They painted with total absorption. What they were seeing as they painted seemed to go far beyond the surface of the canvas. It was as if they could see every detail of the place in the eye of their mind, even though it might have been years since they’d been able to visit it. Watching them paint you could see how deep it went. They didn’t need to see it.

I felt awkward with them. Not easily sharing a language made it difficult. But it was more than that. These rigorous old men made me aware that I was living in a place I didn’t know the first thing about.

We had the show in the Kununurra library. The librarian told me the men had probably never been inside the library before. She was terribly pleased that they were there and understood that it wouldn’t have been easy for them to come. They stalked in as a group, in cowboy shirts and boots, courteous but reserved, and sat down in the plastic chairs, their faces unreadable.

An elder from their community gave a speech. She stood four-square, in a bright patterned skirt and a shirt of another bright pattern. Her face was lean, deeply grooved. Her face, her body, had nothing extraneous about them. The essential human face, the essential human body.

She told the story of a massacre of Aboriginal people that had happened on their country. A boab tree marked the spot. After the massacre the bodies were burned. She told us that there was still a big bare place on the ground. ‘The fat came out of the bodies,’ she said, very matter-of-fact. ‘So nothing grows there after that.’

The audience—mostly white—listened in silence. In this welcoming place, this room full of books, pictures, smiling librarians, this story was like a truck driving through the wall. The things she was talking about had happened just down the road. It was in the lifetime of her own grandmother. Of our own grandmothers.

Afterwards, when everyone had gone, we took down the white fabric we’d pinned up as background for the photographs and put the chairs back where they belonged. I moved the chair where one of the painters had sat, a long tall thin man with legs bowed as if from years in the saddle. On the carpet around the chair were pebbles—red chips of the stone the country was made of.

The librarian saw them too. Her eyes met mine. ‘He brought them in with him,’ she said. She was almost whispering. ‘I saw him get them out of his pocket.’ She made a secretive twisting gesture with a hand down near her hip. ‘Dropped them all around him.’