From the expression on her face when she returned I could see that she’d been contemplating violence.

‘Homicide?’ I asked.

‘Suicide,’ she said.

Charlie tried to calm her down. ‘It’s just the uniform,’ he said. ‘It was the same when the coons were given self-government in Kenya. They were suddenly all tin-pot Hitlers. So I played ignorant. It doesn’t cost anything to play ignorant.’

It was odd, hearing coon-talk from Charlie. Although it accorded naturally enough with his faint South African/Rhodesian intonation, it was somehow belied by his sympathetic, boyish expression. Had you listened to him only with your eyes you would have believed he was saying something quite different. So here was another example, I told myself, of a person’s opinions being the worst and least interesting part of him.

And for some reason Charlie was all opinion tonight. Coons copped it, the diamond mine copped it, even customs officials got it in the neck. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that if they go through your case you can order them to re-pack it exactly as it was? OK, you can say, you took it out, you put it back.’

‘Tat’s true,’ Henri confirmed. ‘You can.’

But it was for the local owners of jeeps and Range Rovers and Toyota 4-wheel drives that he reserved his greatest scorn. ‘The funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that nine-tenths of them never drive on anything but bitumen.’

You have to hear a white Kenyan pronounce bitumen in order to realize how much bitch is in it.

Before we left we exchanged addresses and agreed that we would all try to meet up in Perth.

‘For a drink,’ Ros said.

‘For a lot more tan tat,’ Henri promised.

We reminded him that his wife was due to give birth at around about the time we’d be in Perth. ‘So?’ he said. ‘We’ll take te baby to a French restaurant.’

On the bus to Derby the drivers went through their usual dispiriting routine: mobile toilets, knickers round the ankles, no poofters in the rest area. It occurred to me as I dozed that there was an article to be written dealing with the problems most frequently associated with Aborigines – alcoholism, unsociable behaviour, an inability to be assimilated into polite society, irrational aggression, and so on – except that the subject of the article would be the white Australian male, not the Aborigine. Being a man in Australia, by which I meant being the kind of man who could drive a busload of poofters, sheilas and Abos through the outback in the dead of night, had never looked so precarious to me; for a number of reasons – not the least of which were feminism, androgyny and Land Rights – the Australian bloke appeared to be on the front line of a serious social breakdown.