‘I would have thought we had better things to do out there,’ I said.

‘Such as?’

She knew she had me there. She knew I’d never been any good when it came to dealing with the big questions. Besides, there was a subtext to this. I’d squandered some of the best years of my life in Sydney and Melbourne in the sixties and early seventies. I’d been back on ghost-laying expeditions several times since, eating too much, drinking too much, fighting with my old friends, and coming home again bemused and disappointed. I was in no position, Ros’s question implied, to be talking of ‘better things’.

There was another unspoken issue in the room alongside our half-packed cases. Pineapples. I might have adopted Australia but Rosalin had been born there. The last time we’d been back nosing around the ruined sites of our several histories Ros had gone down with a mystery illness which was diagnosed finally as an allergy to her own country. ‘It’s common,’ the doctor told her. ‘Many people react badly to where they come from once they’ve been away. You’ll feel better when you leave again.’ In the meantime the only comfort available to her in her misery was that afforded by the sight and smell of pineapples. She lay delirious for three weeks in a hotel bed in Manly with a pineapple hanging from each bed post. I sat up through the nights listening to the sharks nibbling at the jetties and waiting for Ros to stir. ‘Pineapples,’ I had to whisper the moment she opened a bloodshot eye – ‘Pineapples, my dear.’

Australia, in other words – even leaving aside what lay curled and ticking in the undergrowth – was a dangerous place for us. Australia contained the past and the past holds more terrors than any jungle. We had to tread carefully. Self-discovery was out. The last thing we wanted to come upon at the end of some five hundred miles of dirt track was ourselves. Any of that and there was a good chance we’d both end up on our backs sniffing pineapples.

Keeping away from our old haunts – the merest whisk around the Eastern cities – would be one way of staying safe. And some simple, selfless project – some course of altruism or utility – would be another.

That’s how we came to be flying out of London on the coldest day in recorded history (this detail is important because it explains what we were wearing when we arrived in Darwin on its hottest) with the express purpose of scouring Australia – the Northern Territory, the Western Seaboard, the Goldfields, the Wineries, the Outback, the Rainforests, the Red Centre, the Reef and the ineffable Bush – for copies of Orianna Ooi’s latest volume of densely conceptual verse.