A mere six or seven kilometres away is the Leprosarium; a short sail up the Sound, Point Torment; and, a couple of days’ trek through inhospitable country, Mount Disaster. Reach that and you wouldn’t be at all far from where the explorer George Grey was speared by natives – his men unable to do much for him, either because they were unable to get their rifles out of their waterproof bags in time, or because they’d dropped down in a dead stupor at their first sighting of the black men they’d come to civilize. ‘Oh, God! Sir,’ one of Grey’s trustiest lieutenants cried out, as the savages advanced. ‘Oh, God! Sir, look at them; look at them!’ Whereafter he was incapable of delivering a single sensible sentence again until he was transported back to England.

William Dampier, the first white man ever to try his luck ashore hereabouts – as the melancholy town-sign records – wasn’t too impressed by what he saw either. ‘Dry and dusty,’ he noted in his journal. And as for the inhabitants: the ‘Misirablest people in the world’. But, lest you should think that is the beginning and the end of Derby, the home-made hand-painted board proclaims the town’s other claims to your attention. As for example its possessing the LARGEST TIDAL VARIATION IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE; to say nothing of its having landed the LARGEST MUD CRABS and CROCODILES EIGHTEEN AND A HALF FEET LONG. DON’T MISS OUR SUNSETS, you are implored, in case you are still thinking of leaving. And then, as a plaintive afterthought, THE PEOPLE HAVE CHANGED.

A hostage to fortune, had fortune ever passed that way.

Things didn’t go too well for us in Derby at first. We’d been bundled off the bus in the dead of night, and had booked into a hotel which was a sister establishment to the one we’d stayed in at Kununurra, only to discover in the morning that we were half an hour’s walk from the centre of town, assuming there to be a centre of town, and that the walk was more likely to take twice that long in the intense heat. We did it in short bursts, stopping for shelter whenever we found a tree that wasn’t itself gasping and leafless. The outskirts of the town were indeed dry and dusty. And flat. And unrelieved. And teeming with small insect and minor reptile activity. Every step we took seemed to disturb a little kingdom of invertebrates. Grasshoppers flicked. Bull ants reared. Tiny lizards darted across our feet. Each blade of grass, each granule of dirt, was alive and chirruping.