Australia is about to re-enter the pre-Gutenberg darkness. This young woman on the 109, turning a page hurriedly, greedy to keep the scene running, is the last reader. She is a throwback, perhaps a Morris Dancer on weekends, maybe a pigeon-fancier. Any minute she’ll start singing a hymn or powdering her nose. Her fellow commuters are unsettled because reading a book has become a small piety, a way of claiming intellectual and cultural superiority over the phone-fed drones around you. The sooner she reaches her stop the better they’ll feel.

People now see reading as a quaint, historical diversion, a pastime for those who lacked more splendid options, a drag, something akin to needlepoint or whittling, a distraction for castaways and folk who got snowed-in for long winters without power, a hobby for paranoid misanthropes, abandoned widows and anti-social geeks – for Victorians, Edwardians and colonials. The citizens of the TikTok epoch think of libraries as a type of asylum.

Watching her read her paperback, this young woman on the 109, I know she is a juggler of empires, a traveller in limitless cities, is becoming wise in love, and steeped in tragedy’s lore, and, as well, is an addict of hilarity, and goes to sleep listening to orchestras play at unsuspecting ducal balls held on the eve of revolutions.

I also know she is the final ambassador sent by Australia to the country of Fiction to represent us there, to meet its ancient and vibrant people and assure its VIPs we love reading and will always be their allies. But this is mere diplomacy. It is not true. She will be the last visitor from here. That place’s splendours are undiminished, but superseded – and Australians do not go there any more.