But I realized I might have been jumping the gun a bit. There was likely to be more to race relations in North Queensland than a cheerful atmosphere around the shopping mall. And it was not at all beyond the bounds of possibility, either, that the price those Islanders paid for their external ebullience was a spiritual disinheritance, a hopelessness as far-reaching as my own when it came to knowing what you were supposed to do with sacred objects – tyuringe (pronounced tewring-ger) – and the like.

It was a puzzle and no mistake. Compounded by our taking a night off from our labours and going to see Crocodile Dundee in the Townsville picture theatre, where we sat stony-faced, like Lord Longford and Mrs Whitehouse on a blind date, while all around us Queenslanders with shoulders too high to see over laughed at what wasn’t funny and agreed with what wasn’t true. Presumably it worked differently in different venues, but in Townsville it was the moment when Paul Hogan addressed the kangaroo hunter (the ecological bad guy) as ‘shit for brains’ that won the audience over completely. The idea that you could update your decencies and still not have to forgo your swearing seemed to be the key to their hilarity and relief. But however much the decencies were remodelled, the indecencies remained where they’d always been in Australian mythology – quite beyond the grasp and comprehending, let alone the experience, of the rough-mannered, simple-hearted, but always clean-minded larrikin of a hero. Balls on a transvestite? Rudeness to a lady? Never!

It was hard enough to swallow, this cute fiction of butch naivety, even in those parts of Australia where only 25 per cent of the population was overtly homosexual. But here in the high hot north, where you could see the Townsville hoist in operation twenty-four hours a day – where you couldn’t in all truth ever not see it – no, the gorge rose and rejected it.

For the traveller, watching something like Crocodile Dundee in situ is probably not a good idea. It makes you doubt the usefulness of your eyes. It seemed to me that what I saw of Australians on the street bore only an oblique relation to how it pleased them to see themselves. Here I’d been, supposedly in 1986, observing what I thought was a various and dynamic culture responding to sensitive contemporary challenges, both from within and from without, and all along it was 1958 out there, the uncultivated terrain still peopled by roving bands of amiable boof-heads whose profound ignorance of the ways of the world (poofters, foreigners and intellectuals) was, quite magically, the very thing that endeared them to the sheilas. In which case, if I had slipped back thirty years in time, maybe those happy-happy-talking Torres Strait Islanders really were extras from South Pacific.