Back in London we felt we had only one failure to reproach ourselves for – Tasmania. I blamed Ros that we hadn’t made it across the Tasman. She blamed me. So several months later, when I happened to be in Australia – the old Australia – for purposes not unassociated with the book we’d spent all that time re-comma’ing in Townsville, I decided I would do Tasmania solo, and append it to our travels in the same way the state itself is appended to the mainland – have it spinning away independently, held in check only by a force that even on an atlas looks like a diminishing magnetic field.

I did the job thoroughly too. I secured introduction. I made appointments. I spent my first night in Hobart having dinner at Parliament House, a guest of Neil Batt, the Tasmanian Opposition Leader. I attended a sitting of the House and heard about the case of the local police officer caught selling undersized crayfish to Hobart nightclubs. I met Bob Brown, the hero of the Franklin River Blockade, now an Independent parliamentarian, and I was a witness to his offering Neil Batt support, in the event of a hung Parliament, in return for a Ministry of Forests and Wildernesses. Then I set out for the forests and wildernesses myself, travelling in a state of mind not far removed from that of George Grey’s Aboriginal servant, Warrup, as described in his own words:

1st day: At Dundulap we eat fish; then onwards, onwards, onwards, till we slept at Nerroba.

2nd day: Onwards, onwards, till we reached Nowergoop, where the horses drank water; then onwards, onwards, onwards . . .

5th day: We go onwards, onwards, onwards, onwards . . .

6th day: Onwards through the forest, onwards through the forest, onwards through the forest . . . We see the sea; then onwards, onwards, onwards, along the sea shore onwards, along the sea shore onwards, along the sea shore onwards. Then we turn back again, away we go back again, back again away; through the forest away, through the forest away, through the forest away; back again through . . .

Onwards, onwards, onwards to Launceston I went; then along, along, along to Burnie; then down, down, down to the south-west, pausing at the village of Strahan where all the Greenies great and small had gathered; then on a boat along, along, along the Gordon River; and out again, back out again, back out again through Hells Gates. I visited the lovely old Gaiety Theatre at Zeehan, and saw the shocking despoliation of Queenstown; too many dams, too many dams, too much hydro-electricity, too much, too much . . . Then back through any number of placid settlements, sensitively restored, to Hobart, where after standing outside the oldest Synagogue in Tasmania (fancy there being more than one) I took a turn around the university, recalling the scandal that had ruined Professor Sydney Sparkes Orr in the 1950s, and reading on the wall of the present Department of Philosophy the chalked advice:

50% of the locals have TB