I could have said, somebody my religion, because if I wasn’t much mistaken the fleeing honkie had been circumcised, barmitzvah’d and the rest of it. But I doubt if the Aborigines would have spotted that, or that it would have made any material difference to their pleasure if they had. Given the extent of their need to ease basic otherness tension, anti-semitism would have been pure finessing.

I watched the rest of the film, or at least I watched the audience watching it, in a far easier frame of mind. They hadn’t just relieved their own pressures, they had relieved mine. I felt freer, now that it was sort of openly agreed between us that we were all specimens of some type, to indulge my own humdrum taste for the human-picturesque. I couldn’t have been the first person to be struck by the enormous urchin-charm of Aboriginal children – all in that state of becoming indigence that would have sent Murillo wild – but I was struck by it anyway. As I was by the theatrical gestures some of the women made when they rose to leave in the middle of the video, sweeping their blankets around themselves and their offspring as if they were the cloaks of aristocrats. Instinctual elegance? Natural grace? – Oh, what a mess it all is, the language of cross-cultural appreciation; but natural is probably never a good word to get tied up in, the more especially, in a case such as this, where no one could be oblivious to the possibility of scrutiny, where no one was unaccustomed to the experience of scrutiny, and where no one, therefore, could be expected to be unaware of their effect.

The audience was never still. People shifted their positions or left altogether, and others immediately took their places. There was no overwhelming narrative reason for coming or going; the film was a series of moving staircases which you got on or off whenever you felt like. Only the children remained settled, compressing or separating according to horror or humour. And of course the dogs, still prowling between the humans – a glint of their part-dingo ancestry occasionally showing in an uninterested eye.

And then, the very second the video finished – and I mean the actual story, not the reel; the plot, not the credits – they were gone, up and vanished all of them, without even bothering to wait for the name of the actor whose cowardice had given them so much pleasure to appear on the screen. It would be no exaggeration to say I didn’t see a single one of them go, because they didn’t go, in the accepted usage of that word, they simply and suddenly – like Prospero’s palaces – dissolved. Where they once had been, there they now were not. Precisely as the earliest explorers had noticed of Aborigines, they still possessed the power to evanesce.