I felt particularly bad about this in case I’d inadvertently contributed to his debilitating cultural confusion. One night, prior to driving into town but not wanting to lose our space – it was, as I’ve said, a highly competitive caravan park – I had found a couple of dustbins lying about and used them to mark out my boundaries. He had watched me doing this with some concern. ‘So that no one nicks my spot,’ I’d explained, illustrating my meaning partly by shouting, and partly by pointing to the campervan, to the ground, and to Alice Springs. Unfortunately I am a careless pointer and had in fact signalled Heaven, Hell, and Coober Pedy. To make it even harder for him we had no sooner driven out than we had both been beset by a sudden lassitude which compelled us to drive back in again. Watching me return, remove the bins, and park the van precisely where it had been fifty seconds earlier could have been what tipped the balance for him. It was possible that he didn’t have the confidence, after that, to go out again and mix with Euro-Australians.

Just as I didn’t have the confidence to go out and mix with Aborigines. I don’t mean that loosely. I’m not talking about casual street encounters. I had an invitation in my pocket to visit the Aboriginal community of Areyonga, 300 kilometres due west of Alice Springs, where the road finally gives out on Haasts Bluff Aboriginal Land. We’d been invited along, subject to Land Council permission, by Leanne Cook, a teacher at the Areyonga Bilingual School whom we’d met outside the amphitheatre on our last morning in Yulara. Come and see what we do, she had said, and we had considered ourselves enormously lucky to be asked. Except that, when the moment to front up to getting that permission actually came, I lost my nerve somewhat. Wasn’t it a bit far? Wasn’t the road a bit rough? Wasn’t it a bit cheeky on our part to go nosing into an area that we had no business in?

Which is the real reason I hung around the caravan park. The longer I could go on finding interest in the unremarkable the longer I could fend off the unfamiliar. Who needed Areyonga when there was the shower block?

But I couldn’t get away with this for ever. I was beginning to bore myself, for one thing. And my back was playing up. And Ros was becoming increasingly unimpressed by the dialogue I was bringing back. So the morning finally arrived when I capitulated. ‘The person to talk to at Central Land Council is Merle,’ Leanne had told us. ‘Then Merle it is,’ I said to Ros.

16 Ghostbusting

Sixteen
 
Ghostbusting