‘Think of it like this,’ Keith said, ‘they could just make a present of the whole shebang to the communists.’

It would be no exaggeration to say that in the reflection of his eyes I actually saw it go, I actually saw the whole shebang being handed over. It wasn’t all that difficult to understand his fears. Unreason is not mysterious. He was a young man already turning a distinguished grey about the temples. Something desirable, immeasurable but palpable, lay within his reach. He didn’t want it to be taken from him before he’d even got it. He was greedy, yes; but it would be wrong to see the object of that greed as simply wealth. There used to be a time, before share-brokers discredited ambition, when it was possible to talk without disparagement about a lust or a greed or a hunger for life. Kirk Douglas made a good living playing characters who quivered under the demands of precisely such a hunger. He would have done an excellent job with the part of Keith.

‘Isolation,’ according to a quasi-official typed report I found in the public library, ‘and the comparatively high masculinity factor of the population are the prime reasons for the development of an unusual entertainment pattern in Kalgoorlie.’ For entertainment pattern read gambling and sex. For unusual entertainment pattern read overt gambling and sex.

In fact, for all the aura of infamy which surrounds its name, there isn’t much that goes on in Kalgoorlie that would shock the inhabitants of a city the size of Cirencester. The illegal two-up schools, where old-timers stand around all day tossing coins into the air and waiting to see whether they come down heads or tails, are now virtually on the tourist route. As indeed are the girls in their lit-up tin boxes on Hay Street. Vice runs out of ideas almost as quickly as television, and there’s a limit to what anyone can get up to in a desert.

And yet it is precisely because Kalgoorlie is a country town in the middle of nowhere that its notorious flesh market – a tableau vivant of whores in comfy horseboxes – is so bizarre. I took a look for myself once the R&I Bank’s thank-you party at Hannan’s had finally fizzled out. One minute I was walking down a broad, dusty, absolutely silent suburban road – the humming town behind me, the open bush before – the next I was being smiled at by girls in their nighties, sitting on the edges of their beds under tantalizing red lights, or pacing the porches of miniature simulacra of the ideal Australian home. More than anything else I was reminded of those garage sales that little girls from nice families put on in summer months, their old dollies and a few fairy cakes laid out on a trestle table, and not a customer in sight. The power of Australian provincialism can conquer all. The demimonde had come to Moonee Ponds.