Not having much to do, now that Mr Everingham had gone, and perhaps supposing, since we were there, that we also were VIPs, the President of the Company came over to shake our hands. A couple of photographers’ flash bulbs went off. Did we like what we saw? Oh, enormously. Had we stayed at Beaufort International Hotels before? – the Jimbaran Bay in Bali, for example, or the Tanjung Aru Beach, in Kota Kinabalu? No, no, we didn’t think we had, but all other things being equal we thought perhaps we soon should. And would we care to be shown around? We didn’t hesitate. Nothing we would care for more, we said.

The person who did the showing was the Assistant Manager, John Girard, on loan from the Hotel Benaktuai, Balikpapan, to ‘help out’ in Darwin. John Girard was possessed of an assurance which intrigued me on account of its having been emptied of anything that might excite envy. He was easy and even jokey, without being personal or humorous. He had good looks without menacing you with his handsomeness. He was of a stature without being, so to speak, personally tall. It was as if he had taken possession of all the desirable attributes as it were on your behalf. I didn’t know at which school for hoteliers he had acquired this extraordinary gift, but I wished I’d been to it, even though he made me feel that I had.

The Hotel was high quality, too. I was particularly taken by the Executive Duplex Suites (one room in pinks, one room in greens), yours for $500 per night, and providing a colour T.V. in every room and all manner of electrical gadgets worked with your own specially attributed, unique-to-you, computerized card – ‘thrown away the moment you leave, so that no two are ever the same’. You want that.

I wondered if this, then, was the beginning of the first true internationalization of Darwin. There already were Travelodges and so on in town, but they went for a simple-minded ethnicity, with Safari bistros and fake grass ceilings. The Beaufort aspired to an altogether higher and more cosmopolitan ideal of kitsch. It had a Teppanyaki restaurant, ‘fitted out from Japan’ and fully timbered ‘by a famous boat builder from Sydney’. It has drugstores and surface-tension pools, a gourmet diner called Siggi’s and a place of entertainment not immediately recognizable to me though Mr Girard assured me, guiding me through it with the merest feather touch beneath my elbow, that it was a typical English pub. And it had a theatre for Max Bygraves to perform in.