Of all things not pebbly in the vicinity of Uluru, the most lovely had been the desert oak – a casuarina, not a eucalypt, which seemed to droop in the most melancholy way when it was hot, but in the early morning, or when freshened by a breeze, would rally with a sort of silvery shudder that any ballet dancer might envy. Now it was the white gum, as made famous in Namatjira’s paintings, that caught the eye. And the Aboriginal association is not fortuitous. Every now and then a species of tree and an inbreed of person hit it off well. You sit an Englishman under an oak. A Pacific Islander beneath a palm. Me beside a boab. And an Aborigine below, behind, before – the preposition eludes you because it is so often as if he simply materializes from – a white gum tree.

A man must always resist his taste for the picturesque, but my most vivid recollection of Alice Springs is: Aborigines returning home along the dried-up bed of the Todd River in the late afternoon, a slow, dusty, crepuscular glide which played tricks with perspective as well as time, so that you could never be entirely certain whether you were merely watching the same scene infinitely repeated, or whether it was the trees themselves that were moving and the men and women utterly still.

But when we weren’t scrambling up the Macdonnell Ranges to look at examples of Aboriginal rock art – sometimes no more than a couple of ochre stripes on an orange stone, or a rough semi-circular gouge in a crumbling wall; and when I wasn’t losing my temper with the politics of ‘sacred sites’, not being able to think of anything at Corroboree Rock, ‘where sacred objects or tyuringe (pronounced tew-ring-ger)’ were buried, except mezzuzahs and tzitzits and tefillin – when we weren’t punishing ourselves like this with conscientiousness, I was able to get back to the more interesting business of creeping around the caravan park with my notebook.

Outside one ramshackle old van I heard the occupant currying favour with the site manager. ‘Every other bugger wanted me thrown out,’ he said, not knowing which upset him most, remembering the indignity or acknowledging the obligation – ‘You were the only cunt who understood me.’

And from the caravan opposite – more like a nightclub, to be truthful, with bamboo blinds over the windows and coloured lights in the pergola and a pyramid of used beer cans mounting by the front door – there poured an unremitting repertoire of filthy folk songs, sung in a self-mocking nasal twang by a sort of Australian George Formby.

Mick me mate the master farter –

Jesus! you should have heard him fart . . .

was his favourite, the thing about Mick being that he had a ‘double-jointed arse’.