When Clive Palmer’s dad, George Palmer, was heading toward retirement, he had the last of his many great ideas. Noting the growing popularity of caravan travel, and the cramped quarters of said vehicle, he invented a sort of plastic fabric caravan extension, which attached to the caravan itself with suction cups along the join. They’re still around, but readers getting a bit long o tooth will recall them in profusion; for about twenty years they were everywhere. It was the crowning achievement of a man who had been among other things, a feature filmmaker, a Hollywood scriptwriter, a pioneering radio station engineer-manager, the first modern press spinner in Australia (for Joe Lyons, when the UAP was established)—and, almost certainly, an ASIO asset.

At the start of World War II, George was running a fleet of intercity buses. By the 1950s, he was running a travel agency specialising in global cruises, whose ships visited the ports of the world. ASIO had set him up in the company, as a way of soft surveillance and back channel diplomacy. The Palmer family spent months moored in China, when official relations between ourselves and the people’s republic were non-existent and some form of connection and surveillance was required by both parties.