Looking around at the engineers and public service men, the lackeys of the diamond and mining exploration companies, all in pressed blue shirts and natty shorts and knee-length oatmeal socks, I was inclined to agree with her. But then we fell into conversation with Henri from Mauritius, who did sub-contract work on vehicles owned by the diamond mine, and Charlie who came from Kenya and called himself a pedlar. ‘I peddle agricultural machinery,’ he told us.

He liked the idea of himself as a poor itinerant, wandering around the whole of Western Australia with a tray of knick-knacks, each one costing about a quarter of a million dollars.

We wondered how business was. ‘The trouble with this place,’ he said, ‘is its isolation. If it was somewhere else it would be a boom town.’

Both he and Henri lived in Perth (Henri pronounced it Pert), some three thousand kilometres down the track, and commuted.

‘Yeah, it’s a long way to travel to work,’ Henri agreed, ‘but I make good money. It’s my ambition to retire when I’m forty. I’m tirty-eight now.’

He was dark and Frenchified and then Australianized. He had black eyes and a scintillating moist moustache. He was the kind of man who used to be referred to as a handsome devil. And he couldn’t say th.

‘So what will you do when you retire?’ I asked him.

‘Fish and drink red wine.’

‘Sounds all right,’ I said.

He wanted to know whether I liked wine.

I said I did.

‘Which colour do you like best?’

I didn’t have too many choices but I paused, wanting to get it right. ‘Red,’ I said.

His face lit up. Had I been a woman I’d have asked him to give me babies. ‘Me too,’ he said.

‘You see, Henri is a typical diamond mines employee,’ Charlie said. He waved away Henri’s objection that he wasn’t employed by the mine but did sub-contract work. ‘He takes all his money away from the town. If a farmer gets rich – we call them cockies – he spreads his wealth around the town. Everybody benefits. But a miner takes his money somewhere else. A lot of them never even see the town. They live in camps on the mine itself, and do their drinking there. The diamond mine does nothing for Kununurra.’

There was a fresh, boyish, melancholy colonial air about Charlie. He looked like one of Forster’s well-meaning Englishmen, bent on administering the natives firmly but scrupulously. But he wouldn’t hear of being referred to as an Englishman. ‘I’m a Kenyan,’ he told us.

Henri started to up the tempo of our drinking. ‘What do you tink of te Americas Cup?’ he asked me, after he’d had our glasses changed for bigger ones, and filled.