We settled on the Spangled Drongo (Chibia bracteata) as the idea to which the image we required would be as flesh. No other Australian beast that we could think of made a better job of reconciling contrarieties. It’s a bit of a lumpen bird, the drongo, a fly-catching crow-like thing whose name has become a byword for clumsiness and slowness, for harmless ineptitude. A Spangled drongo, though, must surely be another bird again. If there’s no escaping the idea of dim-wit still, at least one thinks of a high-wire circus dim-wit, a flash of glittering light, a coruscation of dancing sequins, a froth of gaudy plumes and feathers – before the fall.

Since we never went so far as actually to propose a Spangled Drongo hunt, our interest in finding one was intermittent and eventually disappeared altogether in social responsibilities and last-minute plans for departure. We went to see the film Kangaroo on our final night in Australia. It was a special occasion. The opening of the Melbourne Film Festival and the film’s own world première. A heady night for Melbourne.

Feeling that we were merely ghosts in the country now, in every sense but the grossly bodily one already back in London, we stood in the shadows and watched the guests arrive: the cream of the Victorian arts, television producers, academics, bar-room reviewers, Catholic poets, Catholic novelists, Catholic critics, the more enlightened figures of politics and journalism, and lastly the director of the film himself, who years before in a Carlton pub had accused me of submitting language to the heel of the enemy. I had been wondering what he meant for over a decade.

We took our places and listened to some speeches. It was a full house, only two seats, a few rows down from us, unoccupied. Just as the lights were being dimmed a couple of tall young men came flouncing down the aisle to claim them. They were both dressed entirely in black, though with an enpurpled sheen, each wearing some sort of clerical collar and a short cloak which billowed out theatrically – boy-theatrically on one of them, making one think of doomed princelings or passionately androgynous Shakespearean youths; vampire-theatrically on the other, making one think of dripping teeth and soft punctured necks. I believed I saw something gold swing and glitter on each chest. They were priests – probably Jesuits – and they were gay. Dandies in the service of Jesus.

Ros dug me at the very moment I dug her. ‘Found!’ she whispered.

‘The Spangled Drongo!’ I whispered back.

‘Drongoes,’ she corrected me. ‘We’ve bagged a pair.’

But that was how our whole trip had gone – we’d been blessed at every turn with a surfeit of good fortune.