‘A boab tree?’ He scratched his head and then fell into earnest conference with his friends. Watching them with their faces close together, deliberating, I felt I’d slipped back a couple of centuries. I wouldn’t have been surprised had one of them suddenly leapt up and volunteered to be our guide. Odd, that their sociable instincts should still survive after so much experience of betrayal. Odd and – speaking impersonally – exasperating. They ought to have known better than to smile at a white man by now. It was pleasant for me to be befriended by them, but what did I have to do with anything?

‘There’s a pretty nice one over there,’ the young man said at last, pointing to the far end of the park, while his companions nodded and bewitched us, every one of them, with their smiles.

We drank cappucino in Estelle’s and watched someone who might have been Estelle herself making heavy weather of being a white who had perforce to do business with blacks. ‘Off! – out!’ she shouted at a group of kids who were only very mildly messing around. ‘Go walkabout!’ When they’d gone she waved a paper bag in the air, wafted the smell of them from under her nose, sprayed the room, sprayed us, sprayed our coffee, and took a cleaning cloth to every surface they might have touched.

Sue picked us up from our hotel on the dot of two o’clock. You could tell at once that she would do most things on the dot. And that what she didn’t do on the dot her husband, who was a pilot, would do to the letter. I imagined that they were very close and wore matching uniforms for going jogging or for going to bed. Underneath the pleasantest of manners Sue gave off an air of domestic militarism. She suffered, to boot, from a more than usually serious dose of the sing-song Australian interrogatives. At no time, in the several hours we were to spend in her company, did she address a sentence to us that didn’t end in a question mark.

She had no other visitors to Kununurra to show around today but she was taking the opportunity of our unseasonal arrival to train a young woman called Jude in the ins and outs of the Half-day Agricultural. Had we turned up a fortnight later we might have got Jude as our guide. As it was we got them both.