The question of ‘intimate personal relationships’ was equally intriguing. For how many of the offspring of those early mixed relations had gone back, unnoticed, into the earliest white communities in Australia? The conclusion seemed inescapable to me: the longer the lineage the greater the chance of a drop or two of Aboriginal blood. I could think of a friend or two of mine who had a wild eye. And I went to sleep, finally, planning that I would ask them, as soon as I reached Sydney, ‘Are you sure your great-great-grandfather was never in the Northern Territory?’

When I woke up we were over the Queensland border and receiving instructions from the coach captain about our breakfasting arrangements in Mt Isa. Opening my eyes I realized we were actually in it, the giant mining town which was like Kalgoorlie and Coober Pedy rolled into one and then cleaned up. No dust on the roads here, and no desperate characters on every corner. But chimneys belched smoke and there was no mistaking that the place was functional.

It had once meant a lot to me as an idea, Mt Isa. In my Melbourne years it had symbolized the options open to me should I ever have the courage to become a fugitive from conventions and relationships. I never knew what I would do if I ever actually made it there; I definitely never envisaged going underground, for example. But the town, with its reputation for hard masculine companionship, shimmered as a possibility for two whole years – a mirage I followed in my dreams, a coppery alternative to the domesticity into which I seemed incapable of not immersing myself.

Now here I was at last, having an early breakfast at the Mt Isa Hotel with a pair of German tree freaks, a bore with a rare associational disorder who was reminded of the last time he’d had breakfast, which was yesterday, and a couple of pupils from a minor experimental English public school. ‘Any more tea there, Ros?’ I asked.

Twelve hours and thousands of picturesquely stilted and verandahed wooden houses later we were in Townsville.

This is not the place to recite the grievances a writer feels when, without warning, he discovers that his punctuation has been fiddled with. Editorial interference has to be taken stoically. There’s no point crying rape. The writer is himself the reason for the crime. Were there no mug there’d be no mugging; no paedo there’d be no paedophile. So, if we would have no editors should we flaunt no prose. A little experience teaches that there are men out there – and women too – who cannot keep their propelling pencils to themselves. It’s an illness, a compulsion, a mysterious psychic disorder akin to kleptomania, except that the patient wishes not merely to take away but also to replace with something different. Emendolepsy. Tinker-ophilia.