So we set out to find a flat where for five or six days we could do nothing but keep an eye on it. And Blues Point Tower, the first of Sydney’s high-rise luxury developments, where Rupert Murdoch had once owned a nuptial suite and Gough Whitlam had partaken of the notorious Iraqi Breakfast, seemed to be just the thing. The estate agents managing a number of flats in the building sent a ‘boy’ along to show us around. He was sixty-three and suffered from an unusual stutter. It affected him only when it came to place names. It needn’t, therefore, in the normal course of things, have played too large a part in our negotiations, except that something prompted him to take us on a conversational tour of Australia, and to pause in every town that he had lived in, passed through, or thought about. An even more unusual feature of this stutter was that it affected his pronunciation of place names only when they began with a preposition. Thus he was fine on Narrandera and Rockhampton, but no good at all on By – By – By – Byron Bay and In – In – In – Innisfail.

It was in the lift going up to the fifteenth floor that he gave us our most trying time. He was remembering how he’d been happy in Up – Up – Up – Upway and To – To – To – Toowoomba but had given up on On – On – On – Onslow in favour of Over – Over – Over – Over – Over –

Ros could stand it no longer: ‘Overton?’ she said.

He looked at her as if she was crazy. ‘No,’ he snapped, ‘Overseas.’

We did make one or two tentative outings from our comfortable Bridge-bound eyrie, sometimes to see friends to whom we were careful to explain that we weren’t really here on this occasion, and could they please not jolt or in any other way disturb us as we were overflowing vessels, brimful of where we had been. And once we went to watch Judy Davis hamming it up terribly as a post-Virago Australian neurotofeministical Hedda Gabler with a Fenella Fielding snort. ‘Mankind cannot bear too much reality,’ the programme for some reason quoted. Reality didn’t seem to be the problem to me, but I was probably biased. It was a pretty intimate theatre, balanced precariously on the edge of a wharf, and I hadn’t liked the way Judy Davis looked at me when delivering Hedda’s line, ‘Academics do not make entertaining travelling companions.’