The idea of Sidney Nolan driving down to Margaret River with his latest canvas and driving back with a boot full of Gewürztraminers was so pleasing to me that I wasn’t able to concentrate as fully as I ought to have on whatever else Denis Horgan had to say. I do remember, though, that Leeuwin is a ‘high-tech winery’; that 60 per cent of what it produces is consumed in the eastern states; that it is sold in the U.K. by Hobbs of South Audley Street – a shop owned by Lady McAlpine, wife of the very Lord McAlpine whose hand (I won’t say whose dead hand) was all over Broome; and that Denis Horgan’s own objective is and always has been excellence. ‘I am used to taking up challenges and succeeding with them,’ he told me.

I asked him if he was a doctor like all the other Margaret River vignerons. He was amused by that. ‘No,’ he said, ‘a chartered accountant.’

‘Get your story?’ Ron asked me, after I’d put the phone down.

I threw him a rugged professional journalist’s smile. But he hadn’t finished doing me favours yet. Before we left he’d fixed up our accommodation in Kalgoorlie and organized us an interview with the Mayor. ‘You went to school with his daughter, Leonie,’ he reminded Ros, ‘I was talking to her only yesterday. She’s expecting you to ring her. I’ll dial her number for you now.’

It took the Prospector 7½ hours to do the 650-odd kilometres to Kalgoorlie, which averages out at about 87 kilometres or 52 miles an hour. It felt slower. The Prospector consisted of two carriages and hostesses who served sandwiches made of cheese slices. For some reason each carriage had fitted carpets on the ceiling. The train suffered from a perpetual judder, an oscillation over and above what you normally expect from rail travel, as if it didn’t quite fit the track.

The journey passed unremarkably. Whenever I looked out of the window I saw a field of washed-out golden wheat or a salt plain. The town site of Cunderdin stays in my mind because it was there that I saw a man standing on the little platform reading a Hungarian novel at the same time as the voice of Ann Blyth came through the speaker system, singing ‘Only Make Believe’.

Ron had booked us in at the Old Australia Hotel. I can’t pretend that we paid much attention to where the taxi was taking us; after the grinding tedium of the Prospector and the second lunch and high tea and early dinner of cheese slice sandwiches we would have been content to sleep out in the streets. But in the morning we were excited to find that our room had access to a lovely broad balcony, decorated with palms and ferns and fitted out with comfortable bamboo furniture, from where we were able to look out upon the main thoroughfare of Kalgoorlie.