The young man who might very well have been responsible for this – I believe I glimpsed the pain – saw me copying it out. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m glad someone’s taking notice of that.’

We arrived back at the Exposition just in time for me to have to run right out again. We’d walked into a peace conga, and if there’s one thing I’ve never been able to join it’s a line of people snaking in and out of rooms and kicking their legs up. As a boy I’d learnt to time my exits from family functions with masterly precision; I had unusually conga-prone aunties and had come to recognize all the early signs of imminent flexuousness. But I was given no warning here. I simply walked in, saw them coming, and ran for it.

When I returned, half an hour and two servings of hangi-hangi later, Ibina Cundell was three quarters of the way through her Love Test. I was surprised to discover that Ibina Cundell was a woman I’d seen wandering about the hall for most of the day, looking quietly satisfied and wearing a rainbow-coloured woolly Rasta hat. Now her hair was free, in an intricate plait, and the rest of her was liberated also, disciplined only by the Isadora Duncanish conventions of the dance. That quality of overt personality suppression I had earlier taken to be primness, proved now to be a sort of self-sufficient rhapsodicality; she writhed and undulated and suggested emotions which did not seem to be entirely commensurate with peace or at all suitable for children. I was not able to deduce from her finale, which was sudden and supplicatory, whether she had passed the love test or failed it.

After Ibina Cundell a couple of bored Maori girls in national costumes they looked neither proud nor comfortable to be in sang ‘Tiny Ball On End Of String’, and did what Maoris usually do when they sing that song or are presented to royalty: twirled fluffy balls. Then Tropical Tai Chi demonstrated how you channel your aggressions into inner peace by making violent movements in slow motion, and looked too gratified for the good of their philosophies, I thought, by the applause they received. Before tea – moo-moo which had been baking in the ground all day was my choice – we watched a group of young Aborigines performing their extraordinarily abrupt corroborees, sudden bursts of animation, eruptions of foot stomping and herb or twig waving, lightning animal imitations, finished as soon as started on what, to the uninitiated, appeared to be a spontaneous and unanimous decision that that was enough of that for a game of soldiers. Whatever else there is to say, no one can accuse an Aborigine of being prolix.