By the time Ros had finished reading I had decided that I hated missionaries above all meddlers. For what lies behind their energies is an assumption of the grossest ignorance and vanity – that others, once shown the way, must want to be as they are. The despot who silences opposition by crushing it is nothing like so inhumane: he knows only too well the vigorous diversity of human nature, the alternative attractions to him.

On our way back through town we walked into a little racial drama in Hay Street Mall. A large crowd had gathered to listen to a group of Aborigines sitting cross-legged on the ground, making music. A beautiful young man with liquid eyes and gypsy-like long soft hair was playing a didgeridoo, coaxing a variety of extraordinary sounds – ironical, almost, in their mimicry of animal and bird calls – from the hollow bark. Another boy, less lustrous and more introverted, kept his eyes down while he beat out an insistent rhythm on a simple drum. Between them, an older and more seasoned performer, full of confidence and self-consciously disreputable charm, sang and smiled and winked and from the back of his throat made wildlife noises which quite rivalled those of the didgeridoo.

But it was the composition and attitude of the crowd that interested me as much as the talents of the buskers. For nothing could more dramatically have marked how far we had travelled from the North of Australia than the respectful attention of this impromptu audience, its exhalations of admiration, its bursts of enthusiastic applause, its solemn air of deference to an exotic culture. In-between each number individuals from the crowd would step into the centre of the circle and place money in a blue plastic travel bag which served as the collecting tin. This action of stepping forward looked to be as deliberate a statement of liberal conscience as carrying a banner at a CND march or demonstrating outside a South African embassy.

In the meantime a couple of young policemen at opposite ends of the crowd had been growing very agitated. I had watched them communicating with each other by means of walkie-talkie radios, and I could tell from their expressions (I’d worn one like theirs myself when I was a school prefect) that they felt compelled to do something. The crowd could not have been more orderly, the Aboriginal musicians could not have been more innocuous, but still these rookie cops with boys’ chests had to intervene. They pushed their way to the centre of the circle and muttered a few sentences to the senior busker. ‘Give it a rest now, mate,’ I heard one of them say, ‘you’re obstructing the mall.’ The Aborigine smiled and shrugged his shoulders. The music stopped. Ten yards away a regular mall entertainer – an unfunny Englishman wearing silly clothes and a hat that had objects spinning on it – played his banjo unmolested. But then nobody could have said that his crowd constituted an obstruction.