Although we’d already bought a couple of bus tickets valid from Derby to Broome we couldn’t face waiting for the bus. So we hired a car instead, for all that there was an extortionate one-way drop-off fee and remote area loading and various other little hidden extras which made the two hundred and fifty kilometres to Broome the most costly in Australia, if not the world. But I didn’t care. I would have given half my blood to speed us out of Derby once and for all. Which is why I responded ambiguously when, in what was meant to be our final five minutes in the town, Ros ran into Rod Drummond, the lead singer of MANTUS, in the Post Office, and arranged to meet him later that morning, at the Aboriginal Hostel, ‘for a chat’. I could see that we owed it to our professional integrity not to go past an opportunity to hear about Derby as it were from the other side; I thought that we owed it to just about everything else, however, not to roam the streets of this hell-hole for eternity.

Rod Drummond was no less ambiguous himself. He couldn’t work out precisely what we wanted to chat about, nor was he at all certain that he possessed the information he assumed we were after. He was waiting for us when we arrived at the Hostel and drove us out with him to pick up a party of seven Aboriginal children who were flying in from school at Kalgoorlie to rejoin their families in the far north. On the way to the airport I tried to sound Rod out on the tone of community relations in Derby. I knew in some detail what the whites thought of the blacks; I was curious to hear the reverse story.

‘It’s a lovely, friendly town,’ he told me. ‘The friendliest I’ve been in.’

I’ve never been much of an investigator. I have no talent for concealing the question I really want the answer to. But I did my best not to be too obvious. ‘Yes, yes, some of the people are very nice and friendly,’ I said. ‘However, I’ve noticed that as soon as they get a few beers into them they start to show a – I don’t know – a different aspect. A certain aggression – a sort of social belligerence, I suppose you could call it – suddenly begins to show itself.’ (‘They call you coons, Rod,’ was what I wanted to say.)

He listened to me very patiently, his fine dark eyes concentrating on the road ahead. ‘It’s a really nice place to live, socially,’ he repeated.

I wondered whether he was being evasive or had really failed to grasp my meaning. ‘So everyone’ – I leaned on the word everyone, trying to put colour into it – ‘so everyone gets on here?’

‘Ah, yeah. Occasionally there’s a failure of communication because people are changed around every couple of years up here, and it takes a while for the new ones to become acclimatized. But that’s all.’