Part of the pleasure came from simply noticing how large and healthy and good-looking they were. One of Townsville’s more intelligent commercial boasts was the number of outsize fashion shops for women it had. And it needed them. Women here were a good three inches taller than those we’d seen elsewhere in Australia, which means they were nine inches to a foot taller than what you’d find in Birmingham or Manchester. And without exception their br****s were fuller also. I am less likely to be reliable on inches here, but every woman we saw in Townsville, who was a native of the place or had lived in it long enough for its climate to have seeped into her hormones, had large, high, round, and perfect br****s.

The men, too, were more than satisfied with what the North Queensland sun had done for them. I noticed before too long that there was a strict way of wearing shorts in town if you were young and single – a certain brevity and tension and lift; a sort of bunching effect that wasn’t a matter of the shorts being skin tight, but on the contrary a function of their being cut high and open at the leg, so that the marvel was that whatever they contained did not fall out. I called this the Townsville Hoist and noted, as the days went by, that the greater the impression of imminent catastrophe the hoister gave, the more attention he received. It goes without saying that, while this spectacle was available to be appreciated by anyone, it was ultimately inter homines. Hoisters hoisted first and foremost for one another.

But what really made the streets of Townsville quite distinct from any others we’d walked along in Australia was the presence of blacks who neither looked like any Aborigines we’d seen before nor behaved like them. The bus journey had already given us some intimation of this change. We’d noticed that the closer we drew to the coast the more marked became the variations in the physical appearances of the Aboriginal passengers we picked up. Skin grew progressively darker, hair curlier, features flatter, bodies stockier and shorter. By Charters Towers we had people on board who looked more like Maoris than Aborigines. I’d read that coastal tribes were not the same as inland tribes. Leichhardt himself had noted the difference. And I also knew that North Queensland had been more subject to foreign incursions, long before the English turned up, than most other parts of Australia. Melanesians had been here. Some historians speculated about Papuan colonization. But I still hadn’t expected to see Townsville looking like a stage set for South Pacific, where handsome, vigorous, well-dressed, confident and apparently happy South Sea Islanders strode about the town whistling.