As for the oddballs and ‘characters’ themselves – Bill Easton who did wild pig imitations and played the spoons, Charlie Priester who had his own safety belt to hold him upright at the Ti Tree bar, Roger Jose who lived in a ten-thousand-gallon water tank – they were most of them shy, recalcitrant figures. Bachelors. Solitaries. Some very nearly hermits. Their characterfulness, in the main, an eccentricity and rawness bred out of seclusion; and what else was that seclusion but the only possible response to a prior sense of overwhelming social difficulty? So it was some paradox, boisterous Australia’s love of ratbag individualism – the piss parlour idealizing the very qualities least welcome in it.

Watching these distressed men blinking at the cameras, and Ted Egan’s gentle consideration of them, it became clear that he shared with them more than he knew; that he too was more reticent in the flesh than in his own mythology. Rough Ted? I didn’t see it. Maybe he wasn’t ready to lock himself away in a ten-thousand-gallon water tank yet but he was looking bored with all the rollicking. And I could hear a hollowness in his lager-phone.

After the film he talked to us about his ‘mate’, Rolf Harris. We might not have been aware of it but it was he – Ted Egan – who had originally given Rolf Harris the words for ‘Two Little Boys’. He had first heard them himself on his mother’s knee and had repeated them to Rolf. One night Rolf rang him from London. ‘Ted,’ Ted said he said, ‘that song? I want it for my TV show. I can remember the tune but I have lost the words. Sing it for me.’ So Ted sang it, every verse, all the way from Alice Springs – ‘And fifteen million copies of the record later . . .’

He didn’t mean that to sound small-spirited. He had no complaints. But there is one clang that all the goodwill and high-mindedness in creation cannot keep out of a voice. And I heard it then. It was too cruel – of course it was too cruel – the contrast between Rolf Harris’s London Television Spectacular and Château Hornsby, Alice Springs; and the gap was altogether too wide between fifteen million purchasers of the record and the eleven maimed spinsters in yellow cardigans, the five shaved yokels from west of Devil’s Marbles, the two Americans on a Fulbright, and us.