‘I’m sure my memory will come back,’ he said, but he wasn’t really. He shook off his intensity in the guise of resettling himself in the seat, then he turned slightly towards her so he was primed to amuse her. She deserved that. ‘I was going to talk about Weipa.’

‘Yes. Tell me about it.’

‘I always wanted to be a storyteller, with people sitting around listening to my tales.’ His wife had rolled her eyes and gone off to repair her make-up whenever he’d started one of his stories, but he’d drawn kids and older people to laugh with him. He hoped Ava laughed.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Tell me a story about Weipa. For some reason, the idea of flying into the Top End like that captures my imagination.’

He marshalled the memory of that morning when he’d flown to the top of Australia for his first outreach locum. He closed his eyes and let himself sink into the memory. It wasn’t as hard as he’d thought it would be. And it was nice to have some memories. Or maybe that was the audience.

‘So, imagine you are flying into Weipa with me. It’s bumpy through the humidity and the clouds, and then you soar in over a ridge that opens up onto a river delta with a forever amount of red dirt and grey-green shrubs and trees.’ He paused. ‘Got it?’

‘Got it.’

‘Okay. There’s a gleam off the water. Apparently it often looks like a deep steel grey, like the day I landed, and there are islands in the delta and outcrops of rocks catching shade. And the borders from the mining demarcations look stark and harsh against the curves of the landscape, despite the areas where they’re attempting the regeneration of the land.’

‘The water glitters over Albatross Bay with the angle of the sun when you fly over the railway bridge above the river, and the plane completes the figure-of-eight shimmy it needs to do to approach the strip. Then you see the Mapoon community on the tip, a dot on the peninsula surrounded by ocean, then closer to the ground you see the height of the termite mounds near the airfield, the green of pandanus palms, and the shine of beach hibiscus trees.’ He opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘We’ve landed. Are you okay?’

‘It was a bit bumpy,’ she murmured as she drove.

‘Always bumpy, stumbling into a roll along the strip because the air pockets are tricky and the plane always wobbles, or so I’m told.’

‘Don’t stop,’ she said.

He grinned to himself. ‘We can see the airport building coming up now – actually it’s more of a shed – and there’s a wire fence at the side, and Indigenous kids behind the wire are jumping and waving at the plane. A dozen people are waiting out the front. Waving. Excited to greet passengers coming home.