Everyone in Kununurra was a newcomer, but Jude was newer than most. She had come north in the best pioneer tradition – because something dreadful had happened to her in the south. She went in for a more solitary and independent idea of womanhood than Sue. Where Sue’s hair fell tidily on her shoulders like an airline receptionist’s, Jude’s was jagged like a leafleteer’s; and, where Sue wore a little sparkling stone in each ear, Jude had a non-concentric pair of gold rings hanging from just one. If I appear to have taken a keen interest in the appearance of these two women that is because I could take no interest at all in what one of them was telling me. Addressing us at all times through her loudspeaker system – although there were only three of us on the bus and we were all sitting right beside her – Sue delivered herself conscientiously of the information we’d paid to hear. She wasn’t to know that, of all subjects of least concern in the whole world to me, dams and crops headed the list.

And so I was led, as though in a dream, along the banks of irrigation channels, through peanut farms and fields of sorghum, in and out of water-melon processing and packing plants, and down, down, into a sing-song nightmare of alluvial soils and yields and nitrogen and hectares. I heard – or someone vaguely like me heard – about Black Spot, which I had always thought to be the name of a villainous character in Treasure Island, but was in fact (oh God, fact) a mango blight brought in from Queensland. And I think I heard of some virus which infects the bloodwood tree and causes it to grow shark fins on its trunk; though that sounds to me now suspiciously like the workings of delirium.

In desperation, after an hour or two of this, I tried to get the women to talk to us about life – real social life, not what peanuts had – in the Kimberleys. Jude swam a lot. Sue liked watching indoor cricket. In fact we were just passing where they played indoor cricket, there, right there. I couldn’t see any buildings, only a field.

‘We play indoor cricket outdoors in Kununurra,’ Sue explained.

‘What about the Aborigines?’ I asked.

‘They don’t seem to want to play indoor cricket,’ Sue said.

‘No, I meant what’s it like for them in Kununurra. How do you get on with them?’