Round it developed a penumbra of specialist spinning and weaving towns, from Stockport in the south to Bury and Bolton in the north.
Historically, the Egyptian government has forced people to live in areas on Cairo's periphery, by evicting them from poor inner-city areas, and relocating them to the desert towns.
Like him, the other detainees had been snatched by US soldiers from Iraq's towns and cities and flown to a place that had already become infamous: a foreboding desert fortress that would shape the legacy of the US presence in Iraq.
But the relative isolation this harsh landscape affords also means the fishing villages, hill villages and maritime towns built on and under these slopes have been able to hold on to their charm and beauty as stubbornly as they've clung on to the mountains on which they're so precariously built.
"Because those towns are in the south everyone assumes they're rich," he says.
For while Labour was wiped out by the SNP in Scotland, it lost to the Tories in the Midlands and south-east, and is threatened by Ukip in many of the towns of northern England.
Others head for cities and towns across Italy.
But 36 hours in a ute will remind you that there are many incarnations of country towns which fit neither the Sunday Too Far Away image or the Wake in Fright model.
Standing on the edge of town, the museum Shear Outback pays homage to the work of shearers, a more common Australian legend than the migrant grower of the irrigation towns.
And towns as as large as neighbouring Griffith, a busy hub which appeared to be full of vim, vigour and young men in noisy cars doing "mainies" on a Sunday night.
In many university towns and cities, there are no shortage of willing and solvent tenants to fill their properties.
