Before the Aborigines packed up, a few more whites went over to drop coins in their bag. Ros did the same. She was struck by them and sorry for them and wanted to encourage them with a smile. The boy with the beautiful eyes and the gypsy hair thanked her, but as she turned the older man whispered an obscenity. It was a rude appraisal, not a curse, but it was still inharmonious.

‘Serves you right,’ I said.

A taxi driver called ‘Rusty’ Hammer took us to Geraldine Byrne’s in Claremont. He was fuming, from the moment we entered his cab, about some young man he knew, whom he’d seen in town only half an hour before, who owed him fifty dollars, who was a millionaire before he was twenty-three, and who still wouldn’t repay his debt.

‘He’s a little shit,’ Rusty told us.

I asked him why the young man was behaving like this. In return we had to listen to a long tale of youthful entrepreneurial zest and cunning. The very qualities this town is supposed to revere. ‘He doesn’t sound too nice,’ was all I could think of saying.

‘He’s a little shit.’

He had his window open as he reiterated this verdict and a couple of young financiers getting out of a Mercedes swung around thinking they’d been addressed.

‘Rusty is not my real name,’ he told us just before he dropped us off. ‘But you know what a nickname is like – it sticks like shit.’

I’d met Geraldine Byrne once before, in London. Hearing that she was in town, attached in some capacity to the Australian Studies Centres in Bloomsbury, Ros had made contact with her and the two of them had gone out and got disgustingly drunk over reminiscences of the Sisters of Mercy. They had behaved so badly, getting from one place to another, that a taxi driver had ordered them out of his cab. Eventually I had to be called out to the famous Australian painter’s house in Kensington where Geraldine was staying, to ensure Ros’s safe return. Geraldine was wearing a pink nightdress when I turned up, and nursing a bruise on her forehead caused by falling down in the shower while trying to sober up. The havoc she had wreaked in the bathroom – water everywhere, a torn shower curtain, blood on the tiles – had reduced the pair of them to hysterics. They rolled on the carpet with tears rolling down their cheeks just telling me about it. This was the only time in my life that I had ever been called on to perform the duties of a Mother Superior. I ticked Geraldine off soundly, prescribed a dozen Hail Marys, and ordered my wife out of the house and into the car. I heard about the disgraceful scene in the taxi later, during Confession.