And the consequence of such dense high-rise waterfrontage, for mere passers-by such as us, was an urban/marine landscape so surreal as to take the breath away. Stand on a beach anywhere between Southport and Tweed Heads looking up the coast or down it and you would see dreaming cities poised perilously on the last millimetre of land, impregnable batteries of luxury apartments rising like the topless towers of Ilium and shimmering in a sea haze as though they had no foundations but simply floated, like hanging gardens. Australian Venices for sunbathers and surfers, they seemed not to have been designed the way they were but to have fallen out like that, as if some freakish cataclysm had severed a metropolis, sinking one half and dumping a golden strand on the very doorsteps of the other.

There was sand everywhere. It was what you saw from every overleaping window. It was the feature that concluded every aspect – sand, a roll of foaming surf, and the Pacific – the reward at the end of every little street.

It was in a car park by the beach at Surfers itself that I was accosted by a tired, lonely looking man with cut-price tattoos on his arms who wanted to know whether the traffic lights up here had television cameras in them the way they had down there. He had driven all the way from Melbourne without stopping and in his fatigue had shot straight through a set of lights. Before I had any opportunity to offer my opinion he put himself on trial for this offence, appealing to me as jury, and insisting on his innocence. ‘Actually it was only an orange light, and even then it had only just turned orange,’ he said, relieved to be acquitted.

It was just as well. I could see that he wouldn’t have had the money to pay the fine.

‘So where are you from?’ he asked me. He reminded me of someone I had once shared a filthy bathroom with in a mouldering house in Wolverhampton. He suffered the same blue-collar sadness and isolation. And he made me feel the same way; I wanted to kick him, then I wanted to bathe his wounds. He wore cheap trousers enlivened by a thick leather belt and a silver cowboy buckle. Had he been a character in a nineteenth-century novel he’d have said, ‘Aw a muddle,’ and not lived long.

‘London,’ I answered. I felt it would have been more compassionate to have said, ‘Wolverhampton.’

‘Geez, you’d notice the difference.’

‘I’ll say.’