‘A lot of people say the Aborigine is not a farmer. This is bullshit. The Aborigine farms nature as nature should be farmed. He killed only for what he needed. If he had to take a kangaroo he took the old one. The young were the guarantee of the future. The Aborigine understood regeneration. He never stripped trees bare out of gluttony or greed. He took what was necessary for his immediate survival – no more. And he knew the fluctuations of the seasons. For the Europeans there are only two seasons in the Top End, the Wet and the Dry. The Aborigines recognized six. Bang-Gerang – the knock ’em down season. Yegge. Gunaggarriwulge – the fire-lighting. Wurrgeng. Gunumeleng. How many’s that? Oh, yeah, Gudjewg – the monsoons. So don’t tell me the Aborigine was a dill.’

Any university ecologist or safe city green might have said this, of course, miles from where it mattered or would be likely to be contradicted. But Tom tended his little clearing of reason in the very thick of negrophobia. The people who told him the Aborigines were dills – and that would have been the kindest thing they called them – were his own neighbours, maybe his own friends. He might have been doing his best by his passengers, giving them a good day out, but that was dialogue he was conducting at the wheel of his bus.

‘What’s a dill?’ Hazel asked.

‘Ahdollsahfool,’ Brian explained.

‘Once he’s in the country,’ Tom went on, ‘once he’s out here, the Aborigine’s a beautiful person.’ (I remember wincing at ‘beautiful person’; I don’t mind it now. You have to take it in the context of all the northern ranting about coons.) ‘It’s in the town, when he’s drunk, that I’ve no time for him. But I’ve no time for the white man when he’s drunk either.’

The foursome from Perth, John and Marion and June and Brian, wished to concur in this. Yes, yes, indubitably, out here, in the wild as it were, the Aborigines were ‘fine people’. But they were just out for trouble and hand-outs in Perth. The half-caste educated ones were the worst. Trying to cash in on land rights and what have you. They would even come up here sometimes, just to stir it.

‘If they’re given a house they ruin it,’ John explained to me. ‘They’re instantly joined by fifty of their relations from miles around.’

‘They’re in limbo,’ Marion said.

‘They won’t work,’ John said.

But June remembered that there was one who was nice who appeared in town on Saturday mornings and performed bird imitations on his didgeridoo.