I suddenly decided I wanted his name, just so that I could savour it, though I felt I could only ask for it if I explained I was a writer. But we had trouble with the word. ‘Wrliter? Wrliter?’ I thought of saying, ‘Mishima – like Mishima.’ However I could see that this might have given him entirely the wrong idea. I didn’t want it to look as though I was recruiting for a private army. Then I hit on ‘journalist’. ‘Ah, journalist.’ He did a little scribble in the air. ‘For paper.’ He even brought a folded Japanese newspaper out of his tent. His smile seemed to imply that he knew I was in there.

I thought this was close enough not to quibble over. ‘Yes, for paper.’ Whereupon he wrote his name down for me – Shigeru-Horigan – rather Irish, I thought; and his address in Omiyacity, Saitamaken.

Before we parted I asked him how much longer he planned to be in Australia, and he explained he was on a working holiday and had a six-month visa which he hoped he could extend. I wondered – I really did mean this to be my last question – what he was intending to work as.

He suddenly became very amused. His whole face crumpled. He nodded in the direction of his immobilized Honda. ‘Motor-bike mechanic,’ he said.

Returning the campervan wasn’t easy for us. It had been our home for weeks. We were even beginning to look like it, in the way that owners come to resemble their own pets, or in Australia their own children. Ros couldn’t bear to be there when I actually handed it over, so I dropped her off in town and arranged to meet her later, once I’d done what had to be done, in Todd Street Mall.

Walking back, troubled by that curious sense of privation that follows parting with a set of car keys, I thought I detected a more than usually heavy traffic of Aborigine-bearing taxis on the streets, and a few more police patrols about as well. And when I caught up with Ros I learnt that there had indeed been some hyperactivity of an Aboriginal nature in town today, caused by the heat and by alcohol and by whatever other mystery ingredient it is that makes one day more excitable than the last. The paddy wagons had been out, that’s all that had really happened, and a few offenders had been bustled, protesting, into the back of them. The taxis I’d seen were simply carrying Aborigines bent on dematerializing quickly away from trouble.