Kambalda was half old mining settlement – East Kambalda – and half new mining settlement – West Kambalda – situated about sixty kilometres down the track from Kalgoorlie. West Kambalda had to be built when it was discovered by the Western Mining Corporation that East Kambalda was sitting on nickel. Now the nickel was sitting on the Western Mining Corporation; the Western Mining Corporation was sitting on the unions; and we were sitting on the bus. From where Kambalda – either Kambalda – didn’t look too promising. Its atmosphere reminded me of those uranium towns we had driven through in the Northern Territory, part comprehensive school on long vacation, part minimum security prison from which the inmates had all bolted out of boredom. The advantages of living here, according to Jill, our sweetly bigoted and bottled-up afternoon replacement for Guy, were clean shops, subsidized rents, and phenomenonally cheap electricity. ‘And yet,’ she sighed, ‘and yet they strike. Ah well.’

Ah well was just one of the catchphrases that contributed to Jill’s all-round winning charm; others she favoured included But there you are, and Ho Hum. She also crashed the gears of the bus. And expressed surprise when things took. By things taking she meant businesses prospering or ideas catching on. On the way out of Kalgoorlie she had driven us past a new health club which everyone in town was going to. ‘I never thought it would take,’ Jill said, ‘but there you are.’

Something in her nature was altogether more soothed by the example of a number of self-help schemes for Aborigines which had been tried out lately. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘we all had high hopes for them but they just didn’t take. Ah well.’

Since we couldn’t get to see much at Kambalda, Jill drove us to the great salt flat of Lake Lefroy, where you could always count on a good mirage. Sure enough, a beguiling silver sea beckoned us from the horizon. ‘It was here,’ Jill told us, ‘that Donald Campbell once tried to break his own land speed record, but the surface was too damp. Ho hum.’

‘What, you mean the salt wouldn’t take?’ an American woman on the seat behind me asked. I wanted to hug her. I would have liked to name the lake after her. Lake Lila.

Then I realized she wasn’t making a joke. That’s what women like Jill do to you. They make you so desperate that you can actually forget that Americans don’t have a sense of humour.

Back in Kalgoorlie Jill handed round a white plastic bucket from which we helped ourselves to a piece of stone with a glint of nickel in it. ‘If you put them in vinegar for four or five days beautiful colours will appear,’ she said. She was all breathlessness and charm, a flashing prism of harmless girlish contrivances. ‘Then paint them with clear nailpolish and the colours will stay, oh, for as long as you want.’