Kununurra is situated just inside the West Australian border in the top eastern corner of the Kimberley Region, and hasn’t been there very long. Look on a pre-1960s atlas and you won’t find it. Ord River is probably the nearest you will get. And the Ord River is your clue. The reason for the concoction of Kununurra was water: inundation and irrigation. It’s very name – as local whites are only too happy to tell you (they love their pidgin, northern whites) – is Aboriginal for ‘big mobs of water’. Ever since Alexander Forest took a look around the area in the 1870s, the Kimberleys had been fancied as prime grazing country, but had never found a way of overcoming the problems caused by the extremes of climate, the wet Wet and the dry Dry. As recently as 1945 the possibility of giving the North West of West Australia back to the Commonwealth Government was canvassed – perhaps because it was feared that even the Japanese wouldn’t want it. But a certain Dr Oldmeadow, who had been medical officer at Broome for some time, reckoned that settlement of the region was possible for white men providing they left it every three or four years, their wives left it every two years, and their children left it every Wet. It seems to me a pity that such advice was not tendered centuries ago in respect of such settlements as Manchester, Liverpool, or Leeds. It was heeded, anyway, when the Government of West Australia looked into means of developing its extremities; as were the words of the Assistant State Surveyor, who saw the necessity for a massive irrigation scheme in the Ord River Valley but also recommended the establishment of a new town site to service it, since, speaking climatically (and not wanting to put too fine an edge on it), he considered Wyndham – the nearest existing town – ‘detestable’. Thus Kununurra; and thus a rather embittered Wyndham, sweating it out without a thank-you where the northern rivers flow into the Timor Sea.

Our interest in the area was not primarily irrigational. Ros wanted to get out into a terrain that was known to be as wild and beautiful as anything in Australia – a country of barely accessible mountain ranges, of marvellous torrential rivers, of remote Aboriginal missions and even leper colonies. And I was keen to visit some of the landmarks made famous – made famous for me, anyway – by George Grey (later to be Governor Grey), whose Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia During The Years 1837, 8 and 9 are neglected classics of comic expeditionary writing. Just as the expeditions themselves are classics of comic expeditioning.