He was quite a young man to have several million dollars invested in Derby, baby-faced, even, behind his thick glasses and beneath his heavy beard. On the other hand there was something elderly about his deliberation and his pernicketiness. Unlike the man who’d bought the company because he’d liked the razor, Neil had bought the taxi because he’d disliked the company. ‘I was sick of getting off planes and into dirty taxis,’ he explained. ‘I’d fly all the way from Perth without putting a speck on myself, and then after just five minutes in a taxi I’d arrive home filthy. The only way I could be certain of getting into a clean taxi was to buy my own.’

The subject of hygiene must have been what put him in mind to show us Derby’s shanty town, an Aboriginal slum just a minute from the centre, though you would have thought, given the dramatic change, that you had been whisked suddenly to the worst of the black townships in South Africa. We were unable to believe our eyes. No photographs of remote or outback Australia ever showed you this – a street of shameful tin shacks in such disrepair that you might have taken each one to be its own rubbish tip; their miserable inhabitants squatting amongst the dereliction, shunning the squalor, to say nothing of the intolerable oven-heat, of their habitations. As we drove past, a dog was shitting on the front steps of an old man’s shack. He was vainly trying to shoo it away, but without any expectation of success, his weary, futile loathing compounded by the presence of sightseers. The hand which he raised to the dog he might also have been raising to us, or to some higher authority. The fleeting scene stayed in our minds for months, an image of the utmost misery and hopelessness. We recalled it when the Hon. Malcolm Fraser returned to Australia, after his Eminent Persons’ tour of South Africa, breathing righteousness. And we recalled it again when he returned from Memphis, having mysteriously lost his trousers.

‘Of course nothing can be done for them,’ Neil explained. ‘They’re vermin. They don’t know how to live and they can’t be taught. Even when they’re given good conditions they turn them into this. They can’t handle them. It’s not unheard of, you know, for Aborigines to rip up the planks from their verandahs to light the fires in their electric ovens with. They’re a good hundred years behind us. I’ve got some very good Aborigine friends – men I respect professionally, educated men I do business with – but I wouldn’t go into any of their houses for fear of what I’d pick up.’