On the way back we stopped off at Hidden Valley, just minutes from the centre of town. It was a series of valleys actually, between low crumbling sandstone rocks, where visitors had been known to go missing for days, beguiled by the beauty of the place, and deceived by its apparent smallness of scale. Sue found us a number of geodes lying about in the dust, and explained how the Aborigines would have ground away at them to extract powder for their paint. I was struck by the contrast between how little she knew, or was prepared to say, about contemporary Aboriginal life, even in her own town, and how informative she’d made herself on the details of their ancient practices. You find this all over Australia: the Aborigine himself somewhere between a petty problem and a pestilence, his arts and customs a matter for reverence and national pride. When George Grey came upon his first examples of Aboriginal art he was as unequivocal in his judgements as Waldemar Januscek. ‘I often also found rude drawings scratched upon the trees, but none of these sketches indicated anything but a very ordinary degree of talent, even for a savage.’ Say that today and they’d drum you out of Australia.

Seeing Sue with her small face pursed, describing the way the young braves used to sharpen their spears, and watching Ros scanning the orange rocks, imagining corroborees, the idea began to form in my mind that white Australians owed far more than they knew – and certainly far more than many of them would ever willingly acknowledge – to their sable friends, as Ludwig Leichhardt used to call them.

Australians do not, as everybody knows, practise apartheid. But they do post stringent dress requirements – NO THONGS, NO BARE FEET, NO SINGLETS, NO TANK TOPS, NO OUTLANDISH HAIRCUTS – outside their places of refreshment and entertainment, and this works just as well.

It does not, however, mean that the poor Aborigine is compelled to go without his beer. The economy of many a northern country town would immediately collapse if the social security cheques paid to the Aborigines – ‘sit-down money’, in local parlance – did not promptly make their way back to the white community via the bar and the taxi. (I’ll come to the taxi later.) The bar at which they are acceptable – the cheques and the Aborigines – is simply not the one at which we are. We drink in something called the Lounge – in Kununurra it was the Green Room – the Aborigine has either a Workers’ or a Sportsmen’s. In Kununurra they had a Workmen’s, though it was referred to by the locals as the Animal Bar. And through the thin partition that divided us we could hear, day and night, the sounds of unending festivity and riot.

‘We’re in the wrong place,’ Ros remarked, on our first evening in the Green Room.