‘I’ll tell you what happens,’ he said. ‘We dig. We mine. We get it out. And we all get the benefits. That’s what we do. But the Abo says the land is his. Coon country. Find uranium or oil on a few hectares he hasn’t been near for twenty thousand years and suddenly its sacred coon country. No one else has such rights of private landlordism. Not beyond three metres underground. If I find gold a hundred feet under my house it’s not mine by rights. You don’t own what’s underground. But the Abo thinks he does. I’m telling you – it’ll divide the state. You can’t have one set of laws for one people and one set of laws for the other.’

I didn’t say the obvious thing in response to that last sentence. I’d vowed that I wasn’t going to wander round Australia explaining their glaring inconsistencies to Australians. I didn’t think that was the right way for a guest to behave. But I had to say something if only to ease my own internal pressure. Just opening my mouth would probably have done; but while it was open I thought I might as well say, ‘So Land Rights is still a hot potato?’ with it.

He banged the table again, sending spumes of ice-cold beer high into the air. ‘Red-hot!’ he boomed.

‘Wheeeee!’ cried the electric cowgirl, tilting her head backwards and catching the beer-spray on her chin.

I can’t say that I was especially convinced by the noises either of them was making. The fat girl’s good time and Hector’s rage seemed to me to belong to the same area of psychological, maybe even purely physiological, compulsion. The need preceded the occasion. There was no reason to suppose that Hector was a confirmed racist, just because he slagged off coons, than to assume that the girl was a dedicated hedonist, just because she was misbehaving on the dance floor. That which we call racism is often merely the expression of a fundamental yearning, akin to thirst or hunger, to speak violence. The object – the particular instance of colour or nationality – is purely arbitrary. It’s just tough if you happen to be it.

And, as if to prove that very point, Hector was soon getting the aggression and the competitiveness out of his system on a very different pretext. In order to calm him down, and because she herself was becoming homesick in the heat and the excitement, Ros had begun to talk to him about Perth. Within seconds they’d unearthed a coincidence – of no interest whatsoever to anybody else, but a matter of much hilarity and vehemence for them: Ros’s brother and Hector had rowed, respectively, for two of Perth’s arch-rival public schools.

‘You went to Scotch?’

‘Your brother went to Aquinas?’