It wasn’t busy. In the Kunia Lounge they even had difficulty changing a fifty-dollar note. We took a break between drinks and strolled around the reception area where Aboriginal artefacts were displayed in discreet glass cases. A set of ‘Carvings of Ancestral Figures of the Tiwi Tribe’ – looking to me suspiciously like funeral poles – enjoyed prominence, pleasingly arranged on a pretty plinth. The sounds of live music drew us to the Mulgara Bar where Mr Jan Castor was entertaining no more than a handful of drinkers. A stylishly handsome German or Dutchman or Czech or maybe a combination of all three – he sat on a simple stool, one leg carelessly thrown across the other, playing a guitar to computerized electronic backing. He finished a number just as we were finding a table and he seemed to wish to dedicate the next one to us. ‘Zis is a song about a didgeridoo vich I have written myself. For zose of you which didn’t knowing vat a didgeridoo is, it’s a long pipe vich Aborigines use for blowing.’

He flicked a switch on his computer which must have been marked ‘blackfeller’, because suddenly he had an identically dispiriting rhythm going to the one we’d heard earlier coming from the roof of the Ford Bronco. Then he sang the song he’d written.

I’ll be your didgeridoo

I’ll give myself to you.

I’ll be your didgeridoo,

Give yourself to me, too.

As the song progressed I noticed from Ros’s expression that she hadn’t taken the full measure of the subtle modulations of its lyrics. She hadn’t noticed that the I’ll became I’m and promised an elegiac drop into an I’d. ‘There’s an underlying statement about Time in this song,’ I explained to her.

I was your didgeridoo,

he sang as we rose to leave;

I gave my love to you.

We were still in the hotel foyer when we heard him following up with ‘Morning Has Broken’.