Our only other brush with the culture of the city came when we found ourselves embroiled in a mêlée, sponsored by the Lebanese Christian community of Sydney, outside the cinema showing Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary. And that – our embroilment, not the mêlée – was quite accidental. We had gone to have lunch with Mez Levy, after whom we had renamed the more spectacular part of the Atherton Tablelands, and Elizabeth Brown, a North Shore Sydney girl of exquisite looks who had worked for Ros five or six years earlier in Cornwall. In those days Ros ran a tea gardens and Elizabeth Brown – Miss Brown, as she was called – saw to the chips. ‘What does it mean, Mr Jacobson,’ she used to ask me whenever I popped into the kitchens for a chip and a chat, ‘that, although I left Sydney over a year ago now to see the world, I spend my time frying mountains of chips which are no sooner devoured than I have to fry mountains more?’

‘Miss Brown, everyone must have a project in life,’ I used to tell her. ‘You should be pleased that yours is so clearly defined.’

She became famous in the village in the end not for her chips but for the slug incident. Seeing her carrying a tray through the gardens on a balmy Saturday afternoon, an enraged customer had beckoned her over, complaining in a loud voice that there was a slug eating the same lettuce from the inside that she was eating from the out. Miss Brown glided across the trodden turf, her fine profile tilted at an angle of almost anguished solicitude. ‘Oh no,’ she said as she approached the table and was shown the slimy offender. ‘Oh no. The poor little thing.’ And, taking the slug on her finger and whispering every manner of comfort and endearment to it, she returned it to the bushes where it more naturally belonged. ‘There, there,’ she said, all the while remembering to keep smiling at the woman in whose lettuce the poor little thing had come so very close to perishing, ‘there, there.’