In 1922 the last Aboriginal prisoners left the Island. They were put aboard the S.S. Bambra and transferred to gaol in Broome. By then Rottnest was well on its way to becoming a haven for holidaymakers. Myself, despite Ros’s rhapsodic recollections of the place, despite her guiding me like Virgil to its loveliest and quietest coves, I felt that something of the prison-camp atmosphere remained. The old administration buildings, painted a uniform scrambled-egg yellow, in which visitors still loved to loll away their vacations, were a bit spartan for my taste. The idea of confining the Island’s traffic essentially to bicycles was obviously a good one, but again their uniform yellow and their clearly identifying numbers made me feel I was in the hands of some sinister regime, lulling me into submission with the illusion of healthy outdoor freedom. Most worrying of all was the Island-wide speaker system, ensuring that wherever you were a message could be relayed quickly to you. To be lost to civilization, walking by the edges of a deserted salt flat or looking out to Vlaming’s landing place at Porpoise Bay, or merely to be feeding crusts to a quokka quizzing you from the protection of a Ti tree, and then to hear yourself addressed in nasal twang from some loudspeaker hidden in the undergrowth – is this not what Orwell has warned us of?

In the late afternoon, though, relaxing on the beach outside the hotel and watching families bringing their little boats to within three yards of the omelette-coloured cottages they’d rented, I came to understand the special place Rottnest occupies in the affections of West Australians. Its scruffiness and egalitarian restrictedness were everything. In sight of Perth, enjoying the same hard blue waters and the same climate, it was yet free of the depredations – actual and symbolic – of the millionaires. There could be no prestigious homes here. No exclusive suburbs. None of Rusty Hammer’s little shits climbing out of limousines. You hired a spartan little cottage and you rode a numbered bike. Or you stayed away.

The more skyscrapers Perth threw up, I realized, the more popular Rottnest Island would become. And, once I’d seen that, I grew to like the place myself. Yes, I promised Ros, yes, we would come and spend a long slow summer here one of these years, just as she had in the 1950s with her mum and dad and brother and their oldest friends the Wises, the Jewish family who had escaped from Germany in the nick of time and who, here on Vlaming’s Earthly Paradise, knew better than not to count their blessings.