We all swooned a bit. Hardly speaking, we sat with our legs crossed, chewing chilli sausages and pepper steaks sandwiched between thick absorbent slices of white bread; and unified in a single suspiration we washed them down with billy tea. What brought the idea of language back to our little lapsed party was Leanne’s damper, rising miraculously from a cast-iron pan which she’d placed on the burning embers. Buttered and dripping marmalade or jam, it resembled an enormous Devonshire scone, an entire cream tea in a single bite.

I asked for the recipe. ‘Flour and water,’ Leanne said. I swooned again, in an ecstasy this time over ingredients not outline.

It must have been the sight of this bushman’s scone that reminded Neil and Dawn of their whizz through the West Country on their one and only English trip. A visit that had very nearly been ruined for them at the outset by an event they still vividly remembered. ‘We heard on the aeroplane,’ Dawn said, ‘that Mrs Thatcher had just been elected Prime Minister. But by then it was too late to turn back.’

I laughed, but they weren’t of course joking. They were a serious couple, Neil and Dawn. They really did believe that you oughtn’t to go merry-making in a place of whose politics you didn’t approve. Thus they wouldn’t go to South Africa or North America. And they hadn’t yet been to Queensland. ‘We’ll wait for that one,’ Dawn said.

‘I admit it cuts your travel options down a bit,’ Neil conceded.

Talk turned again to the problems of Areyonga and what they all saw as the hopeless intransigence of white attitudes to blacks. It was queer, sitting by the fire under the stars on this marvellous warm night, eating damper running with marmalade, lazily feeding the flames merely by reaching for any combustible to hand – the very ground we sat on was combustible – and tossing it on, and at the same time fuming over ocker incomprehension of Aborigines. I had a feeling that Aborigines themselves would not have wanted to be the object of our concern here, now, in this setting. ‘People talk about their language as if there’s just one,’ Leanne said. ‘And they think that’s just a series of simple noises. They’ve no idea of the range of sophistication in Pitjantjatjara, for example. Simple noises? I’d like to hear them trying to make some of those simple noises!’