The quarantine officers came aboard yawning. For all the spruceness of their nautical rig – long white socks, navy shorts, short-sleeved white shirts with epaulettes, and deep-sea divers’ watches – I wouldn’t have wanted to be within a hundred miles of land on any vessel steered by them. And they were bad-tempered as well as half-asleep. They meant to give a hard time of it to a certain Mr Ramsden who was required to proceed to the front of the plane ‘with his possessions’.

From the time they took with him I could only suppose he was carrying about his person at least one example of every item you were not allowed to bring into Australia: a snakeskin belt from Venezuela, a woven bamboo basket from Borneo, a rhino horn from Tanzania, the larva of the Abyssinian fruit moth, and signed copies of Last Exit to Brooklyn and Das Kapital.

Mr Ramsden wasn’t our only delay. The quarantine officers refused to walk the length of our plane and back with their cans of deodorizer and disinfectant held aloft until every passenger was in his seat. They drummed on the luggage lockers with their uncontaminated fingers, in order that we should see it was our own time we were wasting, not theirs. They were in no hurry themselves. They’d been tipped out of their warm beds at 3.30 in the morning in order to sanitize us and make us fit for entry and they had nothing else to do now – since planes were few and far between in Darwin – with the entirety of their day. They could wait.

I later learnt that there might have been an element of politics in this show of petulance. Japanese visitors to Australia had been reacting badly to the ritual spraying of their persons, since in their country such an indignity was only ever visited on those whose appearance palpably merited it. Meticulous about their private hygiene they took it ill that they should be presumed to be carrying bugs and bacilli capable of wiping out the entire animal and human population of Australia. An exemption from this hysterical precaution had been requested and, since the first aim of all photogenic countries is to be visited by as many Japanese as possible, the request seemed likely to be granted. Good for the Japanese, good for tourism, but not so good for the self-esteem and future prospects of quarantine officers. It’s my belief that they saw the writing on the wall. Soon anyone would be able to breeze into Australia exuding germs and breathing viruses at will. It was unmistakable from the disdain with which they wielded their aerosols at last that they were making us pay for those virulent millions who would one day elude the spray.