Brian’s eyes lit up. I suddenly realized that he was about to set his incomprehensibility its most ambitious project yet: he was going to render with his voice what the nice Perth-based Aborigine performed on his didgeridoo. The meagre letters of the English alphabet cannot hope to survive a contest between Aboriginal, Scottish, and Australian birdsong, but roughly the noise Brian made was, ‘Cay – caw – cooachawahjibli.’

We all sat and ruminated after that until the bus pulled up within a short walk of Nourlangie Rock. On the subject of the spirit-galleries and the rock paintings I intend to remain silent, I don’t trust myself on primitivism – the art or the religion – and I am content to leave a proper appreciation of the local creation myth (involving the passage of a couple of giant white-shouldered rock wallabies, cutting crevices as they went) to those whose imaginations swell to such tales. But Nourlangie Rock itself was grand and red and menacing, a wild outcrop of sandstone, and if you must invest a place with spirit this was as good a one to invest in as any. It looked old and ominous – altogether the superior, as a site ministering to superstition, of, say, St Paul’s Cathedral or Stonehenge.

And Tom was the best of guides. He discussed the legends, peremptorily dismissed Von Däniken (Kakadu was Dutch spaceman country), and talked to us, as we looked out over the plains to the distant reddening escarpment, about the cruel female circumcision ceremonies of the Aborigines on whose sacred ground we stood. These ceremonies were so brutal and decisive that they once and for all removed the better part of sensation from sexual activity, thereby serving as an efficient if somewhat supererogatory form of family planning. The first white missionaries dissuaded the Aborigines from these barbaric practices whereupon pleasure returned to sex as suddenly and sweetly as a poignant memory. The immediate effect of which, according to Tom, being that the lubras wandered off to follow the white man, leaving the local tribes to fall into atrophy. For him this was just one more instance of the fatal consequences of white interference. He told the story elegiacally, as though it were a modern Garden of Eden myth. ‘The white man thought the Aborigine was ignorant,’ Tom said. ‘But he wasn’t.’

On the way down from the rock Brian collared me. ‘Trairgic,’ he said. ‘Ah kees av ahbsahlootlah trairgic mossoondahstahndon.’

We ate lunch in the open-air bar of the Cooinda Hotel/Motel, an establishment owned by Aborigines but run on a lease, for the time being, by whites. We sat in what was virtually a clearing in the jungle, enjoying the warm afternoon. Underneath a marvellously drooping pandanus palm a group of Aboriginal youths played pool – paradisal pool – using their unchalked cues to shoo away the giant insects which landed, in a spirit of pure and indolent curiosity, on the baize.