I had an interest in Cook. It was here, in 1920, that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales stepped out on to a ceremonial dais made of railway sleepers and stood under a shelter of boughs transported from hundreds of miles away in order to observe the Aborigines of Ooldea perform their corroboree. Instrumental in the staging of this event was Daisy Bates, the extraordinary Times correspondent who at the age of forty-one came out to investigate the plight of the Australian Aborigine and stayed with them, as a kind of benign autocrat, like a head nurse at a hospice for the incurable, for thirty-five years. In her book, The Passing of the Aborigines, she describes how, earlier in 1920, she had been requested to prepare the Aborigines at Ooldea for the honour of dancing before the Prince of Wales, but had first to quell a mini-insurrection. ‘You send paper to Gubmint and tell them we don’t want white-fellow King,’ a delegation of Aborigines told her. ‘This country black-fellow. Waiyela (white-fellow) gubmint take dousand, dousand, dousand pound – close up five pounds! Wheat-amanning, potato-amanning, waiyela stealem our country. We take back . . . We kill waiyela!’

According to her own account, Miss Bates never left her tent until she was dressed for the day according to the simple but exact dictates of English fashion as she’d known it when Victoria was queen – in a ‘neat white blouse, stiff collar and ribbon tie, a dark skirt and coat, stout and serviceable, trim shoes and neat black stockings, a sailor hat and a fly-veil’. So we must assume that she was thus attired when she addressed the insurrectionists: ‘This young white King comes this country, my King, your King, too – big flour-giver . . . He tells me give you food . . . When this young King comes, he will give you plenty flour, sugar, blankets, tobacco . . . When all the flour and tobacco that you take from the white man gone, who will give you more?’

If the words didn’t do the trick the sailor hat and fly-veil must have. Because on 10 July the Prince of Wales and his suite alighted at Cook and ‘there was nobody in all Australia to give him a more exciting or more heart-felt welcome than the cannibal rebels of Ooldea’.

It was a cold afternoon on the Nullarbor, but one not lacking in ceremony or satisfation:

Lord Claud Hamilton had been requested to present me to His Royal Highness, and when I made my curtsy, the Prince asked me to join him on the dais, where I explained both dance and dancers . . . The Prince, deeply interested, then came down from the platform for a closer view of the native crafts, and tried his skill at flint-chipping and spear-throwing to the delight of the natives and white residents . . .

‘Thank you very much,’ said His Royal Highness to each and every one, with a smile of appreciation.

‘Dango berry-anujy,’ they gravely replied, while the women and children lowered their heads and hid their eyes.