Karen was curious to know if public servants came willingly to Darwin and how, if they weren’t natives, they coped with the excesses of the climate.

Tom laughed, remembering the days when government men were drafted to Darwin as a punishment. ‘If you refused, you got the sack. And, if you stayed, you committed suicide. November and December used to be called the suicide months. The heat and the humidity could prove too much for you if you already didn’t want to be here. Which brings me to the Irishman who was taken to Darwin Hospital with forty-nine bruises on his head – he tried to hang himself with an elastic band.’

‘I don’t get that,’ Hazel said.

Tom was not a Top Ender by birth. Few were. He had been up here since the early seventies. He recalled how the town was just installing its first traffic lights when he arrived. ‘They’d never seen or heard of such things. They wouldn’t stop for a light if it was red, white or purple. The authorities scratched their heads and then came up with the idea of putting an advertisement in the paper, patiently explaining that red meant stop, amber meant prepare to stop, and green meant go as you were going. We were given a ten-day armistice to get used to them, and during that time anyone caught driving through a red light by the police would not be prosecuted. He’d just have it all explained to him again. But even after the ten days no one was taking any notice. You saw a red light and you accelerated. So another advertisement appeared. It said, “Look, these are not bloody Christmas decorations. If you don’t do what the buggers tell you you’ll be booked!”’

We didn’t believe him.

‘It’s true. I kept both those ads, but they were destroyed by the cyclone.’

By this time we were approaching Humpty Doo (Aboriginal for Nowhere), scene of a notorious rice-growing fiasco. The details of the failure of the project are told and retold with such relish by Australians that you can only suppose the Humpty Dooers were Englishmen. Essentially it is the story of the endless resourcefulness and adaptability of the local magpie geese. Nothing could keep them away from the rice crop, not even scare guns. ‘In the end the geese got so used to those guns,’ Tom told us, ‘that they would fly on to them and peer down the barrels.’

Australians take great pride in the cunning of their native wildlife, particularly when there’s some poor Pom on the other end of it.