The girls clawed the air. They pushed one another over to get a touch of his yellow pants or to tug on his Israeli beach shirt. He smiled at them benignly, a bit puzzled himself. He had tight curly hair and a double chin and reminded me not so much of the soft Jewish boys who were regularly beaten up in the playground after school, as their mothers. There was something comfortable and caring about him; something homely – haimisheh. It needed no imagination at all to see him in a shaytl with his arms covered and maybe just a dab of lipstick, blessing the challa on a Friday night.

Well, this was a Friday night, shabbas already, and we were in Queensland, sweating, while somebody who looked very like my mother, too, was slaying them with his Menachem Begin accent, and what his chubby fingers could do on a guitar. I couldn’t get over it. It was too risible. But it was a good note to leave Brisbane on. It balanced Hannah and her Sisters nicely. Hemi proved, if anybody did, that the New York I hankered after – a noisy refuge for a wandering urban soul – was just a construct. He’d built his own – a condo with a busy view – right in the very heartlands of the most unpromising of all territories. As far as Hemi was concerned he was in New York.

Just in case there was any chance of my suffering a similar delusion, the young woman at the reception desk of the hotel we’d been staying at, the Carlton, handed me a couple of Brisbane horror stories along with my bill. We’d enjoyed the Carlton; it was a handsome wooden building with lacy balconies, large, high-ceilinged rooms, and a marvellous lounge in which we’d sat by the hour, watching Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo come and go, as well as marginally less elderly ladies done up to resemble tropical wildlife – a banded snake eel, a couple of pelicans, any number of fruit bats, and on one occasion a cassowary, complete with a technicolour neck, a casque, and, for all we knew, a five-inch lethal toenail. Now, it seemed, the hotel was to be demolished. The very best that could be hoped for was that the façade might be retained. But everything else would go. For?

The woman smiled a slow sad smile at me and made a gesture which was meant to embrace everything that I could see going on in Brisbane with my own eyes. The preparations for EXPO ’88. And – it was vainly hoped – The Olympic Games, 1992. Like the rest of Australia Brisbane was caught up in a madness to pull down and rebuild – except that here the only things they could think of rebuilding to entice visitors with were malls and precincts.

‘Not more shops?’

She nodded. ‘Shops, shops and shops. And maybe, just maybe, a tavern. But no more accommodation. They assume people want to stay in Sheratons.’