At Tully itself we cut in to Mission Beach, along a tortuous road of tropical forests, where we saw a sign which said, CAUTION – CASSOWARIES FOR 10 KS. I was excited. I had never seen a cassowary before, not even in captivity. Now here we were in North-East Queensland, their natural and only habitat, and at any moment, if we were lucky, one was going to come charging out of the jungle with its head lowered – they had casques on their heads, like crash helmets, for this very purpose – meaning to terrify us with its loud booming grunt. It was Ros who possessed this information on them, though she had never encountered one in the wild either. In fact not many people had. They were private birds and not very easy to approach. If they didn’t scare you off with their crash helmets and their gruntings and their size – they had no trouble growing to heights of over five feet – they were capable of ripping you apart with their big toenail. For all that they were obviously just emus gone troppo and turned technicolour, they were lethal, not floozies like their southern relations. But it wasn’t for its aggressiveness that I wished to see one. What I liked was what Ros told me about their eating habits. I liked the simplicity. What they wanted to eat they just tossed in the air and swallowed down in one gulp. It didn’t matter how large or unpeeled the fruit was – up it went and a fraction of a second later it hit the stomach with a thud. We had a back seat full of pineapples and coconuts and paw paws that we’d bought at a kiosk outside Ingham. It would have been fun to throw a few out of the window at a charging cassowary and see what happened. But no cassowary showed. We had to settle for seeing one a few days later at Hartley’s Creek Zoo, where we’d actually gone to watch a live crocodile attack – ‘See the keepers in with the 11 and 14 foot crocs. AUSTRALIA’S ONLY CROCODILE ATTACK SHOW’ – and got the cassowary only as a supporting act.

As a consolation we ate our own lunch, more conventionally, on Mission Beach, with our feet in the warm blue water, palms shading us from the sun, Dunk Island beguiling through a heat haze across Brammo Bay.