So Areyonga was looking more or less the way it had always been intended to.

Leanne’s house was the very last on the left where Areyonga pretty well ran out. She wasn’t home yet but her mother and her kid sister, Geraldine and Brylynn, on holiday from Airey’s Inlet in Victoria, made us comfortable and served us tea and cake – precious commodities both in a place that relied on a once-a-week plane delivery for its provisions. It was only when I learnt this that I realized what a serious error we’d made emptying the Muscat into the sand.

In the circumstances, that’s to say considering no radio message from Merle had been received, Leanne’s family, and then Leanne herself, managed not to look too startled or dismayed to see us here. By late afternoon we had got through all the Dundee cake and most of the Areyonga issues – these, for Leanne, relating mainly to the school, its lack of funding and staffing, and the consequences of this for her bilingual programme. The sense she gave of a small, embattled community of whites, brimming over with good intentions, but thwarted at every turn by broken promises or no promises at all from the authorities in Alice Springs and Darwin and even Canberra, was fleshed out even more when we were joined by the head teacher of Areyonga School, Neil Aird, and his wife Dawn.

Always looking down or looking away, and given to speaking into his own chest so that you caught his words as it were on the rebound, Neil explained to me that when he wasn’t actually teaching, he spent his days writing letters to the Education Department and the Schools Commission, requisitioning, reasoning, asking, pleading, begging, arguing, and trying not to lose hope. He seemed very young to be a head teacher – a tall, soft-eyed, melancholy man, whose constitutional mistrust for the noisier doings of humanity, which made him the very person to brave the seclusion of Areyonga, did not, perhaps, make him the very person to be engaged in this deadly paper war of attrition with bureaucrats. He had the air, to me, of someone who was shell-shocked.

‘We’re at the bottom of a very long ladder of neglect,’ he said, and the ridiculous thing, to his mind, was that they still were not granted Disadvantaged Status. When I asked if there was an advantage in being officially disadvantaged they all looked at me as though I might be a deserving case myself. Disadvantaged Status was the pot of gold at the end of their rainbow. Get that and there was nothing that wouldn’t flow therefrom. And the corollary appeared to be: don’t get it and nothing will ever flow from anywhere else.