On the boat to Rottnest, Ros and I fell to examining each other’s fingernails. To anybody watching we must have looked like a pair of chimps on a mutual flea hunt, but in fact it was our immaculacy we were marvelling over. After only one week, Perth had picked us clean. Had I been in charge of promoting tourism in Perth (and before long, as chance would have it, I would meet people who were), that’s what I’d have pushed: the detergent properties of the place. Come to Perth, where you can wear a white shirt for seven days. Where even your perspiration is nectarine. Where you can see further through washed and spotless retinas. And damn the Americas Cup.

Fat chance of that. We hadn’t paid for a running commentary, as far as I knew, when we’d bought our tickets for a day trip to the Island; it was simply meant to be a journey there followed by a journey back. None the less the Rottnest ferry had scarcely pulled away from the jetty before, through blaring inescapable speakers, it was on – prestigious riverside homes, choicest bits of real estate, Bondy, and who would be sailing what where before the year was out.

Once we’d put Fremantle behind us, however, and the Italo-Australian crew had run out of marinas and waterside restaurants to enthuse over (‘If any of youse wants a night out, that could be a good place to go’), we were permitted to enjoy the nineteen kilometres of ocean in silence. It was a choppy voyage. Quite a little sick-maker, Ros remembered, especially in the days before hydrofoils. But then that had all been part of the fun of the regular holidays she and her family had spent on Rottnest. You screamed, you got ill, you went ashore, and there on the Island, where no vehicular traffic was allowed, you cycled away your childhood in one long silent summer’s idyll.

There is some argument as to who first discovered Rottnest. The honour normally goes to the Dutch seaman, Vlaming, who came ashore in 1696, declared it to be ‘delightful above all other islands I did see’, but still gave it the name Rats’ Nest, not knowing that the little dark brown hoppers with short tails and rounded ears which he found in abundance there were not rodents but marsupials, not vermin but quokkas, small scrub wallabies which thrive on wattles and tourism. It’s Vlaming whose rapturous descriptions of the Island are most frequently quoted – ‘This Earthly Paradise’ is his also – and it is to Vlaming that the memorial on View Hill is dedicated. But there is evidence that another Dutch sailor, Samuel Volkersen, beat him to it by some forty years. However, since all he reported finding were two seals, a wild cat and ‘many excrements’, his name has not adhered to the island.