Leanne having one or two other matters to attend to, it was Brylynn who showed us the way to the school. After a bit of a pouty patch at the waterholes, when she’d been inexplicably fuming at one of those infinitesimal family slights only discernible to the naked eye of a fifteen-year-old, she was now at her most expansive. All people of this age are of course schizophrenic; but the term has to be understood in its Darwinian, not in its Freudian, sense. They are simply selecting the personality that will give them the greatest possible chance of survival. I hoped Brylynn would select this one. She talked to us briskly about the school and the teaching she was doing there herself while she was on holiday. Wanting to work with children in the future she was treating this as serious experience, even though her own teachers back in Airey’s Inlet didn’t think much of the idea and believed she would have been better off putting in a couple of weeks playing ring-a-roses with the local infants.

Which is what I would very much have preferred to be doing from the moment Brylynn pushed open the door of the school and showed us in. A sight of a kind there was nothing in any part of my cultural background to prepare me for met my eyes. Aborigines of all ages, Aborigines of all sizes, Aborigines dressed for every possible climate, squatting on the floor of the hall on old blankets or on scraps of mouldy carpet or simply on the bare concrete itself – a hot, black huddle of wholly foreign and for that reason wholly frightening humanity (‘Oh, God! Sir, look at them; look at them!’) less packed and less numerous only than their dogs who were also here tonight to see the video – sleeping where there was space, prowling where there  wasn’t, the scabbiest curs you ever saw, fighting, scratching, sniffing, in some instances even pissing, without any sense at all that the inside was not the outside or that the school hall was not the road.

From behind a hatch a couple of bright-eyed girls, as astonished by the sight of us as we were by the sight of them, sold us hotdogs. These they presented to us, with a shy aversion of their heads, on a square of tissue. Holding mine aloft, while trying not to spill the sauce, I decided that the better part of valour was valour and plunged into the heaving mass. A dog looked at me curiously as I found a space to squat in, which caused me suddenly to be queasy about my sausage. To hell with it, I thought, meat’s meat. And I sank my teeth in, thinking that I had eaten much that wasn’t kosher in my life before, but that this was trayf and trayf again – this was über-trayf.