The presence of these Israelis had livened up not just Camballin but the whole area considerably. War games suddenly became the rage. Not war games of the kind business executives play, using plastic counters on stiffened boards, but authentic outdoor simulations, involving raids and ambushes and surprise assaults. It was common, Louise said, to be returning home quietly one evening and to find yourself suddenly waylaid by black Yuron, waiting for you on his belly in the grass, ready to toss a crumpled paper bag at you as if it were a grenade. Sometimes both Yurons raided the Boab in Derby, bursting through the doors and firing imaginary sub-machine guns at the locals. They even succeeded in making Neil forget about the condition of his trousers. ‘Whenever I heard their voices outside my office,’ he said, ‘I knew to throw myself down flat on the floor behind my desk and spread my arms.’

Louise showed me the Yurons’ favourite photograph of her little boy. He was stark naked in it, as usual, only this time he was pointing a toy Heckler and Kock automatic at the camera. ‘They all loved this one,’ she said. ‘They all took multiple copies of it back to Israel.’

Ros remembered the various crazy offers that Australian administrations had made over the years to this and that Middle Eastern combatant: such as that they might like a little piece of Australian desert which they could call home. ‘I suppose this would be a good location for the continuance of the Arab/Israeli conflict,’ she said.

‘What do you mean would be?’ Louise and Arch, not to mention Humpy and Neil, all said together. ‘The next station along is in fact owned by Arabs. They had the farm at Myroodah Station before the Israelis came. Now they glower at each other across the Fitzroy River, which has been renamed the River Jordan. And those conical mountains you’ll have seen on your way in – the Grant Ranges – we call the Golan Heights.’

Towards the end of the evening Humpy decided to test our nerve with shaggy snake stories. ‘The pythons get very big round here,’ he told us. A twenty-footer was nothing. Only the week before, one as long as that and half as long again had made a surprise call on the once-monthly Camballin outdoor barbecue and tinnie party. Wholly undaunted by the lights, the noise, or the thirty or so people present, he had slithered in, taken up a position not far from the fire, and flicked his lips. ‘Snake!’ someone had called out, ‘But we were all too busy drinking,’ Humpy said, ‘to bother.’

‘A favourite trick of theirs,’ he went on, after Arch handed us each another can, ‘is to curl around the inner rim of a toilet bowl. They like it there. And of course you just don’t see ’em unless you look very carefully.’