Ted Egan was the Territory’s best-known resident entertainer; he wrote folk songs and sang folk songs, accompanying himself on an empty box of Fosters, and told tall stories, and kept alive the names of ‘characters’ he’d met from Barrow Creek to Borroloola. If you were in Alice Springs you were meant to go and watch him, in the same way that you were meant to see The Mousetrap if you’d never previously been to London. In both cases kids in shops would look at you as if you were simple when you told them what you’d bought a ticket to.

It was in the gardens of Château Hornsby, ‘Central Australia’s first and only winery’ – about whose wines the best is silence – that Ted Egan was currently performing. To packed houses, we’d heard, though when we rolled up after four hours of torrential rain we found only two Americans travelling on a Fulbright, plus their child, in the audience. So it very much looked, as I tried to make them feel at home by saying, that we weren’t goin’a get no show. Twenty minutes before he was due to start Ted Egan himself appeared, rubbed his face, and bought us each a beer.

I felt sorry for him. Had he been a novelist giving a reading he would have considered this a big turn-out. But he was used to better. He had a sad, sleepy quality which belied the larrikin idea of him I’d formed from Tom Winter and Bill Richards and any number of coach drivers around Australia who played his tapes and spoke his name with reverence. There was something of Dean Martin’s sleek slum-brousness about him, a hint of Robert Mitchum indifferentism, a rub of Stewart Granger’s insubstantial gravity. And it seemed to me that although he was known far and wide throughout the territory and famous enough beyond it for what he could do with an empty Fosters carton, he was still sad because he had not become as famous as those men. And the four and a half of us weren’t helping.

Then, just as we all thought that was that, an old Ford utility pulled in, bearing a mixed but not always distinguishable family from west of the Devil’s Marbles, all five of them with their hair shaved three quarters of the way up their heads. The paterfamilias nodded at Ted Egan as if they were old friends. ‘Remember mad Mort from Urandangie?’ he asked, without preliminaries. ‘In his heyday he must have been 52 stones, wouldn’t you reckon?’