I’d got this sort of thing wrong in the past, of course. Most notably in Broome where I’d confused servitude with spontaneity. So I thought I’d better buy Ross Fitzgerald’s A History of Queensland before I made another ass of myself. If these too were prisoners on day release, or just a boatload of Honolulans who happened to be in North Queensland on vacation, I thought I ought to find out about it. There wasn’t much time for reading in Townsville, given the task of comma reparation to which we were committed, but a quick perusal over lychees and frozen avocado yoghurt told me what I needed to know. These were Torres Strait Islanders. They weren’t in prison and they weren’t on holiday; they lived here. Whether they were indeed as happy as they seemed to be Ross Fitzgerald didn’t say. I looked up Contentment, Aboriginal in the index but didn’t find any entry. It wasn’t that kind of history book. If I had my facts right it very nearly hadn’t been any kind of history book at all, having been pressurized, threatened, changed and in its original form even pulped – pulping being a touch more final than repunctuating – as a consequence of some heavy leaning by whoever looks after that in Queensland. I’d picked up something or other in some scandal sheet to the effect that the then Chief Justice of Queensland, Sir Walter Campbell – now the State Governor – had been behind this, but who believes what they read in a scandal sheet? Anyway, happy or not, at least I’d found out who these black men were who didn’t sit in circles on nature strips looking woebegone. And Ross Fitzgerald did offer me one important clue to the undoubted confidence of their bearing. The Second World War. ‘In far north Queensland the war brought Torres Strait Islanders into close contact with Australian and American servicemen and hastened their “assimilation” into white Australian society . . . The arrival of black GIs was a revelation both to the Islanders and north Queensland’s white population.’ I wasn’t for the moment interested in the white population. ‘Although the influence of black servicemen on Queensland’s indigenous peoples is difficult to assess, the relative affluence of negro GIs was certainly impressive. After the war, Torres Strait Islanders displayed material ambitions similar to those of their black American brothers.’

And indubitably, by the time we blew into town forty years later, looked the better for that.

I thought of sending a telegram to Neil and Dawn in Areyonga. ‘Queensland not what you think stop happy hoisters on every corner stop blacks with heads held high stop life a bugger stop never what you expect stop Joh for P.M. love Howard.’