He took his time answering. He drove his car with one hand, rubbing away at his leg with the other. Occasionally he would raise the tips of his fingers above the steering wheel in acknowledgement of the greetings of passing Aborigines. Finally, he pulled into the kerb – I say kerb, but it was a matter only of variation of dust level – and beckoned to one particular Aborigine, a bedraggled make-believe cowboy in drainpipe denims and riding boots. They exchanged a few rapid sentences. Then Hector dismissed him and turned around in his seat. ‘Depends where you want to go, of course,’ he said. ‘But he reckons you can get through. He’s just swum across himself to get to the music tonight.’

‘There’s music tonight?’ (That was Ros, not me. I was still picturing the Aborigine dog-paddling across the King Leopold Ranges in his riding boots to have a Friday night on the town.)

Hector took his time answering again. I thought I even caught him checking us out in his rear driving mirror. Choosy place, Derby.

But we must have passed the test, because he eventually said, ‘At the Boab.’

‘Is it good?’ (That was still Ros.)

‘Well, I go.’

I mentioned that we’d been along to the Boab ourselves earlier that day in search of Bruce Flower, and that we hadn’t, as a consequence, won many friends.

‘Bruce Flower? No – that’d be right – I guess you wouldn’t have.’

We’d arrived by now at our destination. ‘See you later at the Boab, then,’ Ros said, entirely to my surprise.

Surprise, however, knew better than to try anything on Hector Ross. ‘That’s if I’m there,’ he said.

Before heading out for the Boab that evening (we didn’t so much as mention Broome) we took advantage of HAPPY HOUR AND A HALF at our own hotel, where we briefly talked to Ken Mills, a hospital administrator from Kununurra who was on the point of moving to Kalgoorlie to escape the crippling expense of living in the north. The son of Italian migrants (a good Sicilian name, Mills), himself as angelic as a Raphaelite seraph, with gently throbbing eyes and a soft seraphic beard, Ken addressed us on the subject of Kununurra economics in that grossly exaggerated Australian drawl which only the children of first-generation migrants adopt, presumably as an act of symbolic revolt from the ahshadahpahyahface English of their parents. ‘Jeez, the rents. High? What? If they went enny higher they’d be trevelling in bloody Concorde.’

Talking of Kununurra reminded us of the story we’d heard about the Aboriginal woman and the kangaroo found floating down the Ord. We thought Ken would be able to shed some light on this, but in fact it was we who illuminated him. His eyes danced. ‘I’m very glad you told me that,’ he said. ‘I could never work out why the hospital had done an autopsy on a kangaroo.’