We arrived in Kununurra, the main town in the Kimberley, in the afternoon. We were staying out at the caravan park, so we went to the supermarket first for supplies. Waiting for the others outside, I was staring around. The light was so white, the shadows so solid. The sky so pale. Everything was new.

I wasn’t far from a group of Aboriginal people talking among themselves. Their skin was as black as the shadows. Their faces—I glanced quickly and then away—folded in on themselves, unreadable. They were talking quietly, and at first I thought that was why I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then I realised they weren’t speaking English. They were speaking a language where all the words and even the cadences were unlike anything I’d heard before.

Oh, I thought to myself, they’re speaking a foreign language.

I heard myself think that thought.

No, I realised. It’s me. I’m the one speaking the foreign language.

I was ashamed. My first reaction had been to think they were the foreigners. That was how backward I was, underneath those fine sentiments. In spite of all my good intentions and my high-minded thoughts, I didn’t understand a thing.

Now that was something I was never going to learn from a book. But I could use it. Thornhill might have reacted in just the same way.

Groups of Aboriginal people sat under the trees in the parks of Kununurra, blending into the flickering light and shade. The sounds of their laughter carried across the grass to us. They had an ability to do nothing more than sit. Even in full sun the details of their faces somehow disappeared. They always looked cross—those heavy frowning brows, those serious mouths—until they smiled. Then you could see they weren’t angry. It was just the way their faces were.

One man sat alone under a tree, so still, as if he was listening to something, tuned in to some other place. The darkness of his face made it impossible to read his expression.

Another man walked across the grass towards us, heading for the shop. He shot a quick glance our way and a spot of reflected light flicked into his eyes from a passing car. It made them so bright in the darkness of his face that it was as if they were lit from within.

When the Aboriginal people walked, it was in a way no European walked—it was leisurely, but they seemed to cover the ground fast. They were all legs: long thin legs with no bulging calf muscle, the feet big boxy shapes. Their bare feet settled down into each deliberate step, their weight somehow carried behind the hips. Even in the white glare of noon in Kununurra, when all humans became nothing more than silhouettes, it was easy to tell a white person from a black one by the way they moved.