We’d read that there was a serious cheap wine glut in Australia, that a more discriminating public had left behind the bulk stuff and was now progressing nicely through the vintages, as a consequence of which the country had a plonk lagoon as great as Europe’s butter mountain. Sturt’s inland lake found at last. But at least out here there was no paradox of the needy growing gaunt while all around them was plenty. Short of actually piping the wine in, the distributors could not have made a better job of shoving a surplus in the way of its market.

In order to make absolutely certain that none of the irony would be missed, that vulgar stage manager, life, had contrived to sit a cask of Coolabah, with its empty tin-foil skin spilling from it, right beside the red stone cairn to Albert Namatjira, the Aboriginal painter from Hermannsburg who himself had not been able to withstand either the blandishments or the anodynes of white society.

It was a plain monument – a stone pillar some sixteen or seventeen feet high – carrying a simple inscription:

This is the landscape that inspired

the artist, ALBERT NAMATJIRA.

28.7.1902–8.8.1959

It suddenly occurred to me that I knew what I was doing on the day he died. I was on holiday in the Lake District with schoolfriends, and I was throwing up. I could be sure of that because I had counted off the seventeen days to my seventeenth birthday that summer by getting drunk and throwing up on every one of them.

Albert was a full forty years older. You could argue that he should have known better by then. But I don’t really see that one must attach a use-by date to the allure of self-annihilation. I was touched, as it was impossible not to be, by this modest memorial to creativity and despair, erected in a sublime and lonely place, but the story of Albert Namatjira’s failure to survive success outside his own community held an exquisite satisfaction to white Australians which it seemed to me a duty to resist. Even leaving aside the sequence of prohibitions and rebuffs that led Namatjira into alcoholism (not being allowed to buy this, not being allowed to build that, not being allowed to go there), what sense did it make to talk of it as a tragedy of race, of cultural unreadiness, yet another heartbreaking example of a gifted black man unable to hold his liquor – ‘Their livers are even different from ours,’ Australians will tell you; ‘they get drunk just looking at the bottle’ – when all around were gifted white men equally unable to hold theirs?

A few kilometres before Areyonga we slowed down to read the following notice:

RESTRICTED AREA

The possession or consumption of liquor beyond

this point without a permit is a serious offence.

Vehicles carrying liquor may be seized and

forfeited and the following penalties may apply:

First offence, up to $1,000 fine or 8 months gaol.