Also travelling with us was the Canadian girl with the green eyes. She was in tears and didn’t look as though she’d slept. I took it that she’d found Geoff.

We didn’t waste any time in Cairns, though the woman taxi driver who took us from the wharf to the airport wasted some for us. She didn’t think we should leave town without seeing at least the outside of the new hospital. ‘It’s a beauty,’ she said, ‘really lovely, like an international hotel.’

She had a bad case of the rising interrogatives, so that when I asked about the level of in-house caring – ‘Good service?’ – she naturally assumed that I was making an assertion. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘that’s what I’ve heard, too.’

By mid-afternoon we were 2,000 kilometres down the coast. If we were going to be made to feel we were in Birmingham we reckoned we might as well be in Birmingham. Both Birminghams. The one in the West Midlands and the one in Alabama.

So we’d flown to Brisbane.

To tell the truth, apart from the amount of inner-city freeway (none of it as hideous as what loops around the Bull Ring), and the number of cops on every corner (none of them, while we were there, publicly pistol-whipping blacks), and discounting all the evidence of the brutal imposition of utterly unnecessary shopping precincts – for this was the place above all others in Australia where bulldozers were sent in under cover of darkness, like tanks, to settle the finer points of preservation orders – leaving aside, in other words, the personality of the Premier as graven on the forehead of his capital city, I rather liked it. It had a queer old-fashioned frisky air. A nutty exuberance which countless times caused me to laugh aloud in the streets. A country town like Perth, surprised by how rich how quickly it had grown, it didn’t have Perth’s anglophile sedateness. It wasn’t remotely interested in refinement. It behaved like a hillbilly that had just come into a whopping inheritance and didn’t mind who knew it. Looking at people going about their business or drinking cappucinos in the mall, I felt I’d gatecrashed a party that had been going on since somewhere round about V.E. Day, when coachloads of cockies had come whooping into town and been reluctant, ever since, to go back to their properties.