This picture of the great Prussian scientist and explorer sitting his little bedraggled party down in the bush for a loyal repast of sweet tea and fat cake had made a vivid impression on me, and I had vowed that wherever I happened to be on the 24th of May I would do something similar. It was purely fortuitous that I found myself in a field in the north of Queensland, not that many miles from where Leichhardt would have spread his cloth upon the ground, but where today food from every country that had once been a part of Queen Victoria’s Empire was being prepared before my eyes. A man must take what the Gods send him. The Queen would have been 166 today. It was appropriate that I should be able to celebrate not with fat cake but Tongan hangi-hangi, Sri Lankan dahl, Malaysian somosas, Indian chilli chicken, moo-moo from New Guinea, marinaded fish from Papua, and two Australian meat and potato pies floating in a gravy of tomato sauce.

I hadn’t at first thought that I was going to find such consolations. The fence around the Atherton Showground was festooned with schoolchildren’s paintings when we arrived, all variations on the theme of peace, so that it was hard not to feel that one was turning up for a PTA meeting at the local kindergarten. An exceedingly polite Persian – the Atherton Tablelands baker – welcomed us in, asked us if we had any exhibits to unload, showed us where to park, repeated how pleased he was to see us, and wished us each, separately, and in slightly different language – a personalized message, so to speak – as nice a day as we had any right to expect.

‘All this peace is going to be quite a little test for you,’ Ros opined.