High office, however, works its potency on all of us, as I discovered when we were ushered into Mayor Finlayson’s private office. He was expecting us, naturally. I was a friend of Ron Wise. And Rosalin was a friend of Leonie’s. Such connections oil the machinery in W.A. But that didn’t stop him watching me cautiously from under the drape of his heavy, slanting eyebrows. He had been around a long time, a force in Kalgoorlie for years; he wasn’t going to warm to the first journalist married to a friend of his daughter’s to come in off the streets. He was dressed casually, for work, with his shirtsleeves rolled up – a short, nuggety man, who when he was younger might have had the air of what pulp writers call a street-fighter. He took me through the official line on Kalgoorlie. The town was enjoying a boom incomparable to anything it had known before. Contrary to all the pessimistic predictions of the previous decades, the price of gold was higher than it had ever been and the production capacity of Kalgoorlie was limitless. ‘The ore zones on the Fimiston bases will never,’ he told me, ‘I repeat never cut out.’ Considering his lack of interest in me, and my lack of interest in ore zones, he managed to make that revelation sound wonderfully thrilling. ‘They’re here till eternity,’ he went on. As a consequence of which, nothing but expansion was expected. Houses were being built at the cost of a million dollars a month. A Mint was coming. A Mint Museum would be built. A man called Stuart Devlin, jeweller to the Queen and a lover of Kalgoorlie, was to oversee the design and manufacture of gold and bijouterie at the new Mint. But all this could be jeopardized, at a stroke, if Chancellor Keating was allowed to implement his proposed tax on gold. The Federal Gold Tax – that was the spectre at the feast.

‘What part of London are you from?’ Mayor Finlayson suddenly asked me.

His eyes lit up when I told him. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘Ah, yes.’ I assumed from this unexpected lapse into emotion that he had lived in our very street.

‘You know London then?’

‘Only from maps,’ he said.

Somebody rang while we were talking, and he slipped effortlessly out of this vaguely absent-minded, almost melancholy mood into a tone of vigorous contention.

‘Ah, come on, Milton,’ he said – out of the blue I was struck by what a formidable opponent he would be – ‘you’re not going to swallow that!’

Before we parted he gave me his card. It was printed in red type on a gold background, and said,

RAY FINLAYSON

MAYOR OF KALGOORLIE

On the back was the caption,

THE TOWN WITH A OF GOLD