The Polish-born taxi driver who collected us from the Witch’s Cauldron, where we’d made a belated but rather guilty feast of plump pink prawns in garlic, confirmed the rule by excepting himself from it. ‘It’s too quiet,’ he said. ‘It’s good for families. A bit of gardening, a pool, the kids – that’s Perth. You know, there are only seven or eight nightclubs in the whole town. In Poland – which, incidentally, is a communist country now – we have that many in one street. They don’t know what opera is here. They don’t know what theatre is.’ He checked us out in his rear-view mirror. ‘I can say this to you,’ he felt emboldened to go on, ‘because you are not Australians.’

‘I didn’t know it was that obvious,’ Ros replied.

I paid him and wished him a busy night.

‘Busy? Here? That’s a laugh. The night’s over. I’m going home.’ It was ten thirty-five.

I managed to steal one last look at him before he drove off. He had blond curly hair and sad wet eyes and a little golden moustache, clipped like a fencing master’s. At another time and in another place he might have fought duels to protect his honour and danced the mazurka with his defeated rivals’ wives. Now he was cruising round a slumbering Perth with his cab windows open, trying to get rid of the smell of garlic.