I couldn’t believe my ears. Here in the Boab Hotel in the far West Kimberleys, where eighteen-and-a-half-foot crocodiles patrolled the rivers, in despite of which Aborigines from the northern missions swam down to listen to the wild music of MANTUS, a couple of fully grown adults were standing on chairs and shouting:

‘Scotch!’

‘Aquinas!’

Although he had something badly wrong with his leg, and would rub away at it whenever I was talking, Hector didn’t seem to be at all physically incommoded when it came to dancing with Ros. He threw himself around the little floor, banging into tables, his limbs thrashing, his eyes rolling in his head, while I sat and guarded his purse. You would have said, from the way he jived and bopped and limboed, that here was a man of fifty in the absolute peak of condition; and yet the minute he returned to the table he would start holding his thigh and wincing. At one point, just as I was about to offer some observation on the lateness of the hour, he even howled. ‘The doctors say it’s a trapped nerve,’ he told me. ‘But I think the mosquitoes are to blame.’

I didn’t tell him what I thought.

It was just after this that the lead singer of MANTUS came over to join us. His name was Rod Drummond and he was a senior welfare worker at an Aboriginal Hostel in town. (‘This one’s a good one,’ Hector whispered to me. ‘This one’s high caste.’)

I asked Rod Drummond what MANTUS meant.

‘I shouldn’t really say,’ he said.

I thought he was joking. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I can take it.’

‘Well’ – he really was reluctant – ‘Mantu means pussy hunting, but with the us on the end it means muff diving.’

I marvelled at language variation as subtle as that, but he mistook my wonderment for disapproval. ‘I said I shouldn’t say,’ he said.

At the end of the evening he invited us to come and talk to him at the Hostel before we left Derby. Various others reminded us of our arrangements for the following day. Just as we were leaving Orlando De Biasi fell against us and said something that approximated to ‘See you at five in the morning.’ And Hector offered to drive us back to our hotel, where there was a late-night disco.

As we were climbing into Hector’s taxi a couple of young Aborigines approached us. We never got to find out what they wanted. Hector was on to them in a flash. ‘No,’ he shouted. ‘Oh no – none of that!’