In the playground – where she was refereeing a game of Pitjantjatjara rounders – I met Jane, another teacher at the school, who told me almost immediately, as a piece of information without which I couldn’t be expected to understand her, that she came from Moree, the country town in the far north-west of New South Wales. I would have been more surprised by the degree to which Jane was ‘dressed’ and ‘made-up’ had I not had some experience in the past of country school teachers in Australia – I’d been an educational book rep in the early seventies, travelling around Victoria with a boot-load of set texts – and their greater conscientiousness, in matters of personal presentation and couture, than their equivalents in Britain. Australian teachers altogether spruced themselves up for their work in a manner that would have been unthinkable to any of the elbow-patched paupers who had passed on the values of civilization to me. But it was strange, for all that, to see Jane standing in her French high-heeled shoes in the dust bowl that was the Areyonga school playground, a silk scarf that might have come from Yves Saint-Laurent about her shoulders and a tin whistle to her scarlet lips.

‘I am very much a Moree girl,’ she told me. Which was meant to explain such disparities as her comme il faut (though not comme il faut à l’Areyonga) style and appearance, her sense of separateness, and her mistrust of the prevailing tone of social informality. ‘People keep wanting to borrow things,’ she said, ‘and I just don’t believe in lending them. Not even to good friends.’ I took this to be outback wisdom speaking; Moree was probably even more remote than Areyonga – lend something to a person in Moree and it would be ten years before you next saw the person let alone the thing.

But she was also a Moree girl in the sense that that was where she was most happy. ‘There is nothing I love more than to return to Moree in the early evening, to walk into town, and to see a pair of moleskins in front of me. Then I know I’m home.’

This was saucy: moleskins were the trousers that the menfolk of Moree wore.

Just before we parted she asked me what I did, and in that case what their titles were. ‘So that I can pass an opinion,’ she said. I wrote them down for her. She scrutinized the scrap of paper and then folded it neatly into her sac. ‘Now I can pass an opinon,’ she said. It sounded very deadly. I suddenly had an intimation of what it might be like to be a chap in Moree, awaiting her appraisal of his moleskins.