Water preserved in its knotted hollows from the wet season is found fresh and clear after weeks, sometimes months, and when that source fails, in the merciless dry, the pith, ripped from beneath the bark and wrung like a cloth into a pannikin, provides a clear draught, cooling and tasteless, that is often the wanderer’s eleventh-hour salvation. The rind of the pods, chopped and stirred with water, makes an acrid but nourishing food that the blacks enjoy, and that tides over the tuckerless white man to the next out-camp or station; and the flower, a waxy white bloom, possesses medicinal values, particularly in allaying fever. Stirred with sugar, it makes a refreshing drink. Some of the bushmen have succeeded in concocting spirituous liquors from this mixture, well-fermented, which they insist have a fine ‘sting’ if made from the flowers of young trees . . .

But it is as first camp and last camp, station homestead, pub, prison, store, post office and bagman’s rest that the boab has twined its roots deepest into the history of the country . . .

It was at the Boab Prison Tree in fact, the famous landmark just a few miles out of Derby, that we first talked business – though business wasn’t what we called it – to Neil, the second eccentric and buccaneering taxi-driver-who-was-really-something-else we’d met in as many days. Neil had responded promptly to our noontime SOS, coming out of his taxi with an extended arm, a look of friendly calculation under his shaggy beard, and the line, ‘So you want to see our fair town?’ He was so clean that he actually sparkled in the sun. Sitting beside him in his taxi I could smell the soap he’d used, the deodorant, the shampoo, and maybe even the baby powder.

Seeing the fair town of Derby meant, as the man at the information bureau had warned us, seeing pretty much what we’d seen already. But we did get a look at Dampier’s verdict, and the suicidal jetty, and the unsafe sea, and the illimitable marshes throwing up teasing mirages of hope and change. And we did get to find out a lot about Neil. Such as what he thought of the man at the information bureau, what he thought of the state of organized tourism in Derby, what he thought of other members of the business population, and what he thought of himself.

‘Let me make one thing clear at the outset,’ he told us. ‘I only drive this taxi occasionally. I run an accountancy and pharmacy in the town. My partner and I have several million dollars invested in Derby. Which is why I take an interest in your story of how you were advised to leave.’