‘In the gemstone shop the entire stock, and I include fixtures and fittings in that, consists of six tiny cardboard boxes, three containing a handful of stones from West Australia, two from America. Do you want to know what was in the sixth box? Two balls of knitting wool-rusted. There is also an ‘Ye Olde Bottle Shoppe.’

‘Oh, no,’ I said. I thought of Delabole. ‘Not bottles.’

‘Oh, yes.’ But she had even worse to tell me. ‘And the National Trust has moved in.’

‘Ah well then, it’s terminal,’ I said.

She had however – or maybe therefore – liked the cemetery, where there was not only a small Jewish section but also the grave of Ernest Giles, the first white man to see Ayers Rock, and a couple of headstones, both facing Mecca, to Afghans. ‘Sacred to the Memory of Tagh Mahomed,’ says one. ‘Who died by the hand of an assassin at Coolgardie, Jan 10th 1896.’ What Ros wasn’t able to ascertain was whether that was the same Afghan who’d been shot dead for offending against the rules of the Sunday morning communal haircut and shaving ritual. Only when it rained was anyone allowed a shower. Otherwise it was everyone in the same water: first the faces, then the tails, and last the feet. The Afghan met his when they caught him bathing his toes out of turn in a clean tank.

‘Anyway, one good thing came out of this morning,’ Ros said. ‘All the old ladies off the bus gathered round me when they saw me taking notes. They wondered if I was doing my school project.’

‘What did you tell them?’

‘What do you think? I told them yes.’

We had another school project to attend to in the afternoon. Ted Cockram, the Tourism Manager who’d wiped Mt Augustus off the map, had invited us along to the Hospitality Inn to hear the official public release of the Goldfields Region Tourism Development Plan. This was a set of proposals put up by the Western Australian Tourism Commission following upon an independent assessment of the area’s touristical options prepared by a Perth firm of independent consultants called Hames Sharley Australia. Setting aside the complications of which man in a blue suit represented which body, I was to find it difficult to concentrate this afternoon because I was certain that Hames Sharley Australia was something I had once heard the Queen say, by way of an encouragement, during a televised Christmas message to the Commonwealth.