killers.

I s’pose I shouldn’t, but I find these two great new books a bit of a difficulty. Because I don’t read this stuff, because I definitely don’t want to leave them laying about on some park table for the kids to pick up and because, in this political climate I don’t want to be pulled up by the cops with two big books on killing on my passenger seat. Though being in redneck territory I’d probably be in more trouble being caught with the biography of Karl Marx on my passenger seat than manuals on mass killing for dummies.

“Gods gift to man, when we chose to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge, was Time …” – David Denby.