I didn’t catch the reply, because at that moment a small bus arrived and deposited a sorority of eleven ladies in yellow cardigans, none of them seriously ill but each exhibiting some sort of bird-like affliction or another – twisted necks, palsy, beak-rot – two of them even wearing eye-patches. The only one able to keep her head still was the driver, and instead of a yellow cardigan she had on a T-shirt which said CATZ.

‘Well, that’s just great,’ the American on the Fulbright said, ‘now we got a party.’

In fact I said it, but it’s the kind of thing Americans are expected to say, and it’s the kind of thing he might have said had he been less self-conscious, and either way it was what we all wanted to say, except of course for Ted Egan who looked as though he would much rather we went away and came back on another night when he had a larger and more normal audience.

But he made a brave fist of entertaining us. He sang us a song entitled ‘You Get an Awful Lot of Characters in the Northern Territory’, accompanying himself on the Foster’s carton which he sat on his lap and drummed on with his fingers. After which he pretended to worry that his instrument was out of tune. He put it to his ear, peered inside it, held it to the light, and lo and behold! – a can of Fosters skulking in the corner. ‘Cheers!’ he said, drinking it down. The women in the yellow cardigans and the family from west of the Devil’s Marbles laughed, as though there were some property of humour inherent in the very idea of beer.

After a few more songs he showed us a film that had been made about him several years before. It was called A Drop of Rough Ted and showed him travelling up and down the Territory with his son, encountering oddballs and ‘characters’ in the outback or the bar, branding cattle at Muckaty Station or playing his Foster’s carton at Sexy Rexy’s Piss Parlour in Tennant Creek. Seeing him younger and slimmer and more hopeful, in glowing technicolour, distressed me. I could understand why some film stars would never watch their old movies – too upsetting, too unchanging, the past made for ever flesh on film. The camera is a cruel curator of memoranda; it has made us all more melancholy than we were.