Henri believed there was time to squeeze in one last beer. ‘Tat’s te way it should be,’ he said. ‘It’s not right to talk politics while you’re drinking.’

Nor, apparently, while you’re driving a tourist bus. I tried to get Sue to open up, the following morning, on the subject of the new breed of entrepreneurs who had come to the Kimberleys – people like Frank Camer-Pesci who had arrived as a bricklayer and now owned four modern hotels, and Lord McAlpine, the Treasurer of the Conservative Party, who had a name like a building industry and was at present pumping money and publicity into Broome. But she was unresponsive. ‘Some people think they’re a bit arrogant,’ was the most she would give me.

She became almost radiant, though, on the road to Lake Argyle, when Jude told us that only the week before the police had found the bodies of an Aboriginal woman and a kangaroo floating mysteriously down the River Ord. ‘That doesn’t sound so good?’ she said, her voice at full lilt.

The drive along the Ord to the great Dam at Lake Argyle (where you will find nine times more water than in Sydney Harbour – nine times!) was most spectacular. We stopped to look at crocodiles relaxing with their mouths open in the sun, or practising their ghastly weightless droop in the water; and we entered high, silent country where the Ord ran at the bottom of immense ravines, visited by an infinitude of darting swifts and swallows. But no scenery was too wonderful to silence Sue’s pedantry. A Morning Irrigation we had paid for, and a Morning Irrigation we received. Volume and weight of water, surface, spillage, seepage, wastage, wantage (was there such a word or had it come to me in a dream of deluge?) – we got the lot.

Later in the morning we arrived at the Argyle Homestead, the home of the famous pioneer family the Duracks (pronounced Durex by Sue), now moved to a new site. Roy Walker, once head stockman for the last of the Kimberley Durex, looked after the place, acting as gardener, curator, guide, admission-ticket collector, identifier of sad Irish faces in photographs (‘That’s Patrick . . . that’s Stumpy’), and general odd-job man. He was stripped to the waist when we turned up, wearing blue jeans and an old drover’s hat, and pushing a wheelbarrow. From a distance he could have been taken for an Aborigine; there was the same slowness about his movements, the same melancholy in the set of his features, the same physical attenuation. Close up, though, he had eyes the colour of cornflowers. And the limpid fatigue in them was purely personal, not of the race.