The talk that we’d picked up around the town suggested that the Territorians weren’t sure what they thought, were reserving their judgement, would wait and see, would certainly pop in for a beer, but suspected the Beaufort didn’t quite answer their image of Darwin. I knew how they felt. On the other hand I would very much have liked to put the organization of the rest of my life into the hands of John Girard, that’s if I could have persuaded the Indonesians to spare him.

Later on that morning I acquired some interesting statistics relating to the Northern Territory, such as that it contained more lawyers per head of population than anywhere else in Australia, and more people with PhDs. It was Clare Martin, of the local ABC radio station 8DR, who told me this. I’d gone along there, as a Pommy writer passing through, to do a quick interview and be asked how I thought I could get to the bottom of the place if I was passing through so quickly. You are always asked this by Australians. They can’t believe that you have come to their country and aren’t prepared to give at least seven years of your life to savouring the distinctive flavour, fathoming the peculiar mystery, of every one-horse town the bus happens to spill you out in. And they are no less demanding on themselves. They are all absolutely convinced that there is a real Australia out there somewhere, and that they haven’t begun to get to know it. And yet they will fly out to Heathrow, sniff the air, declare England, Europe, and indeed the Northern Hemisphere to be ‘fucked’, and be ready to fly back the same day.

I didn’t put this to Clare Martin. It was too hot in the tiny recording studio to get into a brawl. And, besides, there was no reason for me to believe I’d win it. She was a Sydney girl and all the Sydney girls of my experience fight rough. For all her fierce pride in the place she had barely been in Darwin a year herself. She had followed her boyfriend up – she called him her ‘man’ – after he had followed her down to Canberra and hated it. For some reason this information was enough for me to picture a taciturn sandy-haired surveyor in knee-length khaki shorts. She didn’t know who was going to follow whom where next, but wanted to be back in Sydney. ‘I’m ambitious,’ she explained to me – guiltily, I thought, and with a quick check to make sure the microphones were off, as if the idea of ambition was against the spirit of the Top End. Or the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.