Quite what we were seeing I am not sure that I have ever fully understood. Open up a map of Australia and Kalgoorlie doesn’t appear too promising. If you discount Coolgardie, which is now a ghost town, and Boulder, which is just more Kalgoorlie anyway, it looks a long way from anywhere. It is a few streets in a desert. And yet by 8.30 in the morning, before the sun had been able to get in under our curving corrugated verandah roof, the crossroads on which our hotel was situated were as busy as Hyde Park Corner. Where was all that traffic going to? Where had it been?

We passed a couple of hours in this fashion, sitting amongst the tropical bamboo and fernery, trying to work out why we were exhilarated when we might have been appalled. Quickly thrown-up shanty towns can generate a marvellous temporary atmosphere of ferment and turbulence, as we were to discover in Coober Pedy, but apart from the evidence of the electricity poles marching down the very middle of the road, as if there hadn’t been time to think of anywhere else to put them, Kalgoorlie didn’t really look as though it had been rattled up yesterday on the understanding that no one expected it would still be there tomorrow. If anything it had a solid, grandiose, even respectable air, notwithstanding the notices in the windows of the hotels reminding clients that Wednesday was C-THRU WAITRESS night. The hotels, in fact, seemed to hold the clue to Kalgoorlie. The town was famous for them – for how many it had and for the extravagance of their architecture. We could see several from where we sat – Speed’s Criterion Hotel, just to the left of Mateo’s Pizza Bar, with its small fantastical façade painted white, green, and pink, and its ramshackle balcony; the Palace, commanding and confident, built in 1897, a mere four years after Paddy Hannan’s discovery of gold; and the Exchange, picture-postcard colonial quaint, a queer mix of the frontier and the ecclesiastical, with turrets and gables and a slightly tipsy look. They were ebullient and brash – that was why we liked them. They seemed to have been built, to support the colossal new wealth, not in a spirit of opportunism but as if out of an unstoppable communal optimism.

Altogether, Kalgoorlie reminded us of much that we had enjoyed in the Northern Territory. We were suddenly very glad we had left Perth. You couldn’t mistake this for Europe. I wasn’t myself all that cheered to be amongst 4-wheel drives and ’roo bars once more, the gadgetry of authentic outbackism. But we agreed on this: it was good to see Aborigines in the streets again. Even if the Aborigines themselves didn’t think much of it.