A jumped-up Chinoiserie pervaded the town. The couple of streets that remained of old Chinatown offered a handful of pleasant architectural curiosities, queer mixed marriages of East and West, yoking hyperactive Shinto ornamentation to cool colonial functionalism. Otherwise it was all breeze-block bottle-shops and Sino/Lebanese/Italian restaurants taking cover behind movie-makers’ façades of Japanese temples and Buddhist pagodas. And phoney oriental script everywhere you looked. The bay, almost entirely in the clutch of mangroves, looked poisonous – hot and still and secretive, despite the odd wrecked sailing-ship beached picturesquely to suggest high-seas romance. The poor quality of the make-believe, the half-heartedness of the opportunism – for all the publicity surrounding the shrewd developmental plans of the semi-resident English life lord, McAlpine – all this, in combination with the atmosphere of anxious early seasonal expectancy, the sounds of small financial nerves snapping, made Broome feel altogether too like the thing we’d left behind.

The truth is that once you’ve been on the service side of the tourist industry you can never really enjoy it from the other end again. Not because you’ve seen through it. Quite the opposite. It’s because your heart bleeds every time you pass an empty shop, or meet the eye of a proprietor wondering if he is ever going to have a customer again. The new arcade in quasi-Chinatown, Johnny Chi Lane, echoed to our footfall as we strolled through it on our second morning in town. The man who ran the ice cream parlour paced his forecourt in an immaculate apron. The owner of the gift shop was tying balloons to her front door, ‘to see if that will attract attention,’ we heard her tell her assistant. The only business which could be said to be in operation was the vegetarian café, The Tamarind Seed, where we paused to slurp mango smoothies through a straw and to listen to the runaways – it was lower-middle-class drop-out territory, Broome – reading aloud to one another from the letters they’d just collected from the Post Office. I always find it salutary to be reminded that even people with rings through their noses like to get the odd newsy missive from their mums.