We walked home in the warm night, Ros and I, not quite together, each absorbed in thought. Lightning was still illuminating the sky. Not once, in the five or six nights we’d been here, had the sky been silent or still.

Although the Darwin Performing Arts Centre had already been inaugurally opened to the sound of a not quite capacity audience singing ‘You Need Hands’, the Beaufort International Hotel which housed it wasn’t itself ready to receive guests for another week. We had walked past it almost every day, admiring its daring pastel-pink and baby-blue modernity, and agreeing that it was no bad thing for a hotel to resemble a shopping precinct surrounded by squash courts, especially in Darwin where the prevailing hotel style was a cross between Tower Hamlets residential and Trading Estate functional. But it was not until our last morning in town that we were able to set foot inside it.

We blundered in, seeing as the workmen had now removed the barrier of string and coloured plastic flags from the front entrance, and found ourselves eyeball to eyeball with Paul Everingham, one-time Chief Minister for the Northern Territory, now its Federal Representative, and still very much the presiding genius of the place. He was sitting at a table with the directors and President of the Company financing the Beaufort, drinking early morning champagne and orange juice, and posing for photographers. I watched him as he pretended to sign in, his pen poised above the visitors’ book, and I thought how young he looked, and how like a bridegroom, frozen for the cameras with his knife in the cake. He was affable and casual, in shirtsleeves, but he had other engagements. I noticed that as he left he performed a sort of flapper movement with the palms of his hands, much as if he were wiping a window to music. It’s even possible that his rotating palms actually made contact with some of the dignitaries he was farewelling. He turned again, as the doors opened for him, to make absolutely certain that he’d left no one out of his elaborately easy-going courtesies – not even Ros and me, standing with our mouths agape in the virgin vestibule – then he was gone, with a final wave and a wipe, a democratic monarch amongst his people.

We looked around the grand reception area with its as yet empty balconies and small plants. There were workmen everywhere putting in finishing touches, affixing signs and straightening acceptably abstract examples of contemporary Australian art. The house and international telephone cubicles were elegantly designed and lacking only telephones. Blank paper rolled off the telex machine. Three very slender Indonesian girls, dressed like air hostesses, stood with fixed smiles behind the desk, waiting for guests.