Some unlucky circumstance led us, within minutes of leaving our hotel, to Boans, a department store much associated with her past; she could remember it when it had wooden floorboards covered in sawdust and overhead tubes carrying the cash to the offices above and back again with the change. The store had been founded in 1895 and now it was closing down. We had turned up just in time to witness its death-throes.

Many floors, and many sections of floors, were roped off. I obeyed Ros’s instructions to ignore the ropes. High up in the building we found a totally deserted floor with office chairs and desks and old-fashioned draper’s dummies all numbered and arranged into manageable auction lots. In a doubly roped-off remote wing we came upon a solitary secretary still at work on ledgers behind a partition marked ‘Reception’. Her partition had a lot number on it. So, judging from her expression, did she.

Ros led me to the top of the store where the restaurant used to be, where she and her mother took afternoon tea after a hot day’s shopping. It was a large, elegant, and now quite empty space. Grand stained-glass windows commanded wide views over the city. A solitary cockroach lay on its back, its feet in the air, having given up all hope of service.

That special power which adheres to closed-down places of entertainment worked its wicked magic. And Ros was getting what she wanted.

On the lower fashion floors, where some selling was still going on, the only display materials were brown cardboard boxes, arranged in interesting shapes.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ Ros said.

Back in the street we promptly ran into Jane and Brian Dobbie – the incomprehensible Scotsman and his wife we had met on our trip into Kakadu.

‘Fansahmeatandyew,’ Brian said.

‘That’s Perth all over,’ Jane laughed.

What she was referring to was Perth’s reputation for being a small town where everyone knew everyone else. It certainly looked that way to me. I knew five people in the city and already – half an hour after walking out into it – I had met two of them.