When the distinguished Indian diplomat Mohammad Hamid Ansari arrived in Canberra in the early 1980s to take up his post as India's high commissioner, he found awaiting him a note from his predecessor.
This relationship, the note said, has neither substance nor prospects. Now go and enjoy yourself.
It was not an auspicious beginning, but true in its time.
Ansari went on to greatness, now serving his second term as India's Vice-President.
He attended the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Perth in 2011. At that time Canberra still had a policy of banning uranium exports to India, so India's Prime Minister, the redoubtable Manmohan Singh, did not attend. Nor did its President.
Ansari came instead. One of his most substantial meetings was with the then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, who assured him there would be no problems about uranium should the Coalition win the next election, as it did.
Recently, Abbott had an hour with Singh at the East Asian Summit in Brunei. They discussed nuclear co-operation, among many other things.
Before she left office, Julia Gillard reversed Labor's ban on Australian uranium going to India, though the safeguards agreement is still being worked out.
The relationship is now described as strategic by both Canberra and New Delhi, but putting life into it is a big challenge for Abbott and his Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, who will make an early visit to India in November.
The Coalition has a better story to tell on India than Labor. Abbott spent three months there as a young man. John Howard lifted the uranium ban, only to have it re-imposed by Kevin Rudd. But still you get the sense Abbott and his team have slightly missed a trick with India.
It is likely to be among our top two or three source countries for immigrants for as far out as you can imagine. Although its economic growth rate has gone off the boil - it may be lower than 5 per cent this year - it is a huge economy and destined to be a great power in the decades ahead.
This week, the University of Melbourne's Australia India Institute hosted a visitor who demonstrates India's genius and helps to show why it is going to be a source of global economic growth and unique social innovation for many decades ahead.
Nandan Nilekani is an embodiment of how the information technology industry will continue to transform India, through and beyond this period of temporarily subdued economic growth.
In the East Asian economic growth model, the same sequence was followed by all the tiger economies - Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and then China. First, agriculture was reformed, either through technology or, in China's case, by allowing a free market to operate. Successful agriculture yielded a surplus. Either the government, or financial institutions or private companies were able to get hold of that surplus and invest it in lo-tech, labour-intensive manufacturing. This manufacturing was aimed at export markets and competed on the price of the labour.
This manufacturing created mass employment and a vast shift of population from the country to the cities. It produced a huge surplus that was invested in further manufacturing, which became more technologically sophisticated. This produced further rural to city population drift and thus the huge East Asian coastal conurbations.
These urban giants spawned a middle class that wanted services and the development of these service industries led to further export opportunities, though services have been a smaller part of the East Asian miracle.
India's rapid economic growth over the past two decades did not look anything like this. It was born instead in the genius of Indians for IT. As a result, the Indian growth model has its critics and its doomsayers. Services don't produce as many jobs as manufacturing does. India's manufacturing is now developing, but much more slowly than its services sector did. Can it fill the gap?
Nilekani was a critically important leader of the IT revolution. He was educated entirely in India, where he learned his skills at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay In 1981 he co-founded Infosys. Headquartered in Bangalore, Infosys is one of the biggest software and computer and business service companies in the world, with a turnover in the tens of billions of dollars. Press reports put Nilekani's personal worth at more than $1bn.
In a long interview with me, he defends the role of Indian IT in job creation: "For every one job in IT," he says, "there are another 10 jobs that depend on them."
But really he has a much more interesting story to tell about the way IT is transforming India.
