‘What’s it for?’ he wanted to know. He was red-faced, hot, furious, in that state of apoplexy to which all minor officials reduce themselves when they think they’ve found a smart-arse. He had a huge belly around which I think I must only have imagined a holster belt and pistol.

But this was holster belt and pistol territory, and holster belt and pistol weather. And I was wearing winter corduroys and Church’s shoes.

‘I use it to write down my impressions,’ I said. I wasn’t going to say that I’d had it only one day and that my only impressions so far were of the waste basket and of him.

He took another look in it. I think the idea that people wrote things in notebooks disgusted him.

‘Do you know where you are?’ he asked me.

‘Australia,’ I said.

I might have been wrong but I was fairly certain his eyes rolled momentarily with the ecstasy of imagining hitting me. Or of hitting my notebook.

‘You’re in a customs hall,’ he said.

I nodded. We were in a customs hall, all right. And a pretty jumpy one at that. At the far end of the room I could see Ros waiting for our luggage to appear through the hole in the wall. But nearly all those who had their cases were being made to open them. No one was above suspicion in Darwin. One customs official was going through every item of folded underwear in a bearded teenager’s holdall, feeling along the elastic with expert fingers, even checking the hems of his vests for unwonted nodules. It wasn’t just apples and bananas they were jittery about in the Territory.

The neuropath who’d collared me drew my attention to a sign high up on the wall above us. It said, CUSTOMS HALL – NO PHOTOGRAPHY.

‘D’you see that?’

I said I did.

Our eyes met for an instant. His were a lost, dreamy Australian blue. Then he handed me back my notebook. ‘No photography means no writing either,’ he said.

I didn’t argue. I was in a foreign country. It wasn’t for me to go around explaining to the natives what no photography meant.

I went over to where Ros was still waiting for our cases. I ought to have noticed that she was the last one there but I was too full of my own exhilaration. ‘This is brilliant,’ I said. ‘It’s a dream start. I’ve just very nearly had my notebook confiscated.’

‘Why is that good?’

‘Material,’ I said. ‘Material. We no sooner land than we’re in the shit. It’s perfect.’

‘In that case you’re having an even better start than you realized. They’ve lost our luggage.’