The trick did have its dangers. In Rockhampton a drunk policeman splattered our best black snake with the publican's pistol. In Gympie a bank clerk got one with a billiard cue.

We had many assets to replace in Ballarat and we could not content ourselves with one pub, but moved from Battery Hill all the way through the east and up into the smarter pubs around Lydiard Street. We moved fast, keeping ahead of any grapevine, as voracious as an army of ants. The cheeks of the Badgerys were flushed but Leah betrayed her emotions with a nasty rash along her slender neck.

My pocket contained a damp bird's nest of crumpled currency from which drifted the unmistakable odours of Ballarat Bitter. I clicked my cane, tap, tap, a light filigree of sound woven around the military beat of Charles's great clod-hopping boots which he stamped heel first, into the ringing pavements of Sturt Street. Behind him came Sonia, her white socks betraying the lack of garters and behind her was Leah whose bulging black handbag contained a dangerously compressed snake whose welfare was much on her mind. Leah wore what she had escaped in, a light floral dress with an unflattering stain she had collected on a boxcar floor, and a wide-brimmed straw hat whose generous shade did not manage to hide the fury dancing in her big grey eyes and, it must be said, the dancer was limping. I am tempted to suggest that the blisters she habitually collected were caused, not by shoes, but by the same thing that caused the rash to rise from beneath the neat collar of her summer dress.

While Charles dropped back to lean against the wall, the rest of us entered Craig's Hotel in style, through the revolving glass doors, a quick inquiry at the desk and then through to the saloon bar with me no more than three inches behind Leah so that I might hide the stain that marked her backside.

It was that quiet sleepy time in the afternoon when the people who inhabit saloon bars do so quietly, where the work of the barmaid is betrayed by small quiet sounds, and no wolf-pack laughter or hen-party screech offends the ear of the sensitive visitor who may peruse the photographs of famous racehorses at his leisure while the other drinkers whisper quietly to each other, or read their copies of theCourier Mail, turning the pages quietly in respect of the hour of day.

The snake, of course, disrupted this calm a little, but Charles was soon found playing in the street and introduced to the ashen barmaid and then the dour licensee. And while those drinkers who remained found themselves huddled together in a suddenly talkative group, the snake (a Children's Python) worked its way across the slippery linoleum towards an extraordinary-looking man in a yellow-checked suit. He had a bald head, a little goatee beard, an ascetic high-boned face, and gold-framed spectacles over sunken thoughtful eyes. While Charles, blushing red as usual, conducted his stubborn negotiation, this other fellow carried on his own silent conversation with himself, resting a gold-ringed finger on his pale lower lip. He rolled his eyes like a fellow trying to multiply 23 by 48 without using a pencil.

It was easy to see the licensee was not an easy man with a quid. It was not that he haggled, but that he did not move. He regarded Charles with sleepy-eyed suspicion. I expressed the view that the snake was venomous, and relied upon the fact that pythons are not native to Ballarat. The snake paused, lifted its head from the linoleum, and flicked its tongue at the smoky air.

"God damn," said the man in the yellow-checked suit. He spoke in the purest American.

The licensee blinked his lizard-lidded eyes; the snake lay flat as a fallen stick. A green pound note was passed, at last, into my son's custody.

"God damn. You're Lee-anne. The snake-dancer. I saw your show." He picked up his hat, stepped over the snake, and took two gliding steps across the floor, his hand extended to my blushing lover who was huddled back against the photographs of racehorses, pretending snake-fear. "Nathan Schick," he said, smiling crookedly but charmingly to reveal a gold-filled mouth, "I saw your act in Nambour, Queensland."

I did not see Charles leave, but a scream from Sturt Street told me he was accompanied by the python.

Nathan Schick seemed quite unaffected. He fussed around the table and forced Leah to sit down. He shoved out his pale hand and gave me that charming, weary, gold-speckled smile.

"Badgery," I said, trying to keep the publican in view.

"I know, I know," said the splendid American, patting a small round stomach which looked like a tiny cushion shoved down his trousers. "You, sir, are a funny man. A very funny man." I could not listen to him. I watched the cardiganed licensee approach. I kept my eye on the door and smiled at Nathan Schick. "Yes, sir, I saw your show. You should see her," he told the dour-faced publican who had come to block my exit. "You should see this young lady work with snakes."

The licensee had the fine red veins and slow poached eyes of his caste. "I just have, Mr Schick."

Nathan Schick blinked and made his mouth into an "O". What a ham he was. I am nine-tenths convinced he betrayed us to the licensee and then rescued us to that we would feel ourselves in his debt.

He gave the licensee a crisp new pound note, ordered a round of drinks, sent Sonia to fetch her brother, and told the barmaid she was lucky to have such talented performers patronizing her bar. Schick could talk a line of bullshit like I never heard before, and in this he had the distinct advantage of being American and therefore never hesitant about expressing an opinion. Australians, in comparison, lack confidence, and it is this, not steel mills or oilwells, that is the difference between the two nations.

Schick also had that peculiar deafness that Americans adopt towards Australians (not dissimilar to the deafness city people adopt when listening to country people). It comes from not understanding the rhythms of their speech and assuming they would not live where they did if they were more resourceful.

So Nathan Schick, while regarding us benevolently, misunderstood our ironies and took them for firmly held beliefs, contradicted them, dropped names around the bar, criticized the act he had recently praised, suggested "improvements" without a beg-your-pardon, asked us to join his troupe which would soon play the Tivoli in Melbourne, then thought better of it and asked us to audition.

This, for people who had lost ten rosellas and a Dodge utility, was very heady stuff. When Nathan ordered straight gin, so did we. The angry blotches left Leah's neck and rearranged themselves into a rosy aura. She toasted me silently across the gin-wet tabletop, and even the line of her Victorian shoulders suggested relief.

Nathan Schick had ideas to take our act to America, or so he claimed. He caught me pulling a funny face at Leah, and hamming up his hurt feelings, produced a little gold-embossed notebook in which he had written: "Lee-anne, snakes". We had left Nambour, he said, before he could talk to us. He was full of ideas. Most of them – he freely admitted it – were lousy.

It was after five o'clock now and the bar started to fill. In pubs all over Ballarat thirsty men had only one hour's heavy drinking before they were expelled into the street at closing time.

"Hell, Lee-anne," shouted Nathan Schick, now hemmed in by a forest of trousered drinkers, "hell, I know, I'm not an artist. I'm just making a suggestion. Look, an example only. If you want to play, say, Dallas, Texas, you need a hook. You're Australian. You got to have an Australian hook. Something in your act, not a snake – all snakes look the same. Not your ostrich. Something Australian."

"It's an emu."

"Who cares? This is an American audience. Do you say to them, Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an emu even though you think it's an ostrich? Does Herbie make a comedy routine from this?" He raised his pale eyebrows from behind his gold-rimmed glasses. He considered the idea of my comedy routine, flicking his wide eyes from one face to the next. I wondered how it was that, no matter how I hated Henry Ford, I always loved Americans. "Nah," Nathan smashed the idea flat with his ringed hand. "Nah, you need something Australian in your act."