Wallaby

It was a foul winter night in mid-June, 2003. Rain streaked the picture window that dominated one side of our sleeper. As the train gathered momentum and racketed through the city's industrial back alleys, there was a faint clang of level crossing warning bells, a flash of blinking lights and headlight queues in blurry diagonals. Then blackness stole the view. As I stared into the gloom, I found myself reflecting that my first experience of the Indian Pacific was also likely to be my last.

Rod Maclean, author, journalist and television news presenter, is 48 and has cancer. In the final year of his life he writes of his work, of travels with his beloved wife Teddi, and of the sadness of dying.