I was already sick of seeing and hearing the name Bond. It towered over Perth in red neon, atop his newest office block. It was on every taxi driver’s and every desk clerk’s lips. But I always think you should make the best and briefest case for capitalists before consigning them to the flames. ‘At least he’s woken this dreary old port up,’ I said to Ros. ‘Look at it – there are markets, restaurants, Malaysian style food halls, street cafés. It’s a positive Latin Quarter.’

But it seemed that I did not know whereof I spoke.

‘It always was,’ Ros corrected me. ‘Freo was taking on this character long before there was any talk of Americas Cups. We used to drive out here thirty years ago to get pasta and capuccino. I tasted my first ever gelato here – right here where we’re standing now.’

In fact we were standing now outside a pub which boasted barbecued brotwurst and strong Fremantle lager. We gave the wurst a miss but the lager a run for its money. In the gents’ lavatories I was much taken by the instructions on the hand drier.

BUDGET DRIER. HOW IT WORKS: We have achieved the best possible performance by using the available power supply and holding the air velocity to a level which will allow it to heat to the highest temperature near-dry hands could stand on a warm day. This produces the driest air giving maximum rate of evaporation.

WHY IT VARIES: Because of the initial temperature and humidity of the air and the amount of moisture on your hands.

I read this through again and again, trying to coax some meaning out of it. I’d had the same trouble, on the coach from Broome, with an introduction by Don Anderson to a collection of Australian short stories entitled Transgressions. ‘But writing that is not located in the political-as-content,’ my eyes believed they saw, ‘may be no less subversive in that, as a mute transgressive text, it voices protest against the prison house of language while exploiting that very language as the vehicle of its protest. If that sounds paradoxical, it is because truly contemporary writing cuts against the doxa . . .’ In the academy, as in the lavatory, Australian writers demand a high level of concentration from their readers. As I stood there, baffled and with wet hands, the machine emitted a paltry stream of tepid air for five seconds and then stopped. Nothing I could do would get it going again. I wiped my hands on my trousers, copied out the instructions, and left. Which was more or less what I’d done with Transgressions also.