‘Yeah,’ she said, extending the word again so that it implied not simply affirmation but also a kind of open-ended, vague thoughtfulness. She had the slow, comforting, soporific inflection of many old hippies. ‘Yeah,’ she said again, she’d seen the documentary. Some guy had called her and they’d talked, although she hadn’t wanted to appear onscreen or be associated with it in any way. The whole UFO world, we agreed, could get pretty wacky. Nevertheless, she claimed, the memory of the incident was clearer to her than almost anything else that had happened in her childhood.

She had been among a group of kids who ran and jumped the wire fence and arrived at a clearing in the pine trees. The disc hovered in front of her, a few feet above the ground. From where she stood, five or six metres away, she said, it seemed as big as a car. She could feel the heat coming off it. It was silver. It hummed softly. There were lights along the bottom that she saw as it lifted and tilted away. A girl nearby was screaming. Another girl was lying in the grass where she had fainted. The disc rose slowly, then shot up into the sky and vanished almost instantly. Half an hour later, according to the documentary, the army arrived, although the army denies this. The girl who had fainted — Tania — never came back to school, and when Astra dropped by her house a few days later, to see if she was alright, her family were gone. A woman was living there, Astra said, who claimed to know nothing about the previous occupants. Astra never saw Tania again, she told me, but later she heard rumours that Tania was in Brisbane and had become a nun. She had taken a vow of silence, or, at least, she refused to speak when two of her old classmates turned up at the door of the convent. She had looked at them in terror, apparently, and turned away.

‘It all seems pretty crazy now,’ Astra admitted. ‘But yeah.’ She shrugged.