He sang another song or two and finished with ‘Such is Life, Ned Kelly, Such is Life’. He shook my hand warmly when we left. Cheers, he said. Glad you came. Good to see you. He almost certainly called me mate. It was quite ridiculous, considering that I’d come out to be entertained, just how upset I was feeling. I wanted to put my arm around his shoulder and tell him what I thought. ‘Do something else,’ I wanted to say to him. ‘Stuff all this beer can, Fosters carton, Northern Territory vitalistic character baloney. You’ve given it a fair go and you don’t believe in it yourself any more, so stuff it. It’s no life having to stand up in front of paltry audiences who’d laugh at anything, for a living. I know. I used to be an academic. I taught at a polytechnic. I got so bored with the audiences I had to entertain I used to fall asleep while I was talking. One of these days it’s going to happen to you. Your head will just drop down inside your Fosters carton and you won’t even know about it. Your fingers will go on drumming. You’ll go on singing. And your fans will go on clapping. Because they won’t know about it either.’

But of course I had no other career prospects to advise him on, unless he wanted the managership of the Australian cricket team and that wouldn’t be free of humiliations either. All I could do was pump his hand and thank him and try not to catch any of the little points of fire which still flashed out of his somnolence.

The last thing he said to me was, ‘You should come on a good night when we get ninety or a hundred.’ So he was beyond help.

We spent the next few days in a desultory fashion, collecting mail, answering it, sitting in the mall watching tourists watching Aborigines watching tourists, and making short sorties into the Macdonnell Ranges to places which were invariably named, like Alice itself, after women – Emily Gap, Jessie Gap, Trephina Gorge. Had we ventured further we would have found Glen Helen, Ruby Gorge, and Claraville. I wasn’t especially athirst for landscape after three solid days of guzzling Uluru, but little by little the subtler coloration of the Macdonnell Ranges tickled a bit of life back into the palate. This was paler, more luminous country than where we’d been; the rocks more orange than magenta, the spinifex blonde, the gums blanched and ghostly, appearing to hold light itself in their high foliage.