Someone with the name – or at least with the pen name – Peter B. English kept me busy the following afternoon while Rosalin succumbed to the I just want to be able to say I’ve done it personal achievement ethic, and climbed the Rock. Not Peter B. English in person; I spent the day with him only in the sense that I had toppled into a work of polemic he had written – Storm Over Uluru: The Greatest Hoax of All – and was unable to clamber out. I had bought it that morning because it was very nearly the only book with words in it for sale in the Yulara newsagency. That and Land Rights and Birthrights: The Great Australian Hoax, also by Peter B. English. I had been curious about his virtual monopoly of the shelves. To the point of actually asking the assistant why other books that could be considered relevant to the area – John Bryson’s Evil Angels, for example, the bleak and brilliant study of the circumstances of Azaria Chamberlain’s death, selling well everywhere else in Australia – were not in stock. It wasn’t for me to have any attitude to a private newsagent’s buying policy, but I thought I could spot a fairly distinct way of looking at the world in the choice of books available, that’s assuming that Peter B. English’s works were as scurrilous as they looked, and I wouldn’t have minded finding out how far this reflected the purely idiosyncratic taste of the buyer or was in fact quasi-official corporate Yulara weltanschauung. Something was rotten in the state of Yulara but so far I hadn’t quite been able to nose it out.

‘Well, I don’t do the ordering,’ the girl said. ‘But I’ll mention that one to him when he gets back. Evil what, did you say?’

So I had no choice, really, but to buy Storm Over Uluru and see for myself what people were reading and thinking about in the third largest settlement in the Northern Territory.