While I’d been talking to Jane I’d kept half an eye on a large open truck which appeared to be driving up and down the two roads of Areyonga and round and round the school playground for the sole purpose of picking up stray women and young girls. It turned out that there was nothing sinister in this. The entire female population of Areyonga was off for the weekend to Yuendumu or thereabouts – a cross-country trip of over twelve hours – to play a game of softball. The truck kept circling so that no one should be left behind. When at last it was ready to leave – Leanne had joined me outside and was my guide to this ritual – it made one more circle of the settlement with all the women piled into the back waving and shouting goodbye, before driving off at speed and in a cloud of dust in the direction of Papunya, the first stop. Half an hour later it was back. Once again it cruised the town, and once again, to the sound of even more shrill excitement, it sped off in a cloud of dust. This procedure was repeated more times than I could count. ‘What happens,’ Leanne explained, ‘is that the women keep changing their minds about going. They get ten kilometres out and think they’d rather be back here.’ And sure enough, when I looked around, there, sitting contendedly in a circle under a tree, were several of the women we’d seen waving us goodbye the first time.

There was an end to this. The truck finally did leave. Only this time it was not jammed with shouting women but shouting men. What had been intended as a girls-only excursion ended up, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, as a trip away for the boys. ‘They leave it to the women to arrange it,’ Leanne said, ‘and presumably to pay for it – then they take it over.’