I discovered the reason for this as we were driving down the Stuart Highway in the company of Tom Winter three days after our arrival. It turned out to be something else to blame the Japanese for. Incensed, as early as 1942, by the persistent refusal of Australian governments to let them in without spraying them, the Japanese – a mite overhasty as always – responded by bombing the bejesus out of Darwin. The Top End of Australia has long been considered the nation’s Achilles heel. If the yeller fellers were to get in anywhere they’d get in there. And the temptation just to let them have it must have been very strong. Even in peace time Australians have been trying to get rid of the North. In 1888 a certain Mr J. C. F. Johnson, the Minister for Education and the Northern Territory in the Playford Administration, took one quick look at what he was Minister of and returned proposing that the South Australian boundary be moved north of the MacDonnell Ranges and that what was left be handed back, without any ado, to Britain. But when it comes to possessions countries are as irrational as people: that which they are prepared to give freely they will fight tenaciously to safeguard from plunder. Instead of pulling the few troops who were in Darwin down, the government sent additional troops up. And Darwin being hot and dry, and troops being sweaty and thirsty, the first necessity was water. A new pipe line had to be laid at speed, allowing no time for fancy engineering. So it was built above the ground instead of under it. And there it still stands – an amenity to this day – travelling parallel to the highway and bubbling under the sun.

We were travelling likewise as part of a small group headed towards Kakadu National Park, situated in Arnhem Land – just about – between the Wildman and East Alligator Rivers. We’d heard that Tom Winter was the best man to be taken out by in the Top End, and we had contacted him the moment our luggage was found. (It showed up, by the way, exactly five minutes short of our second twenty-five dollars per person payout, just as in the illustration of our entitlements that the nice people at Qantas had given me. It had, of course, been gone through in some detail by customs. I knew that because everything that had been folded neatly in Ros’s corner of the case was now folded neatly in mine. And that included Orianna Ooi’s poems. There were clear signs – creased pages, thumbmarks, textual emendations and so on – that her verse had been subject to careful scrutiny.)