‘That doesn’t necessarily prove,’ I said to Ros, ‘that there are not any white convicts in there. It might simply mean that the prison authorities think so highly of the Aborigines in their charge that only they get the trips out in the truck.’

‘It might,’ Ros agreed. ‘Although in that case, why do you suppose the white driver is steering so close to those trees that the Aborigines in the back have to throw themselves flat on the floor of the truck to avoid decapitation?’

I considered that a tough question to answer. But it was equally difficult to be certain how far the little social drama that was unfolding in front of us – the convicts hammering on the roof of the cab and swearing violently at the driver; the driver leaning out of his window and aiming random blows, before ploughing the truck into the trees again – was anything other than the natural release of high spirits of men cooped up too long. Australian blokes have been beating one another up as a means of expressing affection or relieving tension for some time; why shouldn’t the usual laws of a predominantly male society be operating here?

I wasn’t trying to shirk uncomfortable truths. I’d read that Aborigines are imprisoned at twenty times the rate that white men are in Western Australia, and that Dixon Green was by no means the only Aborigine in the state to have died while in police custody. I wasn’t so committed to my own colour that I needed this to be untrue. I wanted to be rational about what I saw, that was all. And this, anyway, I did see: that the convicts in the back of the truck, with their Afro-Caribbean haircuts and their pumped-up biceps and their confident aggression, presented, en masse, a possibility of politicized Aboriginality preferable to anything we’d so far witnessed outside bottle-shops, arranged in a circle on a nature-strip, or sucking on a flagon under a gum tree in the park.

There is nothing remotely contentious about my ‘preferable’, unless it would be argued that man is never worthier than when he’s docile.