Tom slowed down his bus and showed us the famous Humpty Doo pub. In the good old days – that’s to say the 1970s – the ringers would wander into this pub caked with blood from cutting up buffalo, unwashed for up to ten days on account of the shortage of water, and in need of a drink. They would be only too pleased to engage your company at the bar provided you didn’t ‘look at them funny’. ‘There were only two reasons for going to Humpty Doo in those days,’ Tom remembered, ‘getting pissed or having a good fight.’

‘What’s a ringer?’ Hazel asked.

Brian helped out. ‘Ay’s a steckmon or a droovah.’

‘Now,’ Tom said, ‘it’s just a domesticated family pub. You can take the kids there on a Sunday.’

He made one ashamed of one’s times.

A short way out of Humpty Doo we paused at a well-worn spot for viewing the Cathedral Termite Mounds. We’d seen ant hills in plenty on either side of the road for miles, but these were on a grander scale. Ten-foot-high cellulose shrines with campaniles and flying buttresses and now votaries, they stood witness to the unsurpassed architectural genius of the termites, creatures who could combine navvying with gourmandising, taking in the necessary from one end and passing it out as building material through the other. I wasn’t especially impressed myself. I go vacant before the miracle of ants. I find all that stuff about queens and artisans and soldiers hard to take. Perfected social arrangements, especially in the very small, are inimical to all my belief systems. So I didn’t fully register everything Tom was saying about the air-conditioning and waste disposal units the termites had installed in their cathedrals. Instead I preferred to look at Tom.

The contradictions in his person fascinated me. He was lean, not tall, but fit. He wore a khaki shirt, embroidered with his name and tour company, over brown walking shorts. A small leather pouch, shaped as if to take a knife, hung at his waist. He didn’t favour the knee-length legwear normally worn by territorians going about their business but little ankle socks, white with a couple of nifty pink stripes in them. And these only just protruded from those Australian walking shoes with a tab at the back that I used to know (and love) as Chelsea boots. He was bush-ready in other words, and yet at the same time peacocky. There was a pampered quiff in his hair. He had elegantly shaped and just greying sideburns. And a curly, almost frilly profile, with a small, possibly difficult mouth. A gold chain – the kind sportsmen wear – hung around his neck. And although he told the time off a heavy masculine chronometer, strapped like a weapon to his wrist, he wore two delicate gold rings, one of them with a little roseate stone in it, on the same hand.