I curled out a finger and flicked a branch onto the fire. Our own conversation had scarcely been more than a series of simple noises for some time now – I sighing over the rising dough, Ros crooning over the bush, Neil and Dawn reiterating the fact that we’d stolen Aboriginal land and had to give it back. And that satisfied me. It was good, once in a while, knowing your role and limiting the range of your responses to a couple of syllables. It went with being all profile and no substance. And that’s the other advantage of a barbecue in the bush – it isn’t necessary that you have an inner life in order to enjoy it. Off, off and away I went, spinning into the immensity, my own untenanted circumference.

After another night of street theatre from the dogs of Areyonga – this time they did the Rape of the Sabine Woman and the Sacking of Troy – we rose to find Leanne building a barbecue in her back garden, preparatory to making us damper as a farewell breakfast present.

While things were still at their early stage, the damper a mere latency yet in a bowl of flour and water, I ran across the road to get more marmalade from the community store. I’d heard about the community store and wanted to see it for myself before I left. There was some issue about it in Areyonga which I hadn’t been able wholly to track down. It was run by a white man for the black community, with the idea that its profits should be ploughed back into the settlement. But so far a narrow strip of cleared ground with a basketball net at either end was all the tangible benefit to the community the store had provided.

It was a great hollow barn of a place with petrol pumps outside. Within, its metal shelves were stocked with a limited range of standard junk foods – orange juice that wasn’t really orange juice, bottles of cordial and cola, tins of corned beef and baked beans. Understandably, given the problems of distance and transport, everything was pre-packaged, canned or frozen. And for the same reason everything was impossibly expensive. So you got the worst of all worlds here – it wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t fresh and it didn’t taste nice.

A large quantity of black and yellow tracksuit tops hung from a rail in the corner, near the folding mattresses and the army-surplus type blankets. The only clue to any more exotic or invigorating life lived in Areyonga was given by the shelf of cowboy boots and saddles. Every now and then, I’d heard, the local boys would go out looking for wild horses to catch and train. But I didn’t see any saddles being bought. Only corned beef and hotdogs – the latter being made on one of those hot-spiked Spanish Inquisition contraptions which impales the bun.