It had been the sight of a huge goanna, holding up the bus while it crossed the road, that had got Fred talking. ‘Very tasty,’ he’d said.

I’d leaned towards him so that Ros didn’t have to hear. I was trying to avoid all conversation with her on the subject of snake or reptile tucker. ‘You’ve tried it, have you?’ I asked, in a low voice.

‘Tried it? Lived on nothing else for a couple of years. There aren’t many things that taste like a goanna you’ve speared yourself.’

I was prepared to believe that. But I wondered where Fred had come by his experience. Had he owned a tree-surgery outside Darwin?

He was a small, nuggety man with a bright eye and a bristling moustache. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘I was with the blackfellers in Arnhem Land.’

And that was how I came to hear about his years in paradise, working as a fire-control officer, and learning to spear goanna with the natives. He’d loved it. So had his wife. ‘Every morning, after I’d set off to work, she’d go swimming with the women. She’d swim all day. Then I’d come home and we’d all fish and eat and laugh together. I remember getting back late one night – I’d had to do some burning-off from the air – and finding a party of Frenchmen trying to interest the blackfellers in a few boxes of coloured baubles, plastic beads and mirrors. You have to remember, the blackfellers are very polite people. They smiled and nodded and played with the beads. Then, after the Frenchmen left, they had a big joke about it. “‘M cheeky buggers,” they said.’

What brought this idyllic existence to an end, according to Fred, was the interference of radicals from the south, politicized blacks imported from America, trouble-makers from the Philippines. ‘School teachers started to stir it, too,’ he said. ‘And then suddenly – overnight – my friends started to go on marches, chanting BLACK IS BLACK, WHITE IS SHIT. My friends!’

This had happened some years ago now. He’d run a seafood restaurant in Darwin since then, and been offered in excess of ten thousand dollars for his patented fish batter. And very soon he’d be back in the south of his home state, at the bar of his own hotel in Northcliffe. But his eyes still flashed with bitterness when he remembered his evacuation. ‘Do you know, when we had to leave,’ he told me, ‘all the Aboriginal women wept. They didn’t want us to go. No one in Arnhem Land – no one who came from Arnhem Land – wanted any of this. They stood around and cried and pulled their hair. Some of them even attacked themselves with tomahawks.’