What he did know was that a man ought to have his own space to produce the wherewithal to satisfy his own needs. The Chinese Republic looked the best place to him. In the meantime, since everything was inhuman and destructive of man’s peace of mind, he couldn’t see why we didn’t go the whole hog and destroy people. Given that we wanted to make man miserable and full of despair, why did we stop at the dole? Why didn’t we mount machine guns to the front of our cars and go out and mow one another down? As for himself he didn’t care what happened. Men were better when they lived like beasts and followed the seasons, moving up and down with the snow lines. He likened himself to a bear who wanted to follow the snow.

The phrase ‘I wouldn’t know about that’ was one he resorted to almost every time either one of us said anything. It was part indifference, part personal wariness, but part, too, a refusal to believe that even the most innocently verifiable fact didn’t have some explosive hidden away inside it. Thus when we asked him, as a man who drove millions of miles a year, the distance between Derby and Broome, he wouldn’t commit himself. ‘I wouldn’t know about that myself,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to make your own enquiries.’

He stayed in both our minds for days – a modern Australian migrant version of one of those perplexed working-class heroes in Victorian industrial novels, a sort of Stephen Blackpool without the sanctimony and pap, and therefore without the restraints, thinking his way through the major issues of our time, almost without hope, wholly isolated, staring up the skirts of insanity.

We knew it was time to leave him when he brought up the subject of the gas chambers and whether anyone had really been put to death in them. ‘I wouldn’t know about that myself . . .’ We tried the Tourist Information Bureau again. This time it was open. So much for the good news. The news of the other kind was that everything we wanted information about was closed. The Gibb River Road? Impassable. The tracks and turnpikes to the gorges – Derby called itself the Gateway to the Gorges –? Still ungraded. The Wet had done so much damage to the gravel roads that the graders themselves had not yet been able to get through. ‘Forget it,’ the tourist officer told us when we asked him if there were any local guides or operators who might be prepared to give it a try. ‘Forget it,’ he told us when we wondered if we could hire a 4-wheel drive to give it a try ourselves. ‘My advice to you,’ he said, ‘is to get the hell out.’