He took me along the MacDonald Valley, knocked on the door of a house and asked permission to go into the backyard, down beside the river. There, under some plastic garden chairs and a skewiff plastic table, was an engraving in the rock: of a European ship, complete with mast, sails, rudder.

The owner of the garden setting got out the hose and squirted the engraving so we could see it more clearly. He and Patrick stood on the grass discussing whether it was an Aboriginal engraving or a whitefeller one.

I was thinking, this could be Wiseman’s own boat.

Later, as the afternoon began to wear away, Patrick took me up along rough fire-trails, up and up through the National Park. We lurched along in his car, being lashed by branches, tossed about on the seats, onto the high ridges that I’d seen from the track to the campground.

When he turned off the engine the breathing of the bush came flowing into the silence, the sounds of it going about its life as it had always had. I followed Patrick along no track I could see, but he walked confidently into the mass of bushes and trees, glancing back occasionally to orient himself. Then he stopped. We were on a great open place among the trees where a flat platform of stone faced up at the sky. The place itself had such power—of space, of light, of some kind of intensity—that it took me a moment to see what was under our feet. Engravings, one after the other, grooved into the sandstone: kangaroos, emus, fish, humans. Not lined up neatly, but all over the surface of the rock, using its swells and dips to give the images life, each one at a different angle so you had to walk among them to see them and be drawn into the world they came from.

‘What do they mean?’ I asked.

‘No one really knows,’ he said. ‘No one’s left who knows the old stories.’

The engravings lay there on the surface of the rock, speaking up at the air. But there was no one who could hear them any more. There never would be again. Something was lost: not an extinct frog or flower, but an expression of the human spirit, the richness of its meaning vanished.

We stood on the rock platform as if silenced by the power of the place. Around us the leaves moved with a dry whispering sound. A big black bird perched on a branch and watched us with its yellow eye. Far up, in the pale sky, a cloud slowly shredded away to nothing.