And the film was idiosyncratically humane enough for you to feel that it was all right to be amused. It appeared to release tensions that it hadn’t itself generated, as if the audience of whites badly needed to laugh at blacks in a context that was not their own and in a spirit that was neither malicious nor particular. I am not aware that The Gods Must Be Crazy enjoyed any unusual success in England, so I can only assume that it provided something Australians required and were not otherwise getting, namely a break from the solemnity of the issue of race. Less than twenty-four hours later in a debris-strewn valley in the Krichauff Ranges we would witness an identical phenomenon, only with the colours reversed.

The next morning, early, we drove west out of Alice Springs in the direction of Areyonga. To take our minds off our apprehension we went in for drooling over the landscape, Ros choosing to notice the fine gradations of amethyst in the mulga, shading off even into lilac. I sticking with the orange of the Ranges, eroded so dramatically that a great wall seemed to run along their rim, shading off even into amber.

For the first hour almost all of the traffic we saw was touristical – occasionally a coach, more frequently a Pajero pulling a Statesman, somebody’s mum with a white scarf round her head in the passenger seat, somebody’s dad driving as if what was left of his life depended on it. But as we neared Hermannsburg, and the exit tracks to the beauty spots thinned out, and the condition of the road deteriorated, it became more and more just us and heavily-laden blackfeller vehicles. No couples circling the continent twinned in mute detestation here. Aborigines don’t travel in such small denominations. If one goes on a journey, they all go on a journey. Piled into the back, hanging off the roof, as much of them out of the vehicle as in it, they belted along, all suspension spent, waving and hallooing, only inches from the dust. You always knew when it was a blackfeller’s truck that was coming towards you, it was so much closer to the ground.

But the other side to this incorrigible sociability was evident everywhere too. Strewn by the road, sometimes still where they’d landed on the very crown of the road, beer cans and stubbies and, somehow worst of all, the cheerless green cardboard boxes of Orlando Coolabah Moselle – the most popular, because it was the least expensive Aboriginal tipple in Alice, at rather less than four dollars, not even two pounds, for a 4-litre cask. We’d counted scores of these boxes, tossed into the dirt and the scrub like so many castaway dreams, ever since leaving town, and though they became less frequent the further we drove into Aboriginal territory they by no means disappeared altogether.