It was a wonderful drive: tropical forests, running between the coast and the tablelands, steaming high up to our left; on our right, miles of deserted beaches, and beyond them the reefs. We stopped for lunch at Mossman, the most northerly of the sugar cane towns. Since this too, though not to quite the same degree as Ingham, was an Italian town – the Di Bartolos and the Contarions (and perhaps I just imagined the Figaros) were big here – I opted for a counter lunch of calamari and chips. Good, but not as good as what Ros found in a shop specializing in ‘Rare and Exotic Tropical Fruits’: grandillas and babacos and rambatans and black sapote and carambola – otherwise known as ‘four corners’, a fruit that resembled a starfish – and sour sops and, best of all, custard apples. I fell for custard apples in a big way. They were the only fruit I’d ever eaten that tasted like an artificial dessert. They instilled in me a whole new regard for growing things. Could it be that somewhere out there was natural organic produce that had the taste of sherry trifle or crème caramel? The question was only marginally fantastic. Before we left Queensland we would eat a fruit that had been specially cultivated to taste like pink champagne.

The Aborigines I saw in Mossman were not the confident exotic Islanders I’d admired in Townsville. Nor did they seem to occupy the town in the manner of their brothers in the Northern Territory or the north of Western Australia. There wasn’t that mute sit-down, as if by right, I’d grown accustomed to. Things were jumpier here. They clung to the outskirts of the town and generally kept their distance. It was also my impression, as indeed it was Ros’s, that a number of them looked distinctly Italianate.

Why wouldn’t they. We’d come across an Adolf Inkamala in Hermannsburg; why not a Romeo Rubuntja in Mossman?