The first ballet was to music by Debussy. In so far as I could grasp the plot it seemed to be about the sea – the dancers being the waves or the tide, and the conflict the currents and eddies of the ocean. Appalled by the spectacle of bodies monomaniacally fashioned for a single purpose, I drifted off. The waves crashed, the tide rolled in and out, a climax was reached, and an interval followed. Geoff ushered us through a door marked PRIVATE into a room where a champagne party for the official guests was underway. From opposite ends of the room the Governor and I exchanged suspicious glances. We were to do this once or twice again before the evening was over, and several more times into the bargain before I was clear of Perth. There was no hostility between us. I simply wanted to keep him in my sights so that I couldn’t without advance warning be introduced to him – not knowing whether to call him Sir, or Your Excellency, or Professor (which is what he was when he wasn’t a Governor); and he was just trying to figure out why a very brown person in a shocking pink jacket and a crumpled shirt kept staring at him.

The second ballet set a pretentious modern action to music by Pergolesi. There was barbed wire on the stage. Images of Christianity blended with and then counterpoised symbols of repressive politics. A young girl with a lithe body attempted to simulate the grief of the eternal mother and widow. She rent her hair. She rived her clothing. But because she was so well honed for grace, so bodily introverted as it were, she was incapable of suggesting misery. I decided what I would say to the Governor during the next interval, should he seek me out. ‘Don’t you think, Your Most Worshipful,’ I would say, ‘that the self-absorption of the ballet dancer precludes the depiction of any passion except self-absorption? It is not an acting or a mimetic medium. It can render, with great beauty I will grant you, only itself.’

But I didn’t meet the Governor during the next interval. I met Lucette Aldous. One of the most distinguished living figures of West Australian ballet, Lucette Aldous had once danced with Nureyev.

She was sitting on a sofa in one of the public areas, looking a little frayed both in nerves and in costume, when Geoff propelled me towards her. Her outfit, although it wouldn’t have done for the stage, was still somehow unmistakably a prima ballerina’s, insubstantial and not quite fresh. I could see the bones of her thin chest and gauge how extraordinarily light she was. She would be in the air before you could so much as touch her. I imagined putting out one finger and balancing her effortlessly on it. I could be the ocean bottom and she the dancing wave.