We discovered that we liked Denmark – its hilliness, its meandering river, its picturesque wooden bridge, its bandstand, and its equanimity about calling a park Norm. It also made Ros eat her words about inlets. (‘But not the colour olive, Howard.’) Wilson’s Inlet, named after Dr Thomas Braidwood Wilson, and which should therefore have been called Tom Wilson’s Inlet, was on a bigger scale than Nornalup and possessed all those qualities of grandeur and serenity that it lacked. A vast sheet of placid and protected water, surrounded by low-lying wooded hills, it was home to scores of black swans and pelicans. For the first time that I could remember I wished I owned binoculars. ‘I think the reason I like pelicans,’ I said to Ros, ‘is that they can do everything I can’t. They can fish, they can swim, they can fly, and they can store food.’ She seemed to think this a fair explanation.

We found an excellent Tourist Bureau in Denmark, not just an office for the distribution of maps and guides, but a meeting place where you might be served coffee, where there were exhibits, extracts from old travel brochures on the walls, specimens of local nasties in pickle jars, and where the presiding genius of the place, a wiry Dutchman called Mr de Jongh, would tailor-make you an itinerary according to your particular interests. In the time it took us to read the label on a jar of  pickled python, I heard him put together a three-day local wine and antique tour for a couple of ladies who had driven in across the Nullarbor from Adelaide.

Although the town of Denmark has nothing to do with the Scandinavian country of the same name – Tom Wilson had been responsible for the christening, having wanted to please an old naval chum, Dr Denmark – that hadn’t stopped Mr de Jongh from trying to open up diplomatic relations between the two. On the wall I noticed a framed letter addressed to Mr de Jongh, from M. Wahl, Private Secretary to Her Majesty the Queen of Denmark, thanking him for his gift of a recent local history.

Dear Mr de Jongh.

It was very kind of you to send me some copies of ‘The History of Denmark’ – a township on the South Coast of Western Australia, and it was very interesting to read about this spot of the map. It’s name is familiar, but otherwise Denmark is quite unknown to us.

And it went on to add that the book had been passed on to Queen Margrethe, and that one copy was now in the Royal Library and another in the Royal Reference Library.

‘We are the only town to have an intimate relationship with a country,’ Mr de Jongh told us.