I decided not to wait for my case to turn up but to buy myself at least some thongs and shorts as a temporary measure. A Chinese shop assistant reckoned that I’d look good in pink, so I took his word for it. I was now loaded up with parcels containing abirritants and fungicides and cold drinks and my winter clothes, but I still enjoyed the walk back to the hotel. I loved the sensation I experienced whenever I returned to Australia of being re-acquainted with old and long-forgotten parts of myself – the small of my back, the spaces between my toes, the bristles of my beard, my own perspiration. Your body is simply up to more in Australia, and you are more your body. You drip therefore you are.

I stopped off on the way to buy newspapers. I had no trouble with the Territorian but I was naive enough to offer forty cents for a forty cents Australian.

‘Not up here, mate,’ I was told. ‘That paper’s come three thousand miles and will cost you a dollar eighty.’

I shelled out willingly. I liked the idea of a newspaper as a precious commodity. It made me feel a long way from the usual comforts and amenities. Which was a sensation that Darwin could dismayingly rob you of at any moment. As for example when I read in a shop window that Max Bygraves was in town that night, to open the Darwin Performing Arts Centre at the new five-star Beaufort International Hotel.

I found Ros out of the shower and on the balcony. We stayed there for several hours watching the sun go down over Beagle Bay. The sky flared for a while into a garish adventure novelist’s red before shading off into softer romantic Mills and Boon pinks and purples. Then the moon rose like an Arabian Nights scimitar.