Picture this: a sky the texture of marble, scarlet sunset, parrots chattering in the trees, a view to die for.
On a rustic table bearing an artistic arrangement of desert driftwood and grasses is an antipasto of the killer kind - olives studded with anchovies, melon-wrapped proscuitto, slivers of creamy mozarella, tomato and basil making an edible tricolour. The Italian experience is complete with a turbo-charged Campari cock- tail and the musical murmurings of Pavarotti at his most sublime.
No, this is not some smart Sydney soiree. It's the best dining room in the world -the middle of the Oz Outback.
Or more precisely it's desert camping, Andrew Dwyer style.
This is the sort of tucker you'd label a treat if it came from a chi-chi Surry Hills cafe. Considering the limitations imposed by an ingeniously reconfigured trailer housing a kitchen the size of a phone box, it's nothing short of sensational.
Dwyer has been wowing the gastronomically inclined for the best part of a decade. It was inevitable that this multi- skilled man's twin passions - for the Australian bush and food -along with his back- ground in the hospitality and marketing fields, would lead to a marriage of the tourism kind.
His 4WD adventures begin in Adelaide and take city swaggers by the hand to introduce them to the glories of South Australia's backyard.
It may be the corrugations of the Birdsville and Oodnadatta Tracks, the fabulous folds of the Flinders Ranges, the arrow- straight tracks of the old Ghan railway, the ethereal beauty of Lake Eyre, or the ochre dunes of the Simpson Desert.
This can be some of the most inhospitable country on the continent yet Dwyer and his travelling kitchen serve up everything from green chicken curry to roast lamb, blackened cajun fish to penne pasta, helped along with some of South Australia's finest vintages. Each day, as late after- noon begins to fold into evening, Dwyer and his sidekick, Steve Baird, set up camp at the drop of an Akubra.
Each member
of the group pitches in to help rollout swags, set up tables and chairs,
fossick through the bush for suitable table decorations, set the fire.
This, make no mistake, is camping with the edges smoothed.
Evening meals are themed, with cocktails and wines appropriate to the
cuisine. Our first night, for example, showcases Grant Burge champagne,
spanking fresh nori make - which we immediately christen bushie's sushi
-briny Coffin Bay oysters, smoked salmon, spiced swordfish with wild lime
relish, a glass or three of Martindale Hall riesling.
Post-prandial campfire stories revolve around the land, its history and
its people. Dwyer may play the guitar of which he is a master; Baird,
too, is some- thing of a Renaissance man. He dons a different Akubra as
owner and leader of the award- winning Bogong Horseback Adventures -which
takes travellers through the high plains country of Victoria -so he slips
effortlessly into Snowy River Man mould and delivers some of the best
poetry this side of the Great Divide.
Nights are spent in a swag under the stars; your bedroom may be a eucalypt-studded
dry riverbed with shining ochre gorges for walls, by the side of ouzo-clear
waterholes, in the shadow of a long-abandoned stone homestead, near the
shores of Lake Eyre or the sands of the Simpson Desert.
By day Dwyer and Baird take their guests on a learning curve of the land,
to the intricate rock carvings of the Adnyamathanha people, or introduce
them to everything from a shingle- backed lizard to a wild camel, a pair
of ringed plovers in nest- building mode to an emu and its army of chicks.
Time spent traversing some of Australia's most heart- stopping country,
is, for most, a revelation. For Andrew Dwyer, it's simply everyday magic.