I looked out of the window and watched a group of young Aborigines seeing off one of their friends. I noticed that although there was plenty of social by-play while they waited for the bus to leave – pretend high spirits, awkward tomfoolery, stone-kicking and back-slapping – come the actual moment of parting the break was quite sudden. No kissing, no tears, and only the most perfunctory wave. There was not much to do on these buses except watch people getting on and off, and I believed that what I saw at Tennant Creek was generally true – that amongst Aborigines the emotion and ceremony of departure was kept to a minimum. So what did it mean? Was it residual nomadic wisdom: an old preservative instinct that, in such a vast country and where there was inevitably so much coming and going, you couldn’t afford to make a fuss over leave-taking? And, if so, might that not also explain the origin of the great distinctive Australian expression, ‘See you later,’ which causes so much confusion when it’s used to non-Australians who aren’t expecting to see you again for another six months, if ever at all?

White Australians frequently complain that Aborigines have an unsatisfactory concept of time – they say they’ll do something on such-and-such a date, and then they don’t. ‘Time means nothing to them,’ Bill Richards had told me. ‘They don’t know if they were born yesterday or tomorrow.’ But even for whites in Australia time is a more than usually fluid concept. No sweat; no worries; she’ll be right – what is this small-change of ordinary transactional life but a sort of assurance that time stretches out infinitely and beneficently, and that no moment should ever be singled out for urgency?

It was at Tennant Creek that the idea came to me that it wasn’t only the black man who was Dreaming in Australia.

‘Historical studies of the role played by the Aboriginal since contact with white settlers are sparse,’ says C. D. Rowley. ‘In the broad scope of Australian historical studies he appears as an almost completely passive figure. Yet it is difficult to believe that long association and the most intimate personal relationships in frontier areas have failed to influence the style of Australian life.’ Forget the ‘frontier areas’ aspect of the argument; as far as I was concerned you could trace Aboriginal influence in the very language most commonly heard on Australian lips.