There was to be a film show at the school that night, a video of somebody or other’s choosing, with hotdogs and ice creams sold before and after, all proceeds going to Neil’s current pet project – a school excursion to Melbourne, where the kids could get their first, and their last, ever look at a real city. Melbourne was where Neil himself came from and I read this scheme of his as a sort of final symbolic gesture: he would complete his circle of obligation to these children backwards instead of forwards, he would render his past to them in lieu of his future.

Before the video we went for a short walk with Leanne and Geraldine and Brylynn to the waterholes, a picnic spot of spectacular seclusion just minutes from the rubble of the road. While Geraldine talked to Ros about Airey’s Inlet (she wasn’t to know what I knew about Ros and inlets), and while Brylynn sat on the bank and kicked her feet in the water, I balanced on a boulder and listened to Leanne voicing her anxieties about my presence. What was I actually here for? Did I want to find something out in particular? Did I want to take photographs? Was I after some specific sociological low-down on the community. ‘People have come here before,’ she said, ‘and gone away with some funny ideas about what they’ve seen.’

I didn’t ask her to be more exact. It was easy enough to understand the reasons for her concern. She was how we came to be here. In a manner of speaking, it was she who had put the door on the latch for us. So it was she who would be responsible if we slipped away with the silver. I did all I could to put her mind at rest. I wasn’t looking for any dirt. I didn’t want to ridicule the community. I had no political axe to grind. The silver, in other words, could hardly be safer. But as for funny ideas – well, you can’t stop anybody taking those.

Leanne having one or two other matters to attend to, it was Brylynn who showed us the way to the school. After a bit of a pouty patch at the waterholes, when she’d been inexplicably fuming at one of those infinitesimal family slights only discernible to the naked eye of a fifteen-year-old, she was now at her most expansive. All people of this age are of course schizophrenic; but the term has to be understood in its Darwinian, not in its Freudian, sense. They are simply selecting the personality that will give them the greatest possible chance of survival. I hoped Brylynn would select this one. She talked to us briskly about the school and the teaching she was doing there herself while she was on holiday. Wanting to work with children in the future she was treating this as serious experience, even though her own teachers back in Airey’s Inlet didn’t think much of the idea and believed she would have been better off putting in a couple of weeks playing ring-a-roses with the local infants.