The truth of all this, of course, is that I wouldn’t have felt any of it had I watched Hannah and her Sisters in Kalgoorlie or in the school at Areyonga, or even, had they had an outdoor cinema, a Tropicana, on the beach at Green Island; what accounted for my restless dissatisfaction was anti-climax – my knowledge that our journey was very nearly over and that we were back now in the Australia that had been long familiar to us, and which was indeed but a poor imitation of a poor American imitation of a European model. New York or Brisbane? The question never arose when we were chatting to the euros in the Flinders Ranges, or listening to the dingoes in Yulara.

As for what it was that kept me coming back to the eastern seaboard cities, even though they weren’t New York, I was given a sharp reminder of it on our last evening in Brisbane. At the house of an acquaintance of an acquaintance I found myself sitting opposite a publisher I’d vaguely known in my book repping days in Melbourne. Left to my own devices I might very well not have recognized him. He was perched on the edge of his seat, ginger-haired and bearded, wringing his hands and looking arch, like a well-connected sprite. He seemed familiar, but I had been travelling for months and I was seeing what I thought were the faces of old friends everywhere now. So it needed him to say, ‘So you’re back then,’ – as if I were a recurrence of some pestiferous minor ailment – for me to remember that I remembered him.

He wanted to know what I was doing here. I told him. ‘Well if you’re writing about Australia I hope you make it funny,’ he said.

I pulled a face. I wasn’t feeling in a very funny mood. ‘Funny but not farcical,’ I said.

‘Why not farcical? The country is a farce.’

He poured me a red wine, although he was only a guest at the house himself. ‘It’s a nation of fuckwits,’ he reminded me.

He took me through the details of Australia’s national fuckwittedness. Its reliance on American and Pommy money-men. Its lack of an independent policy on anything. Its parochialism. Its fear of the Melbourne establishment. ‘The only good things in Australia are happening in Perth,’ he told me. ‘Take Holmes à Court, who just happens to be South African-born. He’s got the Melbourne establishment by the scruff of the neck. What he’s doing to those fuckwits is the nearest modern equivalent to the Eureka spirit.’ (That’s Eureka as in Stockade, not Eureka as in Archimedes.)

I raised an eyebrow at the idea of Holmes à Court as a revolutionary, but he went on twinkling wickedly and pouring me more wine. ‘Anyway, so who else have you looked up in Brisbane?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ I said. ‘Just you.’