Opposite the TAB counter where I went to place my ten dollars on Gone Troppo I spotted the crème de la crème of Alice Springs seeking refuge from the sun under a canvas canopy. Three women in particular took my eye because of their extraordinary resemblance to James Cagney, Broderick Crawford, and Edward G. Robinson. They sat preening as if at Ascot, but in apparent readiness for the St Valentine’s Day Massacre. Edward G. Robinson, in a loose blouson top and a pencil-slim skirt, had her scrawny legs crossed and puffed on a long cigarette. A severe twist of gold glinted on each ear. Jimmy Cagney screwed up her eyes in puckish delinquency, a queer spun-sugar confection on her head, plastic see-through sandals on her feet. Broderick Crawford was the least elegant, letting it all hang out of a pink and brown acrylic mobster frock. Grannies themselves, you wouldn’t have let your own granny near them.

Their social fortunes rose, as did ours indeed hold, when Mr Ian Tuxworth, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, suddenly appeared out of the throng of punters and recognized them. He was wearing a crisp white shirt and carrying a soft green drink and seemed no match at all for the hoodlums. Edward G. Robinson offered him her cheek. Jimmy Cagney offered him two cheeks. Broderick Crawford, if I wasn’t mistaken, raised her mouth.

Ian Lindsay Tuxworth, ‘Casino’ Everingham’s immediate successor, was having a hard time of it right now over expenses he had once claimed for travelling from a place at which he no longer lived. He had admitted the offence, paid back the money, and conceded in Parliament that his action had been ‘morally wrong’. Such rectitude had, if anything, worked against him. It wasn’t actually required of Northern Territory politicians that they fiddle their travelling allowances, but they weren’t expected to bring issues of morality into it either.

And it was easy to see why he wasn’t as popular as Everingham had been. He didn’t have the swagger. He didn’t have the Territory tone. Out here on the racecourse, in his short-sleeved shirt and bookkeeper’s spectacles, he looked more like a wages clerk than a Chief Minister. You might even have expected him to try selling you a bible. I had read somewhere that he had pawned his soul to an American positive cerebration philosophy called New Age Thinking, a system for reorganizing society along corporate lines. Whether or not that could strictly speaking be called a religion, I didn’t know; but he had the washed, emotionally baptized look of someone to whom truth had only recently been revealed, albeit on corporate lines, and that made him nobody’s ideal drinking partner.