Next morning we went to hand-feed the fish at Doctor’s Gully. Never having had much to do with fish myself I didn’t at first realize that it was unusual for them to leap out of the water and take slices of French bread from your fingers. But Ros was on her knees, marvelling, at the far end of the pier, and there were notices everywhere warning us not to undo twenty years of hard-won trust by frightening the fish, so I concluded that I was watching something out of the ordinary.

I kept my distance, remembering the crocodiles, and observed the display of personality put on by a young man whose manner and demeanour gave him away at once as an ambisexual Catholic from Melbourne. He made much of wanting to feed certain fish and not others, seeming to find in the water a reflection of a Manichean universe, good bream and evil mullet, the deserving and the otherwise. I was curious to discover the criteria for his preferences, and decided at last that he wished to give only to those who swam alone, the outcasts, the little fishy heroes of the spirit, like himself.

Sometimes he would even reach into the water to retrieve a piece of bread floating towards the wrong beneficiary, but he would squeal if any fish, good or bad, came near him.

‘They don’t have teeth, you know,’ his slight female companion assured him.

‘Makes no difference,’ he said. He was stylized and witty, a fastidious fairy camping it up on a sultry Saturday morning on the shores of the Timor Sea. ‘It’s not the pain, it’s the principle.’

I am attached to unnaturalness myself. It has a long and honourable tradition. But there is always somebody who has to spoil it for the others.

On our way back into town we passed a canary-yellow Volkswagen, with its top missing – it looked as though it had been opened in a hurry with a can-opener – on the forecourt of a car-hire company. Ros was in one of her Mr Wemmick moods. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘here’s a car. Let’s hire it.’

I was wary. I still thought it was too soon to be driving into the bush. ‘Why would we want to do that?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s yellow and it matches your shirt. Come on.’