Neil wasn’t planning to go on waiting. He seemed to suffer – it truly did look like pain: a constriction of the chest and lungs – from a vast, dumb, inchoate, frustrated sympathy for the Aborigines whose children he taught. He wanted to help them. He didn’t know how to help them. He wasn’t sure whether the idea of help wasn’t itself an impertinence. But he was coming to the end of his run. He had been in Areyonga for over two years, and had served a similar term of duty in Millingimbi, in Arnhem Land. Now he and Dawn were planning to go south, back to Victoria, to Gippsland probably, where they would run a smallholding, with Neil taking his turn to stay at home, and Dawn taking hers to go out to work. They made it sound like the sweet life and convalescence all at once – a shimmering prospect in a flimsy frame.

Leanne was at an earlier stage in her career and so more robustly angry. Her brown eyes flashed a fury that Neil’s could no longer manage. Hers was a dual role at the school; she was what’s called a teacher linguist, with special responsibility for building a library of research materials in the language of Pitjantjatjara. After forty years of automatic rations and force-fed Christianity the Aboriginal populations of such communities as Areyonga had been diagnosed as culturally dispossessed. ‘They don’t dance,’ Dawn explained, ‘they don’t know how to dance any more.’ (Me neither, I thought.) ‘And they’ve lost contact with their legends,’ Leanne added. (Me too, I thought.) So Leanne was involved in heritage-repair work – collecting, collating, and even re-inventing materials.

It was Whitlam, apparently, who gave the green light to the bilingual school system. Amid much optimism, over sixteen of them had opened in the Northern Territory, Areyonga being one of the very first, way back in 1973. Whitlam himself had travelled to Areyonga to give it his blessing and had stayed in the house next door – the house that Neil and Dawn now occupied. ‘I sleep in the same bed he did,’ Dawn said. With mixed feelings, I thought.

The next day we would see the extraordinarily sophisticated printing and duplicating equipment available to Leanne in her Production Centre – an even more bizarre technological oasis than the computerized accountancy office we’d found in Derby. The only problem being that the machinery was too complex for Leanne to use. It required its own fully trained printer, and although one had originally come with the equipment he had since gone down with Ross River Fever and there had been no replacement, no mention of a replacement and not one word as to whether the position had ever been advertised. In the meantime the presses lay idle and the Aboriginal children went on with their colouring books, little knowing both how close and how far they were from the wonders and ineffable benefits of man’s great scientific stride.