What they’d perhaps never possessed the power to do, though, was take their rubbish with them. It was still there on the floor – the tissues from their hotdogs and the polystyrene cups from which they’d drunk their trashy cordials, torn and broken, tossed aside without a thought – the only evidence that they’d ever been here. ‘What I think it shows,’ I said to Brylynn, ‘is the instinctive attitude of nomadic peoples to an expended site. They are up and they are off. It’s only the obsessively permanent, like ourselves, who fret about litter, and care about being house-proud and street-proud. What all that is, is neurosis of the immobile. Don’t you think?’

But Brylynn was too busy sweeping up to have time to answer me.

Although there was room in Leanne’s house for us to sleep, it seemed an unnecessary imposition on her given that we had our campervan outside. So we just drove it up her path and said good night and locked our doors and lay awake listening to the dogs.

Had all the dogs in London been rounded up, and every bitch been prodigiously on heat, they would not have made one quarter of the racket the dogs of Areyonga made. Earlier in the day we’d met Neil’s dog and seen how, as a mere white man’s ball of fluff, he knew to keep his distance from the real thing. Even in the daylight the front gate was as far as he’d go. At the first wild howl he’d prick his ears and twitch his nose, hearing some distant echo of heroic times, when the blood ran hot; but it was no more than a last, faint atavistic tug on the line. He’d stand stock still, his head ever so slightly to one side, not even bothering to weigh his needs against his safety. What the blackfellers’ dogs got up to was not for him. He was out of it now. As were we all.

Neil’s cockerel, confused about the dawn, woke us at 3.50 a.m. This meant that we were up and ready in good time for the proposed walk up Helicopter Hill – so called because of its flat landing-strip summit – in the company of whoever wasn’t teaching, that’s to say Geraldine, Dawn, and Dawn’s two boys.

We had a good, invigoratingly spiral climb up the hill, from the top of which we could look out over Areyonga and see how bare and minimally purposeful it was. Ros found a geode – already worked – and declared that we were in an ochre area, but that didn’t help me overcome my sense that however ruggedly beautiful the country was here there was also a quality of ruination about it. Ruination wholly independent of anything humans had done. ‘The very stones lying upon the hills,’ the explorer Eyre wrote of an even more desolate Australian mountain range, ‘looked like the scorched and withered scoria of a volcanic region.’ And so they did here. It wasn’t just the fault of people that Areyonga always looked like some sort of accident.