I passed an old man sitting crosslegged on the ground, a wiry grey beard, Einstein hair, a black vest on his bare chest. ‘Hello,’ I said as I passed—it seemed rude to say nothing—and he gave a small gesture with one hand and an inclination of the head: a king acknowledging his subject.

When they looked at us what did they see? Did they think, our land, these rude people coming without asking? We might have seen them as ‘homeless’ or what a shopkeeper called ‘riffraff’— but did they regard us as people who’d walked straight into their living room without even knocking?

Nothing was disturbing or threatening about any of them, but there was a powerful sense of them as ‘other’. For a man like Thornhill, out there in the bush, a day’s boat ride from any help, that otherness might have seemed threatening. He might have been frightened, and fear might have made him do anything at all.

We met the artists at the house where they stayed when they were in town. They were old men in frayed suit jackets, flannelette shirts, bare feet. They were stern, dignified. Their faces were on a big scale. Nose, eyebrows, mouth: everything was large, serious, workmanlike.

They didn’t speak much. Their English was so accented it was almost impossible to understand. It came in clots, short bursts of sound. My Gija, however, was much worse than their English.

Even with each other they seemed to be men of few words.

One man sat on the couch on the verandah. With a long imperious finger he gestured for his cup to be refilled—a flick of the wrist, a small expressive movement of the shiny black fingers, fluid as water, as if they were equipped with extra joints.

They were cattlemen before the equal pay claim went through in 1968. Then they were all sacked by the station owners. But it meant these men knew their country, because the cattle stations were on their traditional land. That was what they painted. The canvases were simple shapes in bold colours, a few lines of dots. Some of them had terse titles. ‘Kangaroo Dreaming’. ‘Emu Dreaming’. Now and then, if pressed, they might reluctantly point to a part of the painting and say, ‘it’s a big waterhole’ or ‘where the emu went’.

You knew it was much more than a big waterhole, much more than a symbolic shape on canvas. It embodied the whole story they knew about the place. They knew the story in all its nuances, but they were only going to tell what they chose to.