On our last afternoon in Broome I sat on a bench outside the Post Office and watched a couple of Aborigines in smart, green, upper-echelon council-worker-type uniforms busying themselves in the gardens of what I took to be some sort of public or municipal building. I had already been struck by the more or less relaxed demeanour of the visible black population of Broome. They seemed to belong to the town in a way that the Kununurra and Derby Aborigines didn’t. And they walked the streets with a swagger which it wouldn’t have been too fanciful to call Caribbean. They dressed more cheerfully too, and went in for less of that defensive raucousness that characterized their public behaviour further north. Watching these two in their natty green uniforms only confirmed my first sketchy impressions. ‘Broome might not be my cup of tea,’ I said to myself, ‘but there’s nothing wrong with race relations here. If that’s not self-respect I’m looking at I’ll eat my hat.’

Ros, meanwhile, had been in a phonebox attending to some advance social arrangements. She too, while trying for a number that wouldn’t answer, had been observing events in the grounds of the municipal building opposite. Only she had noticed the odd detail that I hadn’t. Such as, to take a random instance, that the building was a prison. And that the Aborigines in the natty green suits were inmates, not landscape gardeners. And that the natty green suits themselves were regulation prison fatigues and not the new street fashion of liberation.

I’d heard about Broome Regional Penitentiary, mainly from Neil who reckoned it was such a soft touch that every Abo in the northwest of Australia couldn’t wait to be sent there. ‘They queue up to be let in,’ he told us. But I had also read a newspaper story about the premature death, behind these very walls, and in circumstances which needed some explaining, of Dixon Green, a young and hitherto healthy Aboriginal inmate. According to the Government pathologist Green died as the result of a heart attack, though when his brother saw the body shortly after his death he wondered why his face was bruised, why there was sand in his mouth, and why several of his teeth were missing. Other parts of Dixon Green were to go astray also, by the time the cadaver would be returned to the family. The brain, for example. And the heart. Accidents happen, of course. Even numerical accidents like the one we observed with our own eyes at precisely that moment, when an open truck arrived at the gates of the penitentiary and all the prisoners who climbed aboard it just happened to be black.