It also wasn’t to help the cause of clarification – though it would prove instructive in every other way – that the person sitting next to me in the audience should turn out to be no one less than Charles ‘Digger’ Daws, the Shire President of Boulder, Mayor Finlayson’s keenest, most vocal, and most long-standing rival. The politics of co-operation and enmity between the twin towns of Kalgoorlie and Boulder are too vexed for any mere outsider ever to master; but it had already been explained to me that the reason Ray Finlayson was a Mayor while Digger Daws was only a Shire President lay in the mysterious attempted municipal putsch of 1969, in the course of which something was done to somebody by somebody else, and Kalgoorlie which had been the Shire Council became the Town Council, and Boulder which had been the Town Council became the Shire Council, though not before Kalgoorlie had looked like becoming the Town Council and the Shire Council, and Boulder had looked like vanishing altogether. Later on, when we’d become acquainted, Shire President Daws would give me his considered opinion of Mayor Finlayson. ‘He’s good. He’s all right. But he’d stab you in the bloody back.’ In the meantime, while we were still at the formal, getting to know you stage of interlocution, I had to make do with his opinion of me – ‘Oh, a bloody Pom, are you?’ – his opinion of the meeting – ‘Now the bullshit starts!’ – and his opinion of Mrs Thatcher – ‘I admire her. She’s not a left-winger like bloody Hawke. She gets things done. And she doesn’t mess around trying to please coons.’

He was a mischievous, truculent, tireless little demon of a man with two tufts of white hair sticking up like horns on either side of his head. If I’d called him an incorrigible ratbag he’d have thanked me for the compliment. But he was right about a few things. I was a Pom. Mrs Thatcher had got things done. And pretty soon the bullshit really did start.

It was Brett Goodridge, Managing Director of the Western Australian Tourism Commission, who started it. ‘In introducing the report I think I can promise you an end of the piecemeal, ad hoc, gut reaction type of development,’ he promised. He had soft, beringed hands and wore cufflinks. He smoked, or rather cleaned, a pipe. And he had the look of a failed British Leyland manager. ‘This report is something we’ve all had a hand in and an input to,’ he concluded.