Myself I thought it highly feasible, and a most excellent wheeze to boot, that a number of floating Aborigines had been hastily and opportunistically incorporated for the purpose of there being somebody the rock could be handed over to. Why not? Are the dispossessed to have a nicer morality than their despoilers? Besides, the act of restitution, like the ceremony in which it was formalized, was entirely symbolic. At the very best it only signified some good faith and a queasy conscience. So the fanatic hostility to it, whether issuing in the dumb show of spiritual disinheritance as mimed by the Australian Liberal Party, or the legal punctiliousness of Peter B. English – wanting it to go to the right Aborigines or no Aborigines at all, which means no Aborigines at all – is both inappropriate and inexplicable until one remembers what the handing over symbolizes for them. ‘Few Australians watching the hand-over “ceremony” on their television sets in the comfort of their own homes throughout the continent will forget the scenes so vividly portrayed by the electronic Media that night,’ Mr English recalls. ‘For these featured prominently the red and black flag of the Land Rights campaigners, fists raised in the Black Power “salute” – and a part-white showing a three-year-old child perched on his shoulder how to ball his little fist into a salute which had its origins in the Black Panther movement in America and is synonymous with every scene depicting mob violence in troubled South Africa.’

Here then is what the fuss was really all about – mob violence, imported images of identity, and fist-raising baby blacks. The something very precious that the letter-writing white Australians thought they were going to lose when inalienable freehold title in Uluru National Park was granted to the Mutitjulus was not Ayers Rock but peace of mind. And that was the explanation for the queer unease you could smell all over the multi-milion-dollar Yulara Tourist Resort – the place was rattled. Not within the boundaries of the National Park itself, and not therefore obliged to part with any percentage of its profits to the Park’s new owners, Yulara nevertheless felt as jittery as a last outpost.