Leaving aside the question of sexual politics – and it was clearly not a cut and dried case of one group exercising its tyranny over another – this event seemed to me to provide an unusual and sympathetic insight into an alternative interpretation of decision. Here was no finality. Here was no heavy burden of completion morality. Here everything remained open and flexible, not just until the last minute but even way beyond it. Simply because you embarked upon a journey was that any reason you should finish it? The whole thing suddenly struck me as intelligible and desirable. Who said a beginning was a binding contract to provide an end? Protestants, I supposed. But wouldn’t Hamlet have had a happier time of it if he’d been a blackfeller sitting under a tree, or on the back of a truck, in Areyonga? How all occasions do inform against me? Not here they wouldn’t. Yes, this part of being an Aborigine looked good to me. Not least because I imagined it as one in the eye for Pastor Kalleske – another failure of the missions to load their charges down with the weight of responsibility and obligation. I could see that there were problems as far as the people at the other end were concerned – those waiting for their game of softball – but then they were Aboriginal women also, and so presumably engaged in similar vacillations. It was only a game anyway. Like everything else in life.

A barbecue had been planned for us later that evening. ‘A bush barbecue,’ Neil had said, ‘not here in Areyonga.’ I’d looked surprised. Wasn’t Areyonga bush? ‘I mean real bush,’ Neil said.

So we set off after school, loaded down with provisions, Neil and Dawn and Brylynn in Neil’s Toyota, Ros and Geraldine and I in Leanne’s Pajero. It was the first time I’d been in any relation to a Pajero except that of external satirist. Now, as a passenger, I had to eat crow. It did, what I think they call in the business, the business. Following Neil, we travelled out of Areyonga on roads that had not been there before we made them. Up mountains, through forests, along the beds of creeks, the Pajero all the while purring as if we’d taken it for a roll on an asphalt carpet. It’s the same with everything I thought: get inside the object of your satire and you forget what you found ridiculous. Cars, men, institutions – the same truth held. The only safety was in distance.