The idea that Levi-Strauss somehow discredited or dissolved the concept of totemism is exaggerated.

Levi-Strauss shows that there is no workable formal definition of totemism, since the things referred to with that moniker are too diverse. He argues that the things called totemism are various manifestations of metaphorical thinking, and not especially distinct from manifestations of metaphorical thought in urban-industrial or agricultural societies.

But what he does not allow is that totemism may be workable as a label for a cluster of social phenomena that share a “family resemblance“, to use a term from Wittgenstein. Levi-Strauss presumes that for a general noun to be valid, it must be susceptible to a formal definition. In fact many or most of the general nouns in everyday use (chair, shrub, love) are not susceptible to any such definition.

I packed some camping gear in my car, and tried to argue that we should not carry more than three or four people (the car’s low to the ground, and the more people you have, the more chance of getting bogged or scraped), but as usual my attempts to be sensible and practical were immediately obliterated when about six people jumped in the back and started arguing over seats.

Daniel wanted to show me a certain tree that is a personal totem of his, and can be used for working love magic. He can’t use it himself, because being his totem, for him its use is forbidden, and it would instead make him sick. But he said it might work for me.

In a sense, the love-magic tree is where the trouble started. To find the tree, we had to drive down a track that was all deep, soft sand. With so many people in the car, we almost immediately got stuck. Then it was hard to get a push out of the sand, because the white sand was burning hot, and nobody had shoes. Eventually various passengers bound their feet up with reeds and managed to push me out of the sand, but they wanted to keep going, but I wanted to go back. The problem is, Aboriginal people just aren’t that bothered about the possibility of getting their car stuck somewhere out in the middle of the bush, and having to abandon it there for days, or perhaps forever. But as for me, with my different type of attachment to material things - I find this horrifying.

The impasse was resolved when Daniel decided that we were in fact close to the love tree already. We left the car in the middle of the track, and followed Daniel into the bush.

The track had been running through sparse coastal scrub, but as we set off in the inland direction, we soon got into thick jungle. We were in the season known to whitefellas as “the build-up”, when heat and humidity become intense as the first rains approach; the air in the jungle was incredibly heavy. Every few metres I was struck by a different aroma emanating from some plant.

We weren’t on a path, but instead weaving our way through trees and thick, ropey vines. In town, Daniel had always seemed a bit of a slouch, wandering the main street slowly, and never joining the football games down at the oval. But now he moved with incredible speed through the tangled plants; he seemed amazingly at home in this place. He had brought along two of his sons, and the skinny little boys moved even more easily through the jungle. That left me bringing up the rear, with three tall brothers whose country was somewhat distant on an inland river. As we got further into the jungle, these tall brothers started to look tired and uncomfortable; one of them told me that he felt bad being in this place. He told me that we (all of us apart from Daniel and his sons) had the “wrong smell” to be in this place. I myself started feeling intensely thirsty, though we had only been walking a few minutes.

Daniel was determined to push ahead though, and he was boss here. As he walked ahead, I could hear him calling out and conversing with the spirits who lived there. I was impressed by this, as I’d previously only heard old people doing this, and I thought that young people might have abandoned the practice.

I hadn’t noticed that we were walking in a big circle, but eventually we emerged from the jungle, back out onto the track near where the we left the car. Evidently the love-magic tree could not be found today; one of the men from elsewhere told me that the spirits did not want to show us the tree, because we are from the wrong place.

We got the car moving again and drove back in the direction of Wadeye, stopping at a couple of other sites to make tea, and collect wild fruits. One of these, a small green stone-fruit called mi gilen, is sweet-but-just-a-little-sour, aromatic, and by far the most delicious native Australian fruit I’ve tasted.

At one stop I was making tea for a few minutes, and when I returned to the car to get something, I immediately noticed that my mp3 car adaptor was missing. I’m used to people nicking things at Wadeye, but I was shocked that someone would so blatantly steal something when we were clearly out in the bush together, I would obviously notice, and the culprit must be one out of the passengers.

I told Daniel about the missing adaptor, and he looked upset at the news. He went around asking the others who had taken it; I asked too, and tried to explain that the missing object was very useful to me, but worth very little money. But no-one would return the adaptor. For a while various people made suggestions about who else might have taken it, then gradually everyone fell into agreement that the spirits in the jungle had taken it. Daniel agreed; he even said that he had “seen it go missing” back when we were stopped near that jungle - though this was clearly untrue, as I’d been using it to play music since then.

I got quite annoyed, angry that people would do this to me. And perhaps for the first time since I came to Wadeye, I showed it. The others all went quiet, which probably means that they were embarrassed for me, or for themselves, or all of us.

So I just had to accept that it was gone. I wondered whether they would have done the same to each other, or if it was considered more legitimate to steal my things because I’m a whitefella. I still don’t know the answer to this.

As we drove back to Wadeye, I noticed that Daniel’s young sons were now naked. I pointed this out, and Daniel said, “Yes, this always happens. When they go out to the bush, the first thing they do is take off their trousers. I take them there with trousers, and they come back as naked people.”

He did not seem to be bothered by the loss of the clothes, and didn’t suggest that we should go back to look for them.

===

A week later, I left Wadeye. It was just on six months since I’d arrived, and it had been a long half-year. I felt exhausted, tired out from always trying to work out what was going on, and so often not being able to.

On the afternoon I arrived in Wadeye, back in April, it poured with rain. But that same evening the clouds cleared, the next morning was dry, and it turned out to have been the last rain of the Wet season.

The night before I left, it had been just over six months without a drop of rain. Not a drop had fallen since that day I arrived. I had hoped to see some of the Wet’s first storms before I left, but resigned myself to the idea that they would come late this year.

But as the sunset moved through its dramatic phases of orange and pink, a large storm-head could be seen approaching from the east. After dark, I ate my last dinner in Wadeye this year, with the white Catholic priest and the Aboriginal deacon. I had just walked back home when the wind began to rise suddenly, almost apocalytpically, and then the rain began to fall.

The rain hammered down most of the night, and in the sodden early morning I drove out alone into the mud - sad, but satisfied with the neat book-ending of my stay in Wadeye.

After a bit some of them went over and casually broke the water mains, so the water started spurting out all over the oval. We all went over and drenched our heads and bodies.

Then one of them said to me, –You’re fresh now, neh?

–Yeah, I’m fresh.

–And I’m fresh now. Fresh.

–Yes, you’re fresh too.

Over the past couple of months we have been almost enemies at times. “Frenemies” at least. They have lied to me, stolen from me, been nice one day then mocked me the next, and generally confused the hell out of me. I have kept trying to tell myself, “Don’t worry, it’s all just a test.”

But I don’t know what exactly is being tested. Recently Jacob, who I thought was a friend, employed extreme deviousness and wile to steal money from my wallet. Yet my intuition tells me that we *are* friends. Just badly mismatched friends, who don’t trust each other, and for good reasons. By the fact that I am a researcher, they all have good reason to mistrust me. I am liable to write about them, and even though the names may be changed, and none of them is ever likely to read what I write, the possibility of betrayal still hangs over everything. Maybe even these blogs are a betrayal.

I try not to betray. For example, the matter of certain court proceedings will not be divulged here. Unseemly medical symptoms will likewise be passed over.

Maybe I feel close to these guys because we are in conflict, like the kidnapper and his hostage. (I could be either the kidnapper or the hostage, or both.) Or maybe it’s just because I spend so much time puzzling over them, focusing my thoughts on them.

Things would be clearer if my Murrinh Patha were better. Jacob and some others are good teachers: they deliberately speak slowly to me, and I can see them testing various words and phrases on me, watching me closely to see whether I understand. In this mode, I now understand a certain amount, enough to cover fairly basic communication without too much switching to pidgin English. But not enough for a real conversation, and not nearly enough to understand the implicit meanings behind peoples’ words.

This might even be a key cultural trait for Murrinh Patha people, the way that what’s really going on is not stated overtly, but left to be understood by subtleties, implications, and of course by what is not said. Maybe we do this just as much in English, but if we do, we’re so used to it that we don’t even notice, and the patterns of slippage between words and facts must be so different that our cultural programming is virtually useless in the Murrinh Patha context.

Sometimes I think that Jacob is my best friend, sort-of, because he is the only person who makes me laught these days. Like when he told me that his previous gang-mate, Leon, was now an enemy, because he had stopped being an Evil Kreator, and defected to become a Metallica Priest. He frowned menacingly and said emphatically, “Lica-Priest”, crossing his forearms in front of his chest in a heavy-metal gesture.

Or when he played me his current favourite song, “Violent Revolution”, on YouTube, and couldn’t help himself from breaking into spontaneous air guitar.

A few days later I saw Jacob talking warmly to Leon at the shop, and I heard that he has gone back to being an Evil Kreator. At least he hasn’t become Evil-Lica, or German-Priest, because that would be really bad.

I asked some guys about the “German” mob affiliation, and where it came from. They responded in some Murrinh Patha that I could not fathom, then one of them explained in hesitant English: “They like Hitler.”

I confronted Jacob about the money theft, and though eventually he admitted it, there was obviously no point in asking for the money back. 20 minutes had passed since he took the cash, and this would probably have been enough time for him to spend it.

About a week later, Jacob came to my shipping container to tell me that he had written me lots of “papers”, which would serve to teach me excellent Murrinh Patha. This seemed highly implausible, given that Jacob is mostly illiterate, and, frankly, quite lazy.

Just to make sure, I dropped by his house the next morning, and asked if I could see those “papers”. He then proceded to make an absurd show of “looking for the papers”, performing a series of stylised gestures by which he clearly searched for nothing. He concluded that his many children must have taken those papers.

But I don’t mean to make Murrinh Patha people sound foolish or ridiculous; it just makes me laugh, the way we do things differently.

Another week later, Jacob came and asked if he could do some work with me to help transcribe Murrinh Patha recordings. I have some funding now from the local Aboriginal corporation, to pay people for working on Murrinh Patha recordings with me; but I said I didn’t think I should pay him, since he took my money. He said he would work anyway.

After we’d been working for a while, we were discussing something related to money, so I took the opportunity to try to talk to him about the theft, and explain why it mattered to me. I told him that I knew people took things all the time at Wadeye, but that I trusted him as my friend. He asked, “True?” I said yes, true. Then he exclaimed, “Oh no, John,” and made a woeful gesture, holding his head in his hands.

This time I couldn’t tell if he was play-acting or not.

I came back from a visit to Adelaide bearing gifts. David had requested a Carlton football guernsey, to which I said okay. After a pause he asked if I could bring him a coat too, I said maybe; then he asked if I could also get him some football boots, I said maybe again, and after another pause he asked if I could also get him a dick pump. I said really? He said yes, for fucking, and made a demonstrative gesture.

To show my goodwill, I met one of his requests, but no it wasn’t the pump.

Nathan had requested a washing machine, but that didn’t fit in my backpack; Mark had requested a “wooden flute”, so I got him a recorder, which I hope is what he meant.

My relationship to people has now become, effectively, monetized. David immediatley went around the camp showing off his new guernsey, so now I am inundated with requests for consumer goods, but it’s okay, I don’t mind saying no. In fact I am practicing the local custom of saying yes to everything, by which I usually mean no.

When I say that I am now more closely accepted by the Evil Warriors mob than before, you would be justified in taking this with a pinch of cynicism - “Yeah, I bet they accept you now that you’re handing stuff out.”

But there is a bit more to it than that. One of the main things that binds together close-knit groups like the EW is the movement of goods and resources around the community. People demand and supply things to confirm their connectedness; if anything, I am wondering if I should start playing the other side of the game too, by walking round the EW camp asking people for money. But I suspect that my requests for help with language are already seen as a form of begging.

After we finished playing football one evening this week, a couple of the EW guys - David and Craig - asked if they could come back to my house, “to rest a while”. I said okay, and when we got there I made them tea and got out some biscuits. I was aware that the whole thing was partially because they were trying to collect together $50 for a bag of ganja, and the visit to my house was an elaborate introduction to a money request… but like I said, I’m getting good at saying no, and I think there was also genuine curiosity to see where the whitefella lives.

Even my shipping container compares pretty well to the houses where the EW mob live, and they were clearly fascinated by the amount of stuff I have lying around. David toured the place, looking at things, and in many cases asking me if he could have them. I let him have a football and a carton of juice, but not my computer or my new boots I just bought in Adelaide.

I have a local map on the wall, covering about a 50km radius around the estuary in which Wadeye is located. David stood looking at this, and asked me to point out Adelaide for him. I tried to explain that Adelaide was far off the map.

We watched football for a while on the TV, and my visitors seemed to quite enjoy being there, perhaps glad to get away from the stresses of family. For some reason they were worried though about my neighbour coming home and seeing them - maybe they felt they weren’t supposed to be there? My nextdoor neighbour is another whitefella, who works on the council. His name is Dicko, and it’s hard to forget it, because his ute is always sitting there outside my door with the numberplate on it, DICKO.

After a while my visitors said they had to go out and “keep looking”. That means, they were still only up to $15, and had a lot of requesting still to go before they could get that grass. I believe that guys like them spend a large amount of their time on this activity; payday (doleday) is probably the only time they have $50 independently, so on all the other days they gather it together by touring their friends and relatives. $50 buys a pretty miserable quantity, just enough for a couple of joints, which David and Craig say they rely on get to sleep.

There doesn’t seem to be anything secretive about the marijuana business here. I soon learnt the local words for it, so I recognise when people shout trade information to each other, openly in the street. And I’ve been told more than once that _____ is a big dealer, so apparently that’s an open secret too. He even drives around flamboyantly in a moderately flashy truck. It makes the whole “community against ganja” thing, the big sign in your face as you land at the airstrip, saying “Ganja is not welcome here,” seem pointless and hypocritical. If I’ve found out this quick, I assume that every Aboriginal adult in town knows all about it.

Maybe they should just sell it at the shop, and at least let the proceeds go to community funds, rather than somebody’s flash truck. Or maybe not. I can’t pretend I know how to untie all the bizarre contradictions and hypocrisies of this town.

It all started about a week ago, when there was some kind of incident at the takeaway. This is a pretty fraught site: there are always groups of young men standing outside the building, literally gathered in the shadowy corners, staring out. I am beginning to realise that they are not just standing there idly; I’ve noticed that none of the guys I know from other side of town ever go near the takeaway.

So, about a week ago there was sudden shouting, people running everywhere, and a sort of minor riot broke out around the takeaway. I couldn’t work out what was happening, but the shops and offices clustered there in the town centre all closed up immediately and barred their doors, clearly having been through this before.

I was told later that someone was hit on the head with an axe - though I don’t know if that is true, or if it was maybe a stick or a hatchet that got bigger in translation. People don’t tell me much; or, they tell me a lot, but it’s all contradictory.

Since then, there has been fighting every night. I hear it from my shipping container - shouts and whistles, and the clanging of metal. Some nights just a little, other nights a lot.

And last night was a lot. I’d been tempted before to go out and see what the fuss was, but I held back because it seemed pointless and voyeuristic. But last night got so noisy, and the noise kept going so long, that I had to go out for a look.

Going out to watch seemed more acceptable once I got out there, because I found I wasn’t the only one. Lots of locals were wandering out of their houses; including, to my surprise, quite a few families with young children. A couple of people told me, “It’s dangerous for you,” but they didn’t seem alarmed. I think they were exaggerating, or maybe they were embarrassed that I should see their town in such a mess. In fact I think it less dangerous for me than for any of them, since I have no clan affiliations, no history, no grievances.

The rioting was pretty wild. Maybe 300 people on some sort of rampage, with one particular “camp” (that is, a cluster of 6 or 7 houses) at the centre of the vortex. Groups of people swirled arond these houses, waving flashlights and in places setting things on fire. There was a huge and continuous din: shouting, whistling and whooping, clanging as people banged on anything made of metal, and crashing sounds as rocks or other projectiles struck the houses.

I could sometimes see certain waves of people surge forward or recede. At one point the whole thing seemed to move into a neighbouring camp, then back again. But beyond that I could not detect the structure of what was going on. I don’t believe for a moment that this was random violence: people in this town live by complex kin relationships that mean everyone has some defined relationship to everyone else. But whatever the pattern was, it was inscrutable to me.

I stood and stared, in awe, at this entirely alien phenomenon: the strange and secret nocturnal life of Wadeye.

What was that? I don’t know if “violence” is the right word: people seemed to be having too much fun. And they kept having fun. I went home and to bed, but woke up again around 6am, to find the din still going on. I went out and checked: much the same activity as before, now with the first light of dawn on the horizon. I went back to sleep, so I don’t know when exactly they finished, but all up I reckon the riot went on for about 10 hours.

But, then, of course it is violence. I don’t really know how much or who or what, but people certainly got injured, perhaps seriously.

Violence, also, because it was a conflict. Lica (that’s short for “Metallica”) and Evil Warriors mobs, avenging and re-avenging over a series of slights that I couldn’t hope to fathom. These two camps are separated by about 50m of grassy hillside; so the boys with good arms can throw rocks at each other without even having to leave their verandas.

But I also get an impression of mutual agreement to riot. I’ve seen and heard the build-up, which starts most evenings soon after dinner, a gradual crescendo of shouts and clanging that seems if anything like an agreement to rumble. On the other hand, when I talk to any of the Evil mob during the day (on the few occasions they emerge), they emphasise their regret at the fighting.

What gets me then is the gentle, discrete, circumspect manners that those same people have when they are not in riot mode. I get in trouble playing football with them because they consider that I tackle too roughly. I know that my talk usually comes out too bold and direct for these people, who speak softly and avoid disagreement or dispute.

Part of the explanation might be clan society. Many or most of the individuals may not want to fight, but they are strongly obliged to when called upon. In any case they seem to get over their reservations pretty well once the clamour gets going.

Or, ultimately it might just be a man thing. And if this town were populated entirely by males, I would say, Cool, if you guys like rioting then who am I to judge? Problem is, the population here is figured officially to be about 60% female. (I fear that the imbalance comes from enhanced male mortality.) It doesn’t seem too fair on the women and children living in those shoddy, cramped, windowless houses with a 10-hour riot surrounding them all night.

The truth is, the men of this town seem bit lost. In the traditional social system, which continued fairly intact up until about the 1960s, males had almost absolute power. And they had three crucial responsibilities: hunting, fighting for territorial rights, and protecting sacred sites. Most of peoples’ food now comes from the shop, the money to buy it comes from the government, and, though most would deny it, I suspect that peoples’ spiritual connection to the land is waning, as they spend less and less time living off that land. So what’s left? Fighting. Even if there isn’t really much to fight over.

When a social system suffers major disruption, I think it is the people who were on top that have furthest to fall.

# # #

Three days later, and there has been an orchestrated truce. The old people called a meeting in the centre of town, got a mic and PA set up, and spent about 30 minutes berating the young men, who at first were entirely absent. Gradually groups of them approached, until a dramatic conclusion when an old man started yelling at them to come over and make peace. Slowly they all shuffled forward, forming a big mob and shaking hands. A group of white bureaucrat onlookers applauded. Then the mob split back into two halves, and shuffled away again.

There are hundreds of children everywhere. Naked or semi-naked, excitable, babbling, unconstrained children.

The first phrase I learn of Murrinh Patha is _Tjuku warda!_ Some older children in the main street keep yelling this at me. They say it enough times that I am able to clearly distinguish the phonetics. I find out later it means “Go home!”

On the second day I see a small child, naked, wrestling with a dog that is twice his size.

Overall, I would say that Wadeye is a happy place. People have fun, don’t bother much with school, work or footwear, and make as much noise as they want.

Feral water buffalo wander into town, but get chased away by the feral dogs. King brown snakes were once common around here, but they have now been virtually eliminated by the invasion of cane toads. Each snake must have died in a mutual mortal embrace: venemous fangs injecting poison into the toad, poison-glands on the toad taking their revenge on the snake.

And I found a topographic map of the area. As well as place names, it has useful descriptive labels like “numerous waterholes” and “rocky outcrop”. But some places are simply labelled “dysentery”, or “anopheles”.

I’m going for a walk down by the oval when a group of young men sitting under a tree beckon me over. So I walk over to them, but when I get there, they just look at me questioningly: I must have misinterpreted somehow. Some moments of confusion pass, then a muscular, square-shouldered guy comes out of the nearby house and strides over, saying “What you want?”

I think it might be time to go, but I hold out for a few seconds longer, just standing there vaguely trying to explain myself. And then the moment passes, or modulates. They become curious about what I am doing there. Though our communication is pretty limited, they offer to help me learn Murrinh Patha. A teenager wanders over holding a machete, but he’s not carrying it in a threatening way - more like, just casually carrying it. Or maybe for fun. He smiles when they explain to him that I want to learn Murrinh Patha.

This time of year, there are many small fires burning in the grass. A nice word, _purrpurrk_, means “small and numerous”.

They are Evil Warriors mob, which means they live in Pepenyi, the camp down the hill. They mark their houses with EW, and their football team is the Demons. Their main enemies - at least at the moment - are the German Boys. The GB live in the camp next to the creek, mark their territory with swastikas, and their football team is the Crows.

I ask the Evil Warriors mob, “Do you fight all the time with the German Boys, or sometimes friends?” They say that sometimes they are friends, sometimes fight. I ask one of them if he has any friend in the German Boys. He says yes, his brother is in the German Boys. He then says, “My brother always hates me.”

They give me a new name: Nirrpi. I don’t know what it means, but they say it’s a place name. Before that they suggested _thawuy_, which is the native tobacco often chewed by old ladies around here. I rejected that one.

The muscly, aggressive guy is Sam, and he surprises me by asking if I can help him learn English. I say okay, but I’m curious why he wants to learn. He says, “Gotta get that whitefella talk,” and asks if I had any “papers”, signalling a writing movement. I say I can get some, and so the next day I drop in at the education office and ask if they can help. George, the battle-hardened old whitefella who runs the outpost, helpfully gives me photocopies of some course materials. But he asks who I’m going to teach, and when I mention Sam’s name he makes a sour expression and says, “Oh yes, we’ve had him up here for a course. He stayed a bit longer than his mates, but then he disappeared. He’s had his chance.” Those are his exact words: _He’s had his chance_.

No one would bother having a thermometer up here, because the temperature never changes.

Late that afternoon I take my photocopies down to Pepenyi, and ask at Sam’s house. I’m told he’s inside, so I poke my head around the door, and see him sitting there in the dark, dirty, mostly empty room. Bare concrete floor and breezeblock walls, like all the old Wadeye houses. No windows, just a trapezium of light coming in through the open door. No furniture except a dirty mattress on the floor, on which Sam is sitting, eating some meat sandwiched between two pieces of bread.

I say I’ll wait outside till he finishes, so I sit out on the verandah and talk with his family. Altogether there are five brothers and two sisters, and some of them now have their own children, all living together in the house. Sam’s brother Jim says he has two, of which one wanders through, looking rather lost. They show me a nasty sore on his foot, and tell me the word for that, _lirrwi_.

Sam finishes eating, and then we go away from the house to a secluded spot under a tree, to do an English lesson. I don’t know where to start, but I soon find that writing his name is the first thing. Sam is 22 years old, and he tells me he’s had “no school”, later revising this to “little bit”. Sam has never travelled much out of Wadeye: he has been as far as Katherine once - a somewhat bigger town - but never to Darwin.

He writes his name, in big, shaky block letters, with excruciating effort. I watch in horror, and pretend not to watch.

I still can’t work out how to be here without being a voyeur.

Then we go through some more exercises, working on questions like how old he is and where he lives, and how to write his full address. Sam speaks and understands quite a bit of English - far better than my Murrinh Patha, of course. But he can’t read or write anything apart from his name. After a while, a few other people have gathered, and he seems to become increasingly embarrassed. He almost pretends that the lesson isn’t happening, but he responds to encouragement, and in the end I think learns to write his name and address.

My coup-de-grace is the postcode. Wadeye doesn’t actually have street addresses, so you just get things sent to the town post office, “Wadeye, NT 0822″. None of the gathered young men have heard of this post-code business, or know that you need one to get something sent here.

Later, walking on my own again, I find a loose metal key lying in the dust. A tiny spike of adrenaline tells me how valuable it is, but the immediate dropoff tells me how useless. A key is an encrypted object.

By now the whole EW mob are all very friendly to me, but I don’t know why. Novelty value?

I’m a whitefella, an outsider, maybe I’m even here just to get my PhD. I am one of the beneficiaries of the historic assault on their culture, and every other culture indigenous to this continent. When their land was taken to make profitable new farms, when people were slaughtered or rounded up to get them out of the way of commerce, that freshly minted money went to my forebears, and that’s where I got my education, my comfortable background, my opportunities in life.

So many reasons to be angry: I found it easier to understand when the kids were yelling _Tjuku warda!_ But like I said, overall, Wadeye is a happy place. And here is this guy taking the risk of letting me see him struggle to write his name.

At 7am, this feels like the first act of a new life. Unlike what came before, this is an act that I have planned, considered, researched. And the planning has brought me here, Wadeye, where sitting alone in a shipping container, my new home, which I am renting from the council for $100 a week. I think it was designed for shipping refrigerated goods, for it has thickly insulated walls; but now the refrigeration unit has been replaced by an air-conditioner, to transform the box into a fridge for humans. A fridge for white humans who want to stay in Wadeye, where the air is always thick and warm.

I didn’t want the fridge. I don’t even like air-conditioning. But you don’t get to choose: if you’re an outsider (white), then you live in a closed air-conditioned box. If you’re a local (Aboriginal), you live in an open house with the heavy warm air oozing through. Maybe we have different metabolisms or something. Or maybe people just feel more comfortable with their differences clearly demarcated.

I’m not asking anyone about this yet. I don’t want to ask hard questions yet, but rather, just sit back and observe. I accept that I know nothing. That I have ideas, eyes and ears, but essentially I know nothing.

So I’m here, waiting to receive knowledge. I have one bag of clothes, two bags of groceries I brought from Darwin (I already knew of the horrors of the Wadeye store), a laptop, a camera, and a high-quality digital audio recorder. Oh and three boxes of incense: I burn that to help me feel more meditative.

I’ve got a print-out showing how to conjugate the 38 verb models documented for the Murrinh Patha language, and a wordlist of about 300 vocabulary items, of varying utility. There are some good ones in there, like ku were, “dog” and kanarnturturt, “crocodile”; but many things I would like to say are missing, and many of the listings don’t seem very useful, like ku ngapkapti, “kidney fat man” and -winhiputh-, “to punish by fire”.

nganhiwinhiputhnu, “I will punish you by fire”, says the example. And now that I’ve given it so much attention, I find myself uselessly remembering this unuseful word.

I don’t have my car though. That’s still in Darwin, which takes me back to the backstory. About a month ago, I finally got all my permissions to do language research at Wadeye. The local elders gave permission, the university gave approval, and my mechanic said my car was as sound as it would ever be. So I drove up here from Sydney, covering the 4500 kms in 10 days, including a few stops along the way in national parks.

The plains of central Queensland seemed to take the longest. Endless flat grasslands, cows, and surly rednecks. I sat taking a crap in a public toilet by the river at Longreach, and read in front of me: “THE ONLY PROBLEM WITH AUSTRALIA IS TOO MANY ABOS AND FAGS” And further down: “BOB BROWN GREENY FAG”.

Not quite, dear author. In fact you are the main problem with Australia. But these sentiments fitted pretty well with most of the short, stunted conversations I had with people in the area. I wondered then if the folk of central Queensland more or less equated environmentalism with homosexuality. After all, Bob Brown is undeniably a fag, and under scrutiny he may even turn out to be an Abo. Well, maybe not. But he’s definitely an Abo-lover.

So when I stopped in these towns in my VOTE GREENS t-shirt (worn, admittedly, to provoke), did people see me with my city hair-do and unbronzed skin and just think, “fag”? Most of them looked at me something like that.

Of course, some people were kind and friendly all the same. The girl at the information centre in Miles asked me where I was headed, and when I told her, she said:

“Don’t stop for them when they’re by the side of the road. Because, you know, they get really …”

She kept not-saying things. In fact I don’t think she ever used the word “Aboriginal”, just “them”. I’ve seen the same effect in the Northern Territory, where a road sign on the way into Katherine has been under-scrawled, “THEY DON’T READ”; and in fact this generic prononoun now seems to be one of the most common ways that bush whitefellas refer to Aborigines. So this is what political correctness mixed with intense antagonism has boiled down to: Them.

“There were a lot of Them around where I was growing up,” the tourism girl goes on, and points on the wall-map in front of us. “And, well … yeah.” She trails off into a series of doubtful winces. But she is trying to be helpful, and sensitive in her own way.

I tell her that until now I have always stopped for Them, and never had a problem. (I have found people who needed lifts, wanted help with their cars, who had run out of petrol. People who perhaps had failed to meet the standards of efficiency and productivity demanded by white residents of the Outback, but nothing that has posed a risk to myself.)

She mitigates then, “Yeah well, I feel really sorry for all the stuff that happened to Them.” She tells me about how an aunt of hers found a store of old documents at a homestead in central Queensland. The documents recorded the killing of around 100 local Aborigines, 70 adults and 30 children.

“So what did she do with the documents?”

“Oh, she put them back in the homestead. It was better to leave them there.”

But I’m getting off track here. Back on the road, now with a pair of Swedish backpackers as passengers, I reached Cloncurry, where the landscape became hilly and the farm-belt gave way to true Outback. I felt much happier. We saw what looked like a pureblood dingo, standing among trees by the side of the road, staring at my car going past.

Outside of Mount Isa, a sign shows a picture of a man dressed in mining gear, and says: “WELCOME TO MT ISA. NOW YOU’RE A REAL AUSSIE.”

As we travelled from Queensland across to the Northern Territory - the long, desolate stretch of the Barkly Highway - we started to see water everywhere, lurking in huge new lakes by the sides of the highway, at places lapping over the top. The roads became riddled with flood-damage.

At Katherine Gorge, we bathed in a perfect natural swimming pool. Clear, sweet water over fine white sand; temperature refreshing but not cold. Even if I had been eaten by a crocodile, it would have been worth it.

With so much water around, I realised that I would not yet be able to get my car out to Wadeye, so I instead made for Darwin, where we arrived, eventually, after two more days driving north. I left my car in a university car-park, and caught the Murin Air local flight that serves as the only Wet Season access to Wadeye.

I arrived early for the Friday afternoon flight, and waited outside the tiny Murin Air building with about a dozen Aborigines. Three whitefellas were trying to organise the flights, their main labour seeming to be adjudicating on levels of drunkenness. People from Wadeye and other bush towns, where alcohol is unavailable, often take advantage of trips to Darwin to get drunk. Some may even travel to Darwin for the sole purpose of getting drunk. On standard Australian inter-city flights, clearly drunken passengers are not permitted to board, but for Murin Air the rules are rather more flexible: it depends how drunk you are. As far as I could tell, if you can stand up, more or less, then you can board. If you can’t stand up without leaning on something, and you’re shouting a lot, then you can’t board. For example, an old guy called Ambrose stumbled in to the waiting area and sat down next to me. He didn’t have any bags or luggage with him. In fact he didn’t have any shoes, and his clothes were covered in mud. He told me that he had been drinking under a bridge outside Darwin. He kept moaning, “When I want to drink, I drink. I love my life, you know. But my life is not in the right way. Nobody gives two fucks about me, and I don’t give two fucks about anybody.” He switched into one or two Aboriginal languages to talk with other people in the waiting room, who supplied him with cigarettes.

Ambrose was allowed to board. But another man, a very big man, came swaying into the building, crashing into things and falling all over the place. He tried telling the staff, “I love my wife. I love my wife and I want to go with her.” But he was not allowed to board.

As for me, I almost regretted being allowed on board, as the tiny aircraft, with its seven or eight passangers, wobbled its way through gusts of rain on the way out to Wadeye. There was some kind of safety announcement but it was completely inaudible; the plain shook and dipped in the squalls, but when we came out the othe side of the clouds, you could suddenly see the expanses of unspoilt forest in the Daly River estuary. Unsuccessfully I tried to spot crocodiles in the rivers, and then Wadeye came into view, and we thudded down onto the landing strip carved out among the trees.

My contact Mark was waiting at the end of the landing strip, with his clapped-out, taped-up Landcruiser. Mark is white, but unusually, he is a permanent resident of Wadeye, and has married into an Aboriginal family. Two of his daughters (I still can’t work out how many children he has) were in the back, holding a baby kangaroo, which they passed forward to me. It lay calmy, curled up in my lap with its delicate face and long eyelashes, and started trying to suckle my t-shirt.

I couldn’t believe I was finally here. My head was buzzing, ecstatic. Not even my first encounter with The Fridge could bring me down. I just dumped my stuff and locked it up (three gates, each with a heavy padlock), then went out to wander the streets. My stomach doesn’t know if its coming or going, but all the same I feel hungry.

“Yes please,” he said, “I’m going to Glen Innes.” Which was where we were headed, about 100km to the north.

So in got Keith, his cart just about fitting on top of all our stuff in the back. As he got into the car he announced, “I’m a Christian ascetic.” And this just about fitted with his leathery brown skin, his grey beard, his trudging by the roadside.

“I used to be an experimental philosopher, but now I’m following the teachings of Jesus Christ.”

As we drove off Petrina and Jasmine, my already-passengers, asked Keith about his life. He kept tilting his head, and reminding people, “I’m deaf in that ear.” I put in my occasional two cents, shouting comments and questions back to Petrina, who passed them on into Keith’s good ear.

Keith was once from London, and still had the accent. He had been a chef, having trained in cordon bleu when he was young, soon leaving England to work in Morocco, Egypt, South-East Asia, Canada, USA and finally Australia. He arrived in Australia, aged 25 and already having worked in 12 countries. He had a short-term working visa, which he somehow converted into 36 years of cheffery all around the country. “Back then, it was very easy for an Englishman to come to Austrlia,” he tells us.

Then, two years ago, Keith changed his life.

“I’d spent all my life working; reading philosophy and working. As a young man I worked, but now I am an old man and I live for pleasure.”

I wondered, then, whether he could still count as an “ascetic”? Maybe he’d originally said “Christan aesthetic?” But in any case, Keith spoke with great eloquence, and seemed to have thought things through quite clearly. He was like a hobo, but sharp and coherent rather than wild and shabby. He was a hobo by choice, not misadventure.

“I was reading about the philosophy of Jesus, and I decided that I should put it into practice. So I got rid of everything. I didn’t have a family, so I didn’t have any of those responsibilities. I could do whatever I wanted. Now I’ve been doing it for two years, and I don’t think I could go back to how I lived before.”

Keith punctuates his narrative with burst of laughter, and his eyes literally twinkle. He grasps peoples’ hands warmly to enforce a point. My other passengers, a pair of young European backpackers, ask him for tips on hitch-hiking, and he provides an elaborate description of his methods. He has developed habitual migratory routes by which he travels, moving with the seasons to keep out of the cold and the extreme heat. He enthuses for a while about the joys of catching rides with strangers. He tells us how he stays in various religious centres that host him, and tries to avoid sleeping rough because he is getting too old for it.

We all regret when it’s time to drop Keith off. He is possibly the best hitch-hiker ever. I help him get his cart out of the back, and ask him about his previous philosophical interests. I am curious about how he got to where he is.

“I started off reading Plato’s Republic, when I was 13. Have you read it? Well you must. Democracy is for the mob, you know. We should be governed by those who have knowledge and wisdom. Well, I went on to read a lot of political philosophy, metaphysical philosophy… but now I’ve had enough of intellectualism. I want to put things into practice.”

I ask Keith what he thinks of Wittgenstein, gesturing to the bulky volume providing ballast in the bottom of my car.

“Yes, well, he was a strange man. You enjoy it, but later on you’ll want to put things into practice. You’ll see.” He seems very glad that I asked him about philosophy, and he grabs my shoulders, beaming, as I thank him.

Thankyou Keith, for letting us give you a lift.

I’d like to ask Chuck, the landlord, about the history of the place; but our pidgin jive in English and Arabic doesn’t permit much history. I don’t know how a Lebanese guy in his 60s gets to be called “Chuck”. Anyway, he gives me a good discount on his otherwise unsellable fruit.

I notice that in our bedroom there are two layers of carpet - the more recent has simply been layed on top of the previous, and both are different shades of grey-brown, deep and spongy. You can see this easily, because the more recent carpet has large holes, through which the fertile old carpet shows through. We don’t have a real bed, but sleep instead on a mattress on the floor. I wake each morning with dust and mucus in my throat.

Of course, I chose to live here. This was the house I chose, after rejecting a dozen others, each of which was seedier in its own way. When I saw this house I was attracted by the plants that grow in unexpected places. Other houses were just over-priced places to eat, sleep and shit - but this house is an ecology.

As the summer has passed, I have watched the cockroaches grow bigger. Back in December they were the size of my fingernail, and scampered timidly into the corners of the room. Now it is almost March, and most of them have grown up to be healthy specimens, an inch or somewhat longer. They move freely about my desk while I sit here typing, sometimes crawling in and out betwen the keys, or venturing across the screen. Before I sip from my glass of water, I’ve got into the habit of checking whether anybody has gone for a swim.

Meanwhile, the rat in our kitchen grows more shameless each day. He barely even bothers to hide himself now.

Kat, who has a bowel problem, thought that Abad, who has a lung problem, had been stealing her food. She mentioned this to me in the kitchen one night, lowering her voice. I didn’t say anything at the time, but I realised later it was probably the rat. It could also have been Rick, but there would be no point in talking to him about it, since he smokes so much dope that he wouldn’t remember anyway. On Mondays, a couple of days after he collects our rent, Rick often asks us whether he has collected the rent.

For a long time, I assumed that Abad was loudly watching South American telenovelas in his bedroom. Only recently did I realise that these are dialogues he has with himself.

There are two things that help me get by in this place: jogging, and staring out the window. Jogging is easy - you just take off most of your clothes, then run out the back door into the alley and keep on running until you can’t keep going any more. Staring out the window is more complicated, but I am well furnished, as my desk is in front of a large window, overlooking one of the main shopping streets in Marrickville. My vantage-point takes in a strip of pavement about 100 metres from the railway station, and I watch the diurnal tides: 7:30am they start flowing down the street, and 4:30pm they start flowing back up. The time in between is the variable, for some days it is short, while other days it is infinitely long. I envy the tide people, because they have natural cycles to refer to, while I find myself caught in the cracks between one thought and another, unsure what to do next. But the cockroaches on my desk just imitate and mock them, rushing back and forth with a jaunty wag of their antennae.

In the mid-afternoon, between times, there is a crazylady who works the strip of pavement. Her job is “unstructured sweeping”: she has an old straw broom and she pushes leaves and rubbish from one place to another, in no particular direction. She spends hours out there, every day, wandering back and forth with her broom.

There are now lots of people who I know from their daily routines up and down the street: a jogger guy, a purple-dyed dyke, an old guy who stops there to smoke a cigarette, and a whole family who seem to meet up at the social welfare office over near the station. But the sweeping lady is my most constant companion.