Behind a counter marked PERMITS a heavy, handsome, self-possessed and laconic part-Aboriginal woman sat eating a sandwich. ‘I’m looking for Merle,’ I said, feeling pretty certain that this was she. I didn’t let anything like certitude show though – not here, not in the offices of the Central Land Council. I wanted them to see that my intentions were entirely pacific. If I could reasonably have approached the counter with my hands up, I would have.

‘You’ve found her,’ she said, in-between bites. But the minute I started to explain why I was looking for her, she stopped me. ‘I’m just finishing smoko,’ she said, staring directly at me. It was a perfectly weighted reprimand – not a rudeness but the surest of parodies, for her own satisfaction and my education, of a white person’s unhurried attitude to a black.

‘Please, please take the longest of smokos there has ever been,’ I would have said had I not promised Ros that I wouldn’t humiliate us both by excessive deference. Which is the reason I wasn’t on my knees either.

I thought Merle was going to take her smoko in front of us and go on eating her sandwich, very slowly, while we waited; but in fact she disappeared and came back again five minutes and thirty-eight seconds later. ‘OK, what can I do for you people?’ she asked.

She was a deeply ironical woman, experienced, unimpressionable, politicized not in the firebrand manner of the young but as if on a slow burner, simmering evenly. She treated us both to the frankest of looks, as though she’d heard everything that we had to say a hundred times before. After a laborious account from me about who we were, where we came from, why we were here, who we’d met from Areyonga and what we hoped to do when we got there (which was mainly get the hell back again), she said, ‘Look, I think I’ll just give you a permit.’