This was another drawback of life in Townsville. You kept thinking you were reading about Mrs Thatcher. In fact Maggie was Magnetic Island, Townsville’s popular off-shore resort, and dollar for dollar probably its chief tourist draw. The storm that was brewing, and had been ever since we’d arrived, related entirely to the issue of development. It was the same fight that was raging all over the state and indeed right across the Reef. Only a few months earlier the whole country had been in uproar over the Queensland Government’s attempt to revoke the National Park status of most of Lindeman Island in order that an airline might build a resort on it. The conservationists had more or less won that one. But were losing just about everything else. Joh, of course, was the bugbear. Followed closely by Colonel Gaddaffi. If he hadn’t been frightening Americans out of holidaying in Europe – that’s Gaddaffi I’m talking about – there wouldn’t have been so many of them coming to Australia. In fact, from what I’d seen of American tourists, they were less interested in multi-million dollar resorts and casinos than they were in staring at kangaroos and Aborigines, and meeting outback Aussies got up like Crocodile Dundee. But try telling a property developer that.

It was only as we were leaving that we realized not only that we hadn’t left ourselves time to go to Magnetic Island in the finish, but that it would have been far the most sensible thing to have taken the manuscript there in the first place, and attended to it in soothing tropical insularity. On a verandah underneath a palm tree. That we never even thought of it proves to what levels of self-defeating despair the task had driven us. Now it was too late. We were both desperate to be away.

A dry, quintessentially unimpressible Queensland woman called Kay filled out the form for our hire car. She was in her mid-forties, plain – on what seemed to be intellectual grounds – with her hair pulled tightly back from her face. While she was writing I mentioned that I might want to keep the car longer than our originally agreed five days in order to drive back down the coast to Proserpine where I’d heard there was to be a rodeo. Only the slightest twitch in the finger uppermost on her pen suggested that she had heard me. ‘There’s a rodeo there, is there?’ she finally got around to asking.

I became aware, suddenly, of her possible powers of contradiction. ‘I think so,’ I said, although I in fact knew so.

She went on with what she was doing, then she raised one, one only, infinitesimal eyebrow. ‘You into rodeos?’