It occurred to me also, as I watched them shinning up the Rock, that here too lay the reason for the number of middle-aged and even elderly Australians who were chasing across the country. They were reclaiming title to it. Prompted by a deepening national insecurity about the ownership of land they had always assumed was theirs without question, they were now having to embark upon expeditions of reconquest and recolonization. Only the night before in the shower rooms I had listened to one old pedant asking another where he was off to, prior of course to telling him how to get there. ‘Alice Springs, Mt Isa, Townsville, Cairns, Borroloola, Katherine, Darwin, Broome, Perth, Albany, the Nullarbor,’ the other had replied, running through the names as if the mere saying of them was incantatory; the act of pronouncing them a kind of rehearsal of occupancy; visiting them a confirmation of possession. Hence the enormous size and duration of many of these journeys, great perimeter loops around the states necessitating absences of years in some instances. So many arthritic Ulysseses in caravans they saw themselves as being, not choosing to stay at home and mete and dole unequal laws; but all along it was an old errand that they were on, staking out a birthright that was suddenly under threat.

I could see that it might have been of no earthly satisfaction to Aborigines to know it, and probably of no earthly use to them either, but it seemed to me that they had white Australians well and truly on the run.

It took Ros and me almost the same amount of time to storm our separate ways over Uluru. If anything I finished a minute or two before she did – the book being altogether less acclivitous than the Rock – which gave me time to take a stroll around the van and listen to a scrawny couple of about my age congratulating themselves on their successful climb. He was bearded and bald but for a single strand of hair which he combed in a circular motion so that it sat on his head like the sort of coiled raffia mat I had been taught to make in primary school. He might have been a lecturer in an undervalued subject at an Institute of Technology, and years before she might have been one of his brighter students. She too had a single coil of hair, only in her case it was deliberate – a short, colourless plait wound hypersensitively tight. She wore a simple empty singlet and a pair of white towelling shorts not unlike a nappy. I had watched her crawling up the Rock on her hands and knees in these shorts several hours earlier and the sight had helped me to concentrate on Peter B. English. Now the two of them were out of breath and triumphant, scanning the heights they’d scaled with a pair of binoculars each and mocking the puny efforts of others.