Thousands of people sit quietly in a gorge as an Aboriginal choir, massed and colourful like a branch of parakeets, sings the music of the dreamtime. Behind them an orchestra blends its music with their ancient hymns.
A scene from a surreal movie? The hallucinations of a traveller who creeps into a valley at twilight, and fantasises about the threads of music woven by the land of Australia? Most incongruous, or most right? This was Opera in the Outback, on a temporary stage in the Yalkarinha Gorge of the South Australian Flinders Ranges, 500 kilometres north of Adelaide, the opera for which wearing boots was not being underdressed.
Why opera? And why the outback, which multiplies a thousand-fold whatever problems of transport, catering, lighting and rigging-up one might have? It could be said the event - which starred Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, and featured the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the Adnyamathanha Women's choir who were new to the stage, but old to the land - was a dress-down rehearsal for Australia's 2000 celebrations.
The first operatic bash in the Flinders Ranges was 10 years ago, and helped to mark two centuries of European influence. The next will take place in three years - a week after the end of the Sydney Olympics, when some of the legions of visitors will be looking for a diversion including more than just snorkelling or guzzling wine.
This performance was a preparatory sip of millennium madness in a land so ancient a thousand years one way or another could be said to make little difference: it was a practice session.
There was another reason. Nine out of 10 Australians have never seen the outback from closer than 10 kilometres above it. For many non-Aboriginal inhabitants of the coastal cities, their country is like a wiggly rubber band with sea on one side and nothing on the other. To go into the middle is an event.