Tom didn’t hesitate. ‘We want it,’ he said. ‘We all want it. Look, we’ve already made enough weapons to destroy ourselves a thousand times over. A bit more uranium isn’t going to make any difference. The Canadians are at it, and very soon the Chinese will be. They’ve got more of it, in a purer form, than anyone.’

‘And the Aborigines?’

‘They want it. They want the revenue. It’s only because they’re not getting the revenue on the mines the Commonwealth won’t allow to operate that they’ve agreed to the opening up of Kakadu. They prefer mines to tourism, given the choice. Tourism means big mobs of people.’

It wasn’t my intention to be provocative but I did want to say that according to all accounts most of the revenue that was meant to go to the Aborigines ended up in the hands of white lawyers and administrators.

‘Yes, yes it does. But they’ll work it out. It’ll take time but the money will get to them. In sixty years they’ll be the oil sheikhs of Australia. They’ll be rich enough to buy the country back.’

I could see, in the reflection of his driving mirror, how much the idea pleased him, how far it appealed to his sense of symmetry and justice. I hadn’t yet learnt how rare it was, in the North, for a white man to accept the idea of an Aborigine having the wherewithal to buy anything, even a beer, let alone the whole of Australia.

‘So you reckon Aboriginal Land Rights and uranium is not a burning issue up here?’ I asked. ‘It’s not all still up for debate.’

He couldn’t have been more definite. ‘It’s old hat,’ he said. And you can’t get much older than that.

But he was wrong. He was speaking only for the calm that was in himself. Out there – outside the rationality of his little bus – it was raging away.

By the time we were back in the outskirts of Darwin we were a softened group. We’d all become chums, and Tom didn’t want to see us go. He belonged to the dreaming, yearning school of tour operators. He fell in love with whichever was his latest bus load. He wouldn’t have minded if, like the Flying Dutchman, he’d been doomed to take us through the Kakadu National Park for eternity.

Just before he dropped us off he was forced to brake suddenly at the traffic lights. We were all thrown forward. ‘Hang on, Tom,’ Ros drawled, those aren’t bloody Christmas decorations y’know.’

As in art, so in life, no one can resist an echo of the beginning in the end. We laughed and said goodbye with broken hearts.