Just as Ron Wise had handed me on to Ray Finlayson, so did Ray Finlayson pass me on down the line to Stanley Brown. A sorrowing, exiled Englishman who would have been played by Peter Barkworth had his life been televised, Stanley Brown was manager of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Kalgoorlie. I met him in his offices where he sat surrounded by tapes and schedules. It’s always intriguing to see who’s just been or who’s just coming into a radio station and I was pleased to notice that Geoff Gibbs had popped through only recently to discuss the current state of Australian theatre. I had the feeling that Stanley Brown would have liked there to be even more of that kind of thing on Radio 6GR, Kalgoorlie.

He talked to me about England, which he hadn’t seen for twenty-five years. ‘Not a deliberate decision,’ he explained, ‘just finances. I’ve got four boys to educate and they don’t pay you very much here.’ It felt as though he were manning a British Council outpost, and making the usual sacrifices in the name of the culture. Then he somehow got on to the years he spent as a sergeant in the British Army serving in Israel after the War. His memories seemed to upset him. He referred to the blowing up of the King David Hotel with his eyes lowered. ‘I used to pass a bit of time in the Garden of Gethsemane when I could,’ he said. He actually closed his eyes, remembering this, a look of faraway pain passing over his face, a high airy cloud, showing how remote he now felt he was from the first part of his life. ‘There is something there in that garden, you know. Some spirituality.’

I closed my own eyes. Anyone coming into the room would have thought we were praying together.

Later on, after he’d finished work, he took us for an early evening snifter at Hannan’s, the only real club in Kalgoorlie, an institution so exclusive that even the person after whom it was named – the very Paddy Hannan whose gold strike had begun it all – did not qualify for membership.

Hannan’s dates from about 1896, the heyday of Kalgoorlie prosperity, and offers all the amenities expected of a social club – a bowling green, meeting rooms, bars, squash courts (which do not date from 1896) and two billiard tables described by Eddie Charlton as the finest in Australia. In order that they might stay that way an unusual degree of restraint is demanded of players. ‘Members are respectfully requested,’ a warning sign on the beautifully polished scoreboard reads, ‘to refrain from lying on the billiard tables when playing.’ Which might have been why no one was playing on the night I visited the club.