We spent what was left of the day packing and reading local newspapers. An ad in the personal column of the North West Telegraph took my eye. ‘I would like to apologize,’ it said, ‘for my behaviour towards the Ladies Darts Team in the Hope and Anchor last weekend. I am deeply sorry for any offence I caused.’

It doesn’t matter where you travel, the really good times are always somewhere else; but Australia has a special gift for tantalizing you with the possibility that they are just around the corner. I went to bed vicariously intoxicated, wondering about the sex of the penitent, and the nature of the offence caused to the Ladies Darts Team. The last image I had before sleep was of Jocky Wilson.

Instead of being thankful that this was her last night in Broome Ros slept fitfully, cursing the time she had already spent there. She was still in a bad temper in the morning and actually woke shouting. We were both having second thoughts about our decision to catch the bus directly to Perth, a journey of some two thousand kilometres lasting well over thirty hours. Originally we had intended to stop off here and there to look about us, but we had now had enough of small coastal towns in the north and hankered after the city. We could have flown, of course, but I felt obliged to see those two thousand kilometres even if I was content not to set foot on many of them. And it struck me that there was a nice symmetry about the timing of this journey, from Ros’s point of view, since it would end in our arrival at Perth on Good Friday. There could be no better day for a Catholic to return to her home town, it seemed to me, apart from Easter Monday, and we were neither of us prepared to wait that long.

In the foyer of our hotel I listened to other disgruntled visitors waiting to board their various buses. No one had a good thing to say about Broome or its famed Chinatown. ‘I expected something ornate,’ a dainty girl from Melbourne complained, ‘like you get in Little Bourke Street. But there was just a few tin sheds. Even the Chinamen looked wrong.’

How Wrong is a Chinaman?