We stopped for morning coffee at Hayes Creek, a high, quiet, blissful spot, surrounded by red jagged hills. A flock of corellas, disturbed by our arrival, rose from the ground in one movement, pure white like an apparition. It was here, in the warm morning sun, that I first hit upon a method whereby I could personally consecrate places I especially liked, and at the same time acknowledge sundry debts of gratitude and friendship which I felt I owed. Reading the classic accounts of their travels written by the early explorers of Australia, I had been very much taken by the liberality – the munificence, even – with which they gave the names of their acquaintances or benefactors to whichever new feature of the country they happened on. Leichhardt, above all, knew how to repay loyalty or encouragement with punctilious notice:

I called the brook ‘Beames’s Brook’ in acknowledgment of the liberal support received from Walter Beames Esq., of Sydney. . . . A large flat-topped mountain I called ‘Lord’s Table Range’ after E. Lord Esq., of Moreton Bay; and a sharp needle-like rock, which bore west-by-north, received the name of ‘Fletcher’s Awl’ after Mr John Fletcher, whose kind contribution towards my expedition had not a little cheered me in my undertaking.

Why shouldn’t I do the same? It’s true that I wasn’t exactly exploring virgin territory; that all the brooks and mountain tops and deserts of Australia already had names. But then that was true when Eyre and Sturt and Leichhardt blundered through it, the only difference being that the names they already had were Aboriginal. If they could rechristen, so could I. In accordance with which decision – I made it in the twinkling of an eye, before the ghostly corellas had vanished over the crumbling ridge – I called the place I stood in Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson Creek, after C. Sinclair-Stevenson Esq., of London, who had kindly assisted me in my expedition.

Back on the bus I met Fred Luff, one time tree-engineer, restaurateur, patentee of a highly secret batter for fried fish, and now on his way to Northcliffe, in the far south of West Australia, to take over a public house. Fred had lived in the Northern Territory for nearly twenty years and was leaving it now with some sourness, a casualty, as he saw it, of Aboriginal Land Rights politics. Along, also as he saw it, with the Aborigines themselves. ‘We all got on well under the policy of assimilation,’ he said. ‘It was the idea of self-determination that changed everything.’ We were to hear this opinion voiced frequently throughout the north of Australia, but in Fred’s case it had the backing of a vivid, personal experience. Fred Luff had lived in paradise one day, and been expelled from it the next. He was, just like any refugee, a passive victim of history.