Let me be absolutely clear about something: he was as handsome, helpful, considerate and courteous a tourist information officer as you could hope to find. Benign intention shone from his obliging countenance. The muscular forearms which he folded across his chest in sympathy as we showed our frustration were such as would have plucked a stranger’s child from the rapids, or the stranger himself from the jaws of an eighteen-and-a-half-foot crocodile. One small defect only stood between him and his being the best tourist information officer in the business, and that was that he didn’t want to give us any tourist information.

‘What would you do with a car?’ he asked me, when I suggested that he recommend a rental company.

‘See the town,’ I said.

‘See the town? You can see all there is to see in Derby in ten minutes.’ He really was upset for us. I thought I even spotted moisture in the corner of his eye. ‘In fact, if you’ve got here you’ve already seen it.’

There was absolutely nothing we could do to stop him looking in his directory for the times of the next planes out.

Just as he was running his pencil down the page a person called Tony popped in to finalize some travel arrangement. Tony was a peripatetic photographer, specializing in group portraits of families inhabiting remote places. According to Tony the camera had never before been to some of the remote places he took it. Just the person to help us out, you would have thought, except that he was on his way south, to Broome, which was where the man from the bureau immediately decided we should accompany him.

‘I won’t be leaving until later tonight,’ Tony said. ‘But you’re welcome to join me.’

‘I’d snap at that,’ the man from the bureau said. ‘I wouldn’t let an offer like that pass you by.’

Ros and I exchanged bewildered glances. We were neither of us certain how we’d been manoeuvred into looking for a lift out of a town we’d only just got to. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ the photographer said. ‘I’ll call in at your hotel on the way out. If you’re ready to go, fine. If you’re not, also fine. No sweat either way. No worries.’

We left it at that and reeled out into the sun. ‘You’d be fools not to snap at that,’ was the last thing the man charged with welcoming visitors to Derby said to us.