The hotel we chose to stay at, although like most of the new buildings in Cairns exceedingly ugly, offered the twin advantages of a large balcony overlooking the bay, and proximity to the two blocks of esplanade where all the action seemed to be. There was a bustling youth hostel here, and several cheap motels and boarding houses, and a couple of fish restaurants whose tables spilled out onto the pavement and very nearly onto the roads. It wasn’t Marseilles or Nice exactly, but there was an excitement in the air, a sort of marine raffishness, a suggestion of slipped moorings, albeit that the majority of people out on the streets were young – American and European college kids having an ‘amazing’ adventure, Australian students taking a year off uni in order to hitch-hike to the sun, professional unattached bums who wanted to laze around close to islands.

I would have liked to spend a few hours here, eating on the pavement, but Ros reckoned we still had plenty of fruit to get through; so we sat out on our balcony instead, chewing on coconut and listening for what was stirring in the waters of Trinity Bay, while behind us on our hotel television the State Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, tried to bully his way through an explanation of what was wrong with the figures that showed Queensland to have the highest number of bankruptcies, the highest unemployment, and the highest budget deficit of any state in Australia.

What was wrong with them, of course, was that they spoiled everybody’s fun.

I was out again on the balcony early next morning, watching the sun rising from behind the Nisbet Ranges, where Aborigines on the Yarrabah reserve would have seen it first. Fishing boats were returning, looking laden. Large white shapes, whose outlines I could not recognize in the half-light but which eventually turned into pelicans, cruised up and down, observing the fish leaping out of the water. There was no sweat. No worries. The seas teemed with breakfast. What the pelicans especially fancied, they took.

Joggers were soon out on the esplanade. All around the sea fronts of Australia someone was running. From a satellite the country must have looked as though its entire perimeter was a moving tracksuit. On the horizon an island – perhaps Green Island – appeared and then immediately shimmered. Straight into business. The hawks too were not sure what they thought about this no worries stuff. They twitched in disbelief at the pelicans’ insouciance. Ever since leaving Townsville we’d noticed that it was hawks that hovered over the beaches, not seagulls. They were a reminder that this was man’s country. Lee Marvin came here for the marlin and threw back anything under 1,000 pounds. This was no place for seagulls.