I was dismayed, I have to say, by the amount of colouring-in I saw going on, but it was Friday afternoon and you could feel time being marked before the weekend. In her Production Centre, where equipment with the capacity to produce the Sydney Morning Herald was languishing for want of a printer, Leanne introduced us to her teaching aid, Nyukana. It was a feature of the bilingual programme that an indigenous language speaker and member of the community should be employed as an assistant. ‘Nyukana is the Pitjantjatjara model and I am the English model,’ Leanne explained. I suppressed my purist loathing for that particular usage of the word model – a model was a train or it was Twiggy, it seemed to me – and I tried to introduce myself to Nyukana. But her shyness was gargantuan. The whole top half of her body fell away, her eyes raked the ground, her arms went everywhere. Infected by it, we did the same. I lost control of all my limbs. Ros’s face set in an inane smile. Even Leanne had to turn away. We were all relieved when Nyukana resorted at last to Aboriginal social magic and dissolved.

I was very much taken by shyness on such a scale. I don’t just mean that I was beguiled by its sweetness – though I was beguiled by its sweetness – but I also thought it gave a clue to another idea of privacy, that it was a true register of the great shock that meeting a stranger actually is. I felt that I shared something of this resistance to the nakedness of new encounter with Nyukana for, although I did not go quite so spectacularly awry myself when it happened, I was none the less never able to hear let alone remember the name of any new person I was meeting.

There is an argument which maintains that present-day Aboriginal delitescence and tongue-tiedness is a sign of their inadequacy and shame, a function of their being instilled with the idea of their inferiority. But this is no more than the rationalization of a culture which has by and large lost its awe of strangers and puts a high premium on social competence. We are all salesmen now and you can’t sell anything if you carry on like Nyukana. The assumption is that self-respect and the confidence easily to interact must go together. What the earliest explorers noted in their journals again and again, though, was the exquisite reserve of Aborigines, their overwhelming desire to be unseen – even if that meant shinning up a tree and staying there – long before there was any instilled sense of inferiority to attribute it to.