So we drove around Darwin for an hour or so, conspicuous by virtue of our colour, our exposure to the midday sun, and our being very nearly the only vehicle in the Northern Territory that wasn’t a Toyota 4-wheel drive, a Mitsubishi 4-wheel drive, or a Holden Jackaroo with Yokohama Super Digger tyres. Until we ended up, partly by design, and partly because that was where the traffic pushed us, in the bohemian suburb of Parap – all bohemias are relative – just in time to catch what was left of the Saturday morning market. The conventional stall-holders had packed up, but the Chinese were caught between wanting to count their takings (which is not how I was brought up to behave on a public market) and needing to sell off the last of their Laotian-style dim sums and Thai noddle soup. And the hippies looked settled in for the afternoon, with fresh herbal coffee on their methane gas rings, and plenty of wholemeal pitta bread sandwiches filled with couscous and capsicum wrapped up waiting in cling film.

The only non-food stall still operating sold Australiana – mainly T-shirts, the most popular of which depicted the nation’s symbol of cuddlesomeness and innocence, the koala, being fellated by a beach girl, and bore the legend, How Much Can a Koala Bear? I sometimes think I could have made a living inventing weak and tasteless jokes of this kind because I immediately had an idea for a follow-up – Less Than a Toucan – but I wasn’t able to interest anybody in it.

We sat for a while under the trees, eating samosas and listening to the hippies admiring one another’s new fluorescent sun glasses – ‘Hey, they’re really nice’ – demonstrating their wonderfully relaxed manner with children, and discussing, in preternaturally deep voices, the latest televised episode of The Young Ones. ‘It’s total anarchy – that’s what’s so amazing. How do they get away with it. Wow!’

Then we were joined by Alfredo, an elderly Sicilian who wondered whether we came from the south or the east. I didn’t want to get into the bother of explaining that Ros came from the west, if we were talking about Australia, and that I came from the north, if we were talking about England, so I simply said, ‘London.’ He narrowed his eyes and nodded. Yes, he knew where London was, but he’d long since given up thinking about that part of the world. Darwin was his home now. He’d been here years, even before shiklone troicee. Ros and I exchanged glances, but we were of no help to each other. ‘Before when?’ I asked.

He couldn’t believe we were so ignorant. ‘Shiklone troicee!’ He made a noise with his mouth and a movement with his hands to suggest a great wind and the tops coming off all the houses.

‘Oh,’ Ros and I said together, ‘Cyclone Tracy!’

‘Si, si, Shiklone Troicee.’