In any circumstances, even without the added pangs of her backward journey through time, these were melancholy suburbs we were ghost-hunting in. Lost and leafy in the heat, they gave off a sense of lush obscurity, of ideal families and vivid childhoods and irretrievable dreams. Increasingly, Perth was coming to seem to me the most exquisite setting for a permanently mislaid past. It was lotus land, a white man’s Dreamtime, heavy with the melancholy of animation suspended in recollection. To live here would be to give oneself over to a great life’s drowse. Irresistible and fatal.

Only that morning a report had been published in the papers claiming that Western Australia enjoyed the highest rate of domestic violence in the country. It was hard to imagine how anyone could find the necessary energy even to want to aim a blow in so soporific a setting. But there you are: the aggressive passions will out, howsoever leafy the suburb.

A propos of which Ros led me, as a final exercise in self- inflicted anguish, to the nunnery where as a little girl she had been encouraged to be a pianist and where, under a silvery gum tree, she had been chastised by her mother for saying ‘fuck’ in the hearing of the nuns. She was greatly distressed to discover that the tree was still there and flourishing.

‘Fuck,’ she said.

While I still had the car I decided that we ought to go back to Fremantle to take a further look at what was going on there and to call in at the Sunday market. I stopped off first at the Round House at Arthur Head, the Swan River Colony’s first gaol, built by the engineer Henry Willey Reveley in 1831. Heritage has become a thriving business in Australia, especially on Sunday afternoons, and today there were history-hungry visitors everywhere, staring at old photographs of convicts and marvelling at the thickness of the walls. Buildings that are hardly more than three times older than me I generally find of limited interest, not least when they happen to be gaols, but one curious fact about Henry Willey Reveley caught my eye. He had been a friend of Shelley’s before hitting Fremantle and had actually saved him from drowning in the Arno. I suppose, in truth, that it is really Shelley about whom that fact is curious. It seems to suggest that he was in the habit of getting into deep waters.