We were in the Liveringa region, heading for Myroodah Crossing, some two hundred kilometres south of Derby, when Neil wound down his window to talk cherrabun with an elderly Aborigine who was about to cast his net into a billabong. The cherrabun is the delicacy of the area, a large freshwater prawn whose ‘run’, during the appropriate season, brings out every fisherman and gourmet for miles around. We’d heard a lot from Neil, since we’d set off on our two-day expedition that morning, on the subject of cherrabun and how many we could expect to catch, so it was not entirely without its discomfort for him to be told by an obvious expert, and in our hearing, that he had no chance – that this wasn’t the time or the weather for them.

‘No big mobs running, boss?’ Neil asked again, just to be certain.

He was the only one talking pidgin. The Aborigine spoke a perfectly comprehensible standard English. He shook his head. But he didn’t want to sound too final. It was clearly not a good idea to contradict a white man flatly. ‘You might be lucky,’ he said. ‘But you’ve more chance with barramundi. My friend got two this morning.’

Neil dropped into his inanities again. ‘‘M catchum big barra? ‘M all along smart fulla.’

The Aborigine observed the pantomime patiently, flicking flies off his face. Behind him a middle-aged woman – presumably his wife – looked on with a kind of weary resentment. This was not the first time, clearly, a white man had pulled up in his Toyota to polish up his pidgin.

Had Myroodah Crossing been dry we would have driven over it as a short cut to Camballin, our immediate destination, an irrigation settlement where Neil had contacts, some investments, and a place for us to sleep. But the flood waters had just been through and the river was swollen. Even if the Toyota had been fitted with twenty-foot-high tyres we couldn’t have made it across, but Neil still ventured out into the shallows and prodded the bottom with a stick. Three white Australian picnickers watched him with amusement from the comfort of their collapsible deckchairs. They had their car radio on, playing ‘Moon River’.

Returning the way we’d come, we passed the Aboriginal couple we’d talked to. They were in the billabong now, examining their net. A small boy was with them, shading his eyes and staring at whatever it is that Aborigines see in the engrossing middle distance. I was struck again by their extraordinary capacity to create a little clearing, like the Promised Land, around themselves.