Her husband resembled her in most respects, except that like most Australian men of his generation his face blazed with the fires of unexpended pedantry. ‘The white man’s still got a lot to learn from those blackfellers,’ he said. ‘We’re only just discovering some of their medicines. The white doctors have found out that they’ve got a contraceptive tree. Right there, growing, they’ve got what our scientists have been working years to discover. And they’ve got one that cures cancer.’

‘They’ve got their own ways,’ his wife explained.

‘Yes, that’s right,’ the woman from Farnham said. She didn’t seem to like this turn in the conversation. It’s harder for you, if you come from Farnham, to concede the superior wisdom of the black man. As well as that, I could see that she didn’t really like the idea of a condom tree either. On the other hand she knew she couldn’t flatly contradict her customers and say, ‘Oh no, they haven’t.’ So she had to keep saying, ‘Yes, that’s right, they have,’ instead.

I helped myself to some free literature, including an invitation to drink the milk of Paradise at the Château Xanadu winery, and a chatty quarterly newsletter which talked about local characters like Allan and Christine who had settled down here for the quiet life but were now running the model railway, and Lu and Peter who were growing exotic vegetables and had named their property Rivendell, after the refuge for elves in The Hobbit.

I left just as conversation in the Old Settlement was moving on to acupuncture. ‘A few years ago they called them cranks,’ the rubicund opinionist was saying. Having done his best by the blackfellers he was now ready to stand up for the yeller ones. It struck me that he could easily have gone the other way. But then you never can tell what effect retirement is likely to have on these old die-hards. Long-winded lenience is as much a function of idleness as prejudice is.