One very curious and frequently observable fact of relations between the Aborigine and the White Australian is that no matter how much the second offers to despise and denigrate the first, he will nevertheless go to great lengths to secure his regard, to earn his approval, almost, you might say, to receive his blessing. Absolutely without their realizing that they are doing so, and in the face of quite opposing impulses and attitudes, those white Australians who value the idea of ‘maleness’ and associate it with bush know-how and outback fearlessness – a rugged and sometimes even vaguely mystical survivalism – acknowledge in the Aborigine their highest ideal. Time and again in those country towns which can still boast an Aboriginal population, you will see enacted the same one-act social drama, in which the European seeks reassurance on the question of his manliness from the Aborigine, in which the white man is the eager petitioner for friendship – street friendship, equality, not intimacy – and the lordly bestower of it is the black. Even Hector, at the height of his rage, was forever to be seen muttering in corners with Aborigines, looking for their confidence, trusting their opinion on such matters as weather or terrain, showing that he had mastered their patois and was at least equal to their ancient certainties. There wasn’t a single white man in the Boab that Friday night who didn’t greet Rod Drummond, the lead singer of MANTUS, as a friend; who didn’t want to talk guitars and jack plugs with him and triumph in his arm around their shoulders. And Neil too, would-be vigilante, poisoner and rat-catcher, could not, once we were out of town, go past an Aborigine without putting himself to the manliness test. The outward form of every encounter was of course contemptuous – aristocrat to serf, bank manager to window cleaner – but the compulsion to stop and talk, to be equal to any conversation about direction, danger, the whereabouts of game or fish, clearly reached down, down, into a psychology that was both private and national.

There is much talk in Australia these days about white guilt and expiation. What we observed was psychopathic not moral. Advanced schizophrenia, I’d call it.