As an almost deliberate act of will, so as not to have to know what I was letting myself in for, I had not bothered to enquire what Areyonga was. All along I had been half fearing and half hoping that we were on our way to an ancient site where we would find barely clothed tribespeople – or at least not clothed in jumble sale T-shirts and beanies – practising their marvellous arts of survival and living in humpies and wurlies which figured in my imagination as scarcely distinguishable from wigwams. Had I taken the trouble to find out I would have discovered that Areyonga was in fact a couple of years younger than I was, and owed its origins – as presumably did I – to the Second World War. Dismayed by the high incidence of native begging and foraging for food at the military camps around Alice Springs, the authorities saw the need to establish a rations depot deep into Aranda and Pitjantjatjara territory in order to check what in official language was called ‘population drift’. The advantage of Areyonga as a site – leaving aside distance – lay in its possession of a permanent water supply already known and used by natives, and the nearby presence of missionary influence. From the very start the Administration worked closely with the Finke River Mission, leaving it to distribute the rations which the Administration provided. Ten years later the Acting Administrator spelt out the Government’s policy ‘to co-operate with the Christian Missions and to give governmental support to their work. We adopt this policy both because we place a high value on Christian teaching and the spiritual counsel and moral guidance of the Church in the uplifting of humanity and because we recognize that the Missions can also make a major contribution to those measures in health, education, and training for citizenship which open a path for the native people towards full social acceptance within our community.’ A few things had changed since then, of course, and it would have been a brave man who dared to discuss spiritual counsel and uplift with Merle. Yet up until only a few days before we got there, the most powerful presence in Areyonga had still been the pastor – the Reverend Leo Kalleske whose tearful departure from the township after thirty-four years of moral tutelage we had read about in the newspapers back in Alice Springs. Auf Wiedersehen, many of the Aborigines who lined the farewell route out of Areyonga had been taught to say, Auf Wiedersehen Frau und Herr Kalleske.

So Areyonga was looking more or less the way it had always been intended to.