Our first object was the Boab Hotel where Ros expected to find her old friend from Perth, Bruce Flower. We were neither of us certain what we wanted from him, over and above a warm handshake and a cold beer, but we shared some essentially unspoken optimism that he would prove to be the element that had been missing from Kununurra, a contact through whom we could meet people knowledgeable about the area, the reason we were going to do much better in the West Kimberleys than we had in the East. So it was a cruel blow to discover that Bruce Flower no longer had any connection with the Boab Hotel, that he no longer lived in Derby, and that it was not the slightest recommendation of us in the bar known as The Waterhole to admit that we knew him.

We took a beer while we were there, and wondered what to do next. I noticed that the present licensee’s name was R A (Rosco) Scoro and made ill-tempered anagrams with it for five minutes. A rock band consisting of one Aborigine and one part-Aborigine was practising in the corner. The band was called MANTUS, their speakers bore the maker’s name, MANTARBO, and the full Aborigine had the word MANDINGO printed across his T-shirt. All in all there was a lot of MAN about. A lot of irony too. On the wall by the bar was a poster publicizing 1986 as the year of the West Australian Tourist Board’s Be Nice To A Visitor Campaign. It depicted, in cartoon form, a number of the very worst kind of holidaymakers looking fat and hot and lost and unhappy in Hawaiian shirts, and it carried the slogan, ‘Make a tourist a friend. Give ’em a hand.’ This had been altered to, ‘Give ’em a hand job.’ The men at the bar watched us keenly to see how we responded to Waterhole wit. Just to be on the safe side I permitted a dry rasp to escape my throat.

Once we’d finished our beer we left the pub and made for the Tourist Bureau at the far end of town. With the exception of a few groups of Aborigines partying under the trees, we were the only people on the street not in a car. The sun beat down on us, curling our hair and bleaching the colour out of our clothes. We walked slowly, pausing at one point to observe an Aboriginal family quarrel. A car containing a middle-aged couple had pulled up at one of the extemporized parties, in order to rescue a young girl who had clearly been out all night in company her parents did not consider choice. There was a lot of screaming and shouting, with the father appearing to threaten a heart attack. ‘Apart from the bad language and the alcohol,’ Rosalin said, ‘the scene is not entirely un-Jewish.’