But it hadn’t worked. You could give blood (the respectable way) in Smith Street Mall; you could buy flags for charity and every known make of French perfume for your wife; you could sign up to sponsor an African orphan or have your name sealed in a time capsule, for all the world as if you were in a precinct in Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells. But still the desperadoes were there, men with Robinson Crusoe haircuts and unkempt explorers’ beards, wearing solitary silver earrings, horrific scars and menacing tattoos. I’d read about the good old days when Darwin prided itself on being a haven for fugitives from the civil laws or the domestic decencies, and I was pleased to see that, despite the numbers of schoolteachers and welfare workers who had taken the town over, an atmosphere of truancy still prevailed. I saw men in Smith Street Mall who had just crawled in across the desert on their bellies. At one outdoor table, fitted up by the town planners to double as a chess board, half a dozen murderers and rapists sat drinking iced chocolate milk, discussing the merits of the Sicilian defence, and whistling at the girls. One girl, in a cut-away blue singlet and with a skull and crossbones tattooed across her neck, whistled back through broken teeth. There was no doubt in my mind that she’d jumped ship the day before in the Malay Archipelago and swum ashore that morning.

But it was the Aborigines whose presence most defied whatever plans for gentrification the civic architects had dreamed up. They used the Mall as a sort of grand adventure playground. Sociable by instinct and rendered idle by design, they lolled about, sometimes badly drunk but mainly engaging in half-hearted and self-conscious mischief – calling out, laughing, pushing one another, like the street urchins they’d become. You had to be blind not to see at once that purposelessness and inactivity was their problem, not the bottle; and that drink for them was simply the assuagement it always is wherever hope has been extinguished.

Not that I was prepared as yet to face up to the issue of the Aborigines. I would need help with that one. Ros was the guilty Australian, not me. We would confront the race thing together. But just to be going on with I noted that for all their rowdiness they were not threatening. In so far as a Jew can manage not to be frightened by black men, I wasn’t frightened by these.