It soon became clear to us that where previously, in the harsh light of a Derby afternoon, everybody had been trying to get us out of town, now, in the smoky excitement of a Derby Friday night at the Boab, everybody was competing to see who could give us the better time. At least two more fishing trips came our way. Then Hector proposed a couple of rival schemes of his own. One for putting us in touch with Sam Lovell, a famous local Aborigine whose safaris Hector reckoned to be second to none in Australia. The other for us to travel in the front seat of his taxi with him, through the night, so that we should observe for ourselves the wily character of the blackfeller. Suddenly, after appearing to turn its back on us entirely, Derby was suffocating us in the promiscuity of its embrace.

We suffered some temporary disaffection though – a lovers’ tiff, I suppose you might call it – when Hector became over-excited on the subject of Aborigines, what they got up to in his taxi, and what they got up to, come to that, absolutely anywhere else. It began, mildly enough, with his running through the qualities that most typified the Aborigine of his acquaintance – rat-cunning, as I remember, being the one he most frequently returned to. But he somehow moved from that, I hope not with our connivance, to the whole question of Land Rights, and it was then that he began to bang the table. ‘It’s got no chance in this state. No chance. We’ll ship it out.’ He had become red in the face and was turning his voice upon us as if it were a cannon. ‘We won’t give it house room in this state. We won’t entertain it. We’ll ship it out! Out!’

He took a minute or two to go to the bathroom – I thought maybe to calm himself; but he was even redder when he returned. ‘If I may be blunt,’ he said, ‘this is arse-end Charlie up here. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re doing. Or what we think. So you tell me this?’ – he pointed, unexpectedly, to a spot on the dance floor where the electric cowgirl was setting an example which the primary-school teachers in their Perth frocks were loth to follow – ‘What happens if we find minerals or oils there? Right there?’

I tried to joke him out of it. ‘Well, first of all I suppose we finish our beers,’ I said.

Pathetic, I know. Hector thought so too. He had a way of making me feel that I was a very trivial person. He achieved this partly by looking away, partly by rubbing the pain in his leg, whenever I spoke.