When I mentioned that I’d taken a look at Paul Everingham earlier that morning, she immediately switched the conversation to Bob Collins, the Labour Opposition Leader. Apparently he had come to the far north, like so many other people, to escape the memory of an unhappy love affair. He hadn’t had the slightest intention of staying, but had been robbed of all he possessed as he was about to leave, and that was that. You don’t argue with an augury. He was now married to an Aboriginal woman and was facing criticism within his own party on the grounds that he associated Labour politics too exclusively with Aboriginal matters. He was alienating many natural white Labour voters, the criticism went.

‘Any truth in that?’ I asked.

Clare Martin gave me a long, steely, Sydney stare. Had I not known she was Australian I might have thought she came from Sparta. ‘What can he do?’ she said. ‘The national Labour party has reneged on Land Rights and changed its mind about uranium. Where does that leave Collins?’

We both knew where that left Collins. Comprehensively fleeced, for the second time in his life.

The reason for all the lawyers in the Northern Territory, incidentally, was not Aboriginal litigation but the high rate of bankruptcy. People were coming north in the belief that it was a place of boundless opportunity, starting businesses with no know-how, and failing. The two classic but contradictory evaluations of Darwin – that of Captain Phillip Parker King:

It must, at no very distant period, become a place of great trade and that of Thomas Huxley, assistant surgeon aboard HMS Rattlesnake:

It is about the most useless, miserable, ill-managed hole in her Majesty’s dominions – were still finely poised.

So much for all the lawyers. What all the PhDs were doing up here Clare Martin forgot to tell me.

On our last night in Darwin we watched a television programme dealing with a group which had just formed itself in Katherine, three hundred kilometres down the track. Its name was SPONGE, standing for the Society for the Prevention of Niggers Getting Everything.

‘Let’s go to Katherine,’ Ros said.

She’d fallen for the Northern Territory and didn’t want to leave. She believed we should kick around up here a while longer yet, putting our noses into all the trouble spots. I was more for expedition myself, convinced that travel meant covering vast distances at great speed. Perhaps it was racial. Something told me that the best way to keep safe was to keep moving.

But as it happened the bus that was taking us to Kununurra would be calling in at Katherine. ‘We’ll be there tomorrow,’ I said, omitting to add that we’d only be there for an hour, for a lunch stop.