We wandered out into the Showgrounds where the food stalls were congregated and did our best by the memory of Queen Victoria. On my recommendation – I knew she liked sweet potatoes, pumpkin, marinaded lamb, cabbage and coconut milk cooked in vine leaves – Ros had the hangi-hangi. I found the moo-moo a touch earthy and swapped to Chinese pasties and Swiss sausage. Then we returned for the evening concert which began with children from the local song and dance academy doing routines which I, in my naivety, considered to be wholly alien to the spirit of the occasion. I thought they were dressed like little harlots, aped wholly unacceptable forms of grown-up femininity, competed with a ferocity way beyond anything required by the normal conventions of upstaging, and sang American or Americanized songs which, while they might not in themselves have been warlike, belonged without question to the bitter sweet of capitalist personal amelioration trauma. If ‘Put On A Happy Face’ – sung the way they sang it – was not Reaganism put to music I didn’t know what it was. They wore Hollywood-musical-style costumes, smiled Hollywood-musical-style smiles, and brought Hollywood-musical-style ruthlessness to the jungle known as self-expression. They were little Shirley Temples of the Tablelands, every one of them. And yet they were cheered to the rafters by an audience who were gathered for the sole purpose of proclaiming peace, and who would, in any other context, have detected menace to the world’s stability in the destruction of a single acorn.

‘It beats me,’ I leaned across to Ros and whispered. ‘And I’m not even a peacenik.’

‘No, but you’re a puritan.’

A puritan? I wasn’t a puritan. I didn’t have anything against fun. I just disapproved of ideological inconsistency and congas.

The concert never got any better to my mind. A couple of Filipino women in Imelda Marcos frocks stood and swayed on the stage, unable to remember the steps of their national dance and unable to see why it was at all necessary that they should, given how nice they looked. A Welsh folk singer in a lugubrious black bonnet sang three dirges that made one think of mist and dripping valleys. The boys of St Barnabas School rang a few bells. Mabel Dean presented an eurythmic version of War and Peace – pure bodily fascism set to Finlandia, which nobody seemed to object to. And the Torres Strait Islanders spoilt what would otherwise have been the most exciting event of the night by keeping their white vests on while performing a war dance.

Back at the chalet, once I’d checked for frogs, sleep came as a blessed respite from peace.