None of the animals at Hartley’s Creek Zoo went in for being welcoming. Crocs of all sizes hid in the mud behind wire fences, trying to look like old logs. Dingoes prowled their walk-in enclosures. The cassowaries – yes, cassowaries at last – looked murderous. And the geese bit. This might have had something to do with the general scruffiness of their environment. ‘Lush’ and ‘tropical’ though the zoo was, it was also cramped and dingy. Or it might have been that they resented having drawn the short straw and landed in a performance park rather than in any of the more conventional forms of captivity. Hard as this would have been for the children of the Tablelands Dance Academy to believe, it appeared that there were some animals who didn’t find their ultimate fulfilment in vaudeville.

The show proper began at 3 p.m., when someone who wasn’t the ‘Most Experienced and Entertaining Guide in Australia’ as pictured on our brochure, but a self-confessed, though highly Australianized, Pom called Peter said ‘G’day’, and pretended to go through the roof when we didn’t, with sufficient enthusiasm, say ‘G’day, Peter’ back. It wasn’t entirely unlike being on the bus again, except that Peter was not, other than in his punchy extroversion and determination to have our undivided attention, a Dutchy or a Clay. He wasn’t spruce and difficult the way they were. He was an outdoor performer, softly bearded, with a highly articulated bush slouch. Culturally too he had far more in common with the eco-religionists who had set up stalls at the Expo, people like the Tablelands branch members of SGAP – the Society for Growing Australian Plants. The bus drivers we’d encountered in the early stages of our journey had all been individual survivalists; social Darwinists; existentially speaking they came fitted out with jutting jaws and roo-bars. Whereas Peter’s allegiances were wholly to the Great Chain of Being theory, currently revamped into the idea of the planet as a giant and mutually beneficial allotment. ‘We’ve pushed the croc back all the way from Bundaberg,’ he told us, as he climbed into their enclosure. ‘Now all he’s got is north of Cairns. It’s not much and we should leave him with it. For our sake as well as his. If there was no reason for there to be crocs, crocs wouldn’t be here. Crocs are here because they’re needed. If we didn’t have crocs we wouldn’t have barramundi. If we didn’t have barramundi . . .’ And so on, until there was a providence in the fall of a megapode.