A Lebanese woman with a transfixed gaze pleaded with the policemen in the name of their mothers. She wore grey socks under her sandals and carried a candle, rejoicing in the pain the molten wax caused her, dripping down over her wrists and fingers. ‘Would Godard allow a film to be made about his mother?’ she cried. ‘No, no, he would be out here with us.’

I was struck again by the sheer tat that went by the name of religious artefact – tyuringe. The old books they were wailing from, the gaudy crucifixes, the rubbishy pictures, the snotty candles, the dead flowers, the gift-wrap ribbons, the worn beads, the mindless literature on cheap paper. An hour before I had been walking through Kings Cross with Ros and Mez Levy and Elizabeth Brown when an incensed midget touting for business outside a strip joint had leapt out at me and shouted, ‘C’mon, gigolo – you’ve got three women, can you handle them or not? Eh? Eh? Eh, gigolo?’ He had come after me in the street, crazed, driven, still shouting, ‘Eh, gigolo? Eh?’ At the time I thought he was as depraved a creature as I had ever set eyes on, as lost to humanity as anyone that still bore the outward semblance of a man could be. Now, after these scenes outside the film festival, I understood what Dostoevsky had been up to having Father Zossima drop to his knees before the most debauched of all the Karamazovs. Compared to the holy the depraved were certainly divine.

That was pretty much the last thought I had in Sydney. We kept to our apartment for a couple more days, steering clear of street trouble, watching the Bridge change shape and form and even colour, bearing infinite, unbearable promise in its bow – man’s convenant to man – then we got the hell out.

It had never been our intention to search for anything on this journey, apart from Orianna Ooi’s poems, and we had given those up unconscionably early on. But as the last of our time trickled through our fingers, first in Sydney then in Melbourne, and those familiar places willy-nilly exerted their old sway again, we submitted to a shared but largely unspoken impulse to find and take away some image, an emblematic figure or tableau, absurd preferably, that would epitomize what was known and stale to us and stand as a sort of memorial contrast to all we had recently seen that was virgin and unprecedented.