Creating order and a home in this situation is a difficult task. All around there are traces of the struggle to achieve domesticity against the odds. This still falls short of existence outside of society as imagined by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan: he believed that we would quickly sink to a war of all against all, and life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Yet this is no idyll.

The decorated caravan next to an orange tree could be a refuge for a modern day hermit enjoying the tranquillity of a solitary wilderness. This is the most enchanting of Murphy’s images, and is evocative of a Renaissance painting. But for the most part the riverbed people favour a scrapheap aesthetic, albeit one shaped with care. A corral of rusty and twisted fragments of engines, an abandoned toy stroller, and other strewn machinery provide defensible space in a parody of a suburban front garden. But who lives here? And how do they spend their days?

Even where they attempt agriculture, the land resists it. An earthed-up ridge of potatoes outside another van provides a primitive allotment overshadowed by a bamboo plant. But the food grown would barely last a fortnight. An allotment transposed to an arid riverbed can’t provide self-sufficiency or anything close to it. Growing food here is an act of defiance. Reduced to the basic necessities of life, universal features of the human condition surface and require action: we need shelter, a place to sleep, something to eat and drink, somewhere to wash, companionship and love, something to do to pass the time.