In so far as Townsville could be said to have a problem, it related to its origins as a commercial centre. Because it had not been built primarily for recreation it didn’t embrace its own amenities conveniently; it didn’t in any inviting way, for example, front its own water. Although the sea was out there – although you knew the sea was out there – you went about your business with your back to it. And this needn’t have mattered too much except that tourism was what Townsville now wanted to be about. Above all things it wanted to shed its country town image and rival Cairns, not just as a convenient stepping off point for the tropical paradises of the Reef, but as a sophisticated, five-star international gambling and shopping metropolis in its own right. On the very day we arrived a brand new Sheraton Hotel and Casino complex had opened its doors – an event, according to a leader in the Townsville Bulletin, that could ‘be fairly described as marking the dawning of a new age both for Townsville and North Queensland’. And which was bound to cause some consternation up the coast – ‘If anyone thought our friendly neighbour, Cairns, had the edge . . . think again.’

New age or not, the Sheraton Breakwater Complex looked a merely conventional oblong high-rise hotel to me; not all that different from a Battersea council estate. And there was no reason to believe that the casino here would fare any better than the ones in Darwin or Alice Springs, attracting far fewer tourist dollars than anticipated, despite the charms of croupiers with names like Lindelle and Leslene, and just adding to the number of ways the indigenous population could make itself miserable.

When it wasn’t trying to be international and getting excited because it had a ‘Gucci’ shop, Townsville made a good job of being the very thing it no longer wanted to be – a charming lazily provincial tropical country town. Some of our most enjoyable times – in-between editing the editing – were those we spent sitting in Flinders Street Mall outside the fresh fruit bar, eating mangoes and paw paw and pineapple served with frozen yoghurt, watching North Queenslanders going about their business, or, and this was only marginally less strenuous, perambulating for the fun of it.