I’d noticed that Tom seemed to know everyone here, and I asked him if he was accepted as a friend. He was leaning back in his chair, wholly relaxed, his legs extended, the sun catching the gold chain around his neck. He looked a cross between a buccaneer, an anthropologist, and a male model.

‘I’ve been coming here for about fifteen years,’ he said. ‘Two or three times a week when I can get through. And I think they are just beginning to trust me. But you have to take it very slowly. They are very patient people, but if you let them down they never forgive you. One mistake and that’s that. They can be very unforgiving, even amongst themselves. Don’t forget that they used ostracization as a weapon, as a punishment. To be excluded from the safety of the tribe meant that you were without food and water. In three days you’d be dead. Then the white man came along and the ostracized Aborigine would go to him for help, ending up in a kind of limbo, depending on a white society he didn’t like, and abandoned by his own. Many found themselves in limbo this way. Many still do. It’s just one more way in which the whites altered the balance of blackfellers’ justice.’

There was nothing unfamiliar about the idea of social exclusion as punishment – incarceration is just another version of the same. But I saw it as having a peculiarly potent significance for Australia, where even today whites view non-acceptance by the pack with terror. What more melancholy sight is there, in this vast sad country, than a solitary drinker? Listening to Tom, I was struck, as I was to go on being struck, by how many of the deepest anxieties of black culture had seeped silently into the white.

We were interrupted by Hazel. She’d mistaken puddles for goannas and branches for snakes ever since we’d left Darwin. Now she had spotted something lethal high up in the tree above her. ‘Oh my, what’s that?’ she called out.

We all looked. ‘That? That’s a leaf,’ Tom said.