We spent weeks driving through sparse winter sunscapes, in such a rush to be somewhere else, in such a rush to be in a rush, stopping only for salt pans, salt plains, salt lakes, salt rock, salt water—like some giant god cried into the centre of this continent, underscored our apathy with tears that could only sustain a desert and buried themselves underground like you can’t find me and I don’t want to be found. And everything was water and rock, water and rock, water and rock. And it’s not hard to believe that everything was ever only water and rock, water and rock, rushing through the hard veins of the earth, sandstone and silicon, salt and moonscapes, faces in the dark.

Daylight is raw and I wonder if I would rather be back there in the empty sky, on cold granite in cold sun, trying to bubble my blood like girl, you were the snake, the lizard, the three degrees of separation, it was you. I want to be all these things I was told I couldn’t just because I shouldn’t, when will you settle down? like I’m supposed to be happy with three children, a house and a man who deigns to fuck me every now and then—no, fuck you, there’s a desert calling my name, a mountain, a spit-out-sideways precipice. And it’s easy to fall back into that, into love, you are my salvation, love, but out on that rock when the thunder is all that you can hear, the sound of the world turning right-way-up—out there you remember. You’re water and rock. You’re ancient and you’re transient. You’re scraps knotted together and you are whole.

Is it funny that the loneliest I’ve ever felt is between the sheets with someone else? Friends, lovers, sisters, brothers. The same words over and over again. The water in this city tastes like salt, and I want to destroy this thing that eats at me inside but you can’t make a shell bleed, and there’s nothing that disintegrates the desire to create like that self-destructive void, that my life can be nothing, that myth that you can find permanence in hot pulses of adrenaline when everything else is burning, burning, turning to ash. Ash heart. A faultline. A crack in the crust, thunder and the tremors echoing—quick, hold me, I need to stop these rocks collapsing, wearing away, salt and sand and somewhere here, somewhere, a trembling, miasmic, volatile heart. Right now the gulf is roaring and I need to drown it out.

A few months ago, I was hanging out at a pub in the High Country. I asked the publican’s wife (a good friend of my Dad’s) what she knew about the local Aboriginal people.

“Nah, no Aboriginal people up here,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Too cold for ‘em up here. Read the history.”

The ‘history’ she was referring to was a book written 100 years ago about the township, by white people, in which no Aboriginal people were mentioned.

The local Aboriginal people in the region were the Taungurong people. If you look at this map you can see their country covers roughly the area from Benalla to Bendigo, the Goulburn River and Lake Eildon. (By the way, AIATSIS sell wall maps of Aboriginal Australia. You can find details on how to buy them here.)

About 15 years ago, C and B’s mother L found a bora ring up on the Black Range. Bora rings are circles of raised ground and/or stones used for ceremony. When the February bushfires came through, they burnt away much of the undergrowth in those hills, exposing a lot more of the ground than perhaps would have been visible before. A couple of weeks ago, B and L went walking up there again and found the following:

Tools found on the Black Range, Victoria.

The rock at the top right is a grinding stone, used for crushing seeds and other tucker. The rock below it is the head of a stone axe. They’re Aboriginal tools. B and L found them very close to the location of the bora ring.

Unfortunately, the Department of Sustainability and Environment have been clearing through the Range to make way for mountain bike trails and firebreaks. B says they’ve started moving the bora stones and cutting into the ground.

I was telling this story to some friends the other day who asked why L didn’t tell the DSE or other government agencies about the bora ring. I don’t know the answer to this, but I suspect it’s not as simple as ‘tell the DSE, protect the site.’ There were also reasons why they didn’t take the tools with them, and why when B picked up the axehead to look at it more closely, she put it straight back down again in exactly the same place. Those reasons have very little to do with site preservation in whitefella terms, and everything to do with the land itself, the people who used to inhabit it and the spirits that still do.

I’m not sure what’s more depressing: that the DSE has started breaking up the site, that they probably didn’t know it existed in the first place, or that the possibility might not even have crossed their mind.

What troubles me most is an attitude of mind that could come to prevail amongst white Australians: a feeling of irritation apparently based on a conviction that we are saddled with the responsibility for problems not really of our making, and by their nature probably insoluble. (W.E.H. Stanner, 1978)

It’s the evening of Tuesday, February 12, 2008. I’m standing in the hallway of a Kilmore farmhouse while my second-cousin Phil, a giant of a man, digs through his bookshelves. They’re about as high as his knees. He’s piling my arms with books that he thinks might help me—Daly Family Languages, an ANU research paper on the mission and Peppimenarti, the Malak Malak land rights claim book, even a heavy hardcover on Top End Native Plants—but he’s looking for one in particular.

‘I’ve always found it really useful,’ he says. ‘It was written by a man I knew out on the Daly, a friend of mine. I still go back and read it when I’m confused about something—Ah! Here it is!’ He straightens up, grins at me through his beard and presents me with a very plain-looking hardback in a slightly scuffed, brown dust jacket. It’s a collection of essays by an anthropologist named W.E.H. Stanner, called White Man Got No Dreaming. ‘Start with that,’ Phil says. ‘But be gentle with it and don’t lose it—it was a present from the man himself.’

Later the same night, I’m holed up in one of Phil’s kids’ old bedrooms. I can’t sleep, so I decide to start on the Stanner book. There’s a looseleaf piece of notepaper folded inside the cover signed with Stanner’s name, thanking Phil and his wife, Willy, for their hospitality and friendship. I am careful not to crush it, and start reading.

Immediately, the four-page preface (the source of the above quote) has me scribbling notes in my journal. The opening essay, ‘The Aborigines’, completely blows my mind. I note the date it was written in incredulity: people were saying this in 1938?! I power through three and a half essays that night and wake up the next morning with my mind still buzzing. At 9am, the new Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd moves that parliament issue a formal apology to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were removed from their families as children, and all I can think is, ‘We’re only just getting to this now?!’

Three years ago, Aboriginal Australia was nowhere on my radar. I had minors in drama and history—none of it specifically Australian—philosophy and English majors, and Honours in creative writing. I had studied Germaine Greer but not Marcia Langton. I knew about the Redfern speech but not the Tent Embassy. I knew more about postcolonial India than I did about colonial Australia. Every piece of information I had about Aboriginal Australia was incidental and through a white populist filter, and it wasn’t until I was considering alternative topics for a PhD that I thought: there is something wrong with this. A year later, having suddenly found myself surrounded by anthropology, politics, Native Title legislation, political correctness, and the history wars, as someone who was looking to write a novel, I couldn’t help feeling like I’d accidentally walked into the topic through a side door. Stanner’s essays jolted me awake: this is relevant to me, I realised, I’ve seen this happen, and no wonder we’ve been getting it wrong for so many years.

A few years ago, Robert Manne tried to find a copy of White Man Got No Dreaming for sale and came up with nothing. The book had been out of print for decades. In April 2008, I was doing the same thing—hunting through secondhand stores and sending emails to every bookshop I could think of, desperately trying to dig up a copy. My university library had one—extremely aged—but it was always checked out or on reserve, and anyway, I wanted my own. I knew Stanner’s work couldn’t tell me everything there was to know about Aboriginal Australia, and that his observations came from a specific cultural milieu and political context. But he wrote ‘without condescension and without sentimentality’ (something so many other white male scholars in the field have been unable to do) and his observations about white Australia’s relationship to Aboriginal Australia still resonated so deeply half a century later—71 years in the case of the first essay—that I couldn’t believe it was so hard to find. Eventually, after a fruitless search, I got BiblioQuest onto it. It took them six weeks to call me and tell me they had found a copy, and it could be mine for $214.50. I paid.

In March 2009, Black Inc. republished most of the essays from White Man Got No Dreaming, including the highly influential Boyer lectures and a posthumously-published article on Aboriginal humour, in one paperback. It’s called The Dreaming and Other Essays and includes an introduction by Robert Manne. I found it last night in Readings and shrieked with excitement. If it was a sign of the times that Stanner’s essays had been so neglected, then perhaps their republication signals something positive—a slight shift in the wind, or a stronger push toward understanding Aboriginal Australia for its own sake. Or perhaps that’s just speculation. But for now, you can buy Stanner’s essays for $32.95—one sixth of the price I paid for them. And dammit, you should read them.

There’s a moment in the film Samson and Delilah where Delilah, destitute and desperate, attempts to sell a painting. She timidly proffers the canvas to people eating outside at a cafe in an Alice Springs mall. Some of them ignore her; others shake their heads dismissively and go back to their conversations. A couple of days later she tries again. This time there is purple-green bruising down one side of her face and her right eye is swollen shut. The customers at the cafe stare as she lashes out, throws the painting at them and is asked to leave.

I saw Samson and Delilah in Carlton last Monday with my mother. The Nova has become a regular haunt for us—tickets are cheaper on a Monday and the daytime crowd generally consists of about three retirees and a backpacker. So imagine our surprise when we arrived for an 11am session to find the line for the box office stretching halfway down Lygon Plaza. ‘Surely they can’t all be here for the same film?’ my mother exclaimed. Low-budget Australian directorial debuts don’t usually generate that much public interest, let alone films about Aboriginal Australia. In this case, however, apparently 5-star reviews on The Movie Show and in The Age had got people talking. So we took our seats early just to be on the safe side, and sure enough, our session was full.

The film begins in a remote community in Central Australia. Until the protagonists reach Alice Springs, the only white characters to appear in the film are a carpet-bagger and the surly owner of the local general store. Such is the power, poignancy and intimacy of the film up to this point that the audience has already well and truly fallen in love with the two teenagers, as they have fallen in love with each other. So when the cafe patrons blithely ignore Delilah, beaten and abused as she is, the audience suddenly sees themselves for the first time. Perhaps watching this movie in Lygon Street surrounded by restaurant culture and overpriced coffee gave the moment unexpected weight, but at this point, the (mostly white) patrons of the Nova shifted uncomfortably in their seats.

A few years ago, I was a passenger in a car during a serious head-on collision with a motorcyclist. As a reaction to that, I became, for a while, involuntarily hyper-aware of everything that happened on the road—every slightly overshot turn or distant flash of brake lights. A similar thing happened once I started engaging with remote Australia. I became hyper-conscious of the words I used, of the assumptions and prejudices that informed every sentence I uttered or judgement I made. I spent months second-guessing myself, constantly asking whether I had the right to write this novel, whether I had the right to think I could come up with answers or even accurately identify the problems. My biggest fear was causing offense. How and when and under what circumstances could my voice possibly be appropriate in Aboriginal affairs when the more that I learnt, the more it became obvious to me how little I actually knew?

Part of the reason people avoid having anything to do with Aboriginal Australia —part of the reason I avoided the topic for so many years—is because it’s hard. For a city-going whitefella on the south coast, remote Aboriginal Australia seems like the antithesis of everything. It’s impossible to grasp the sheer size of the issues or the depth of misunderstanding until you actually start scratching below the surface. And engaging with the issues is not just about practical problems that take commitment and passion to understand and resolve; it’s difficult on a personal level, too. That flash of self-awareness that happens halfway through Samson and Delilah is a constant state for the non-Aboriginal person learning about Aboriginal Australia. And of our English terms—self discovery, epiphany, revelation, enlightenment—not one seems to capture the clumsiness and embarrassment—the profound sense of humbling that these moments force upon us.

After the film, my mother and I wandered down Lygon Street to a restaurant with lunch specials and sat at a little street table in the sun. We talked about the film and my novel and the way that scene made us feel, and we’d just been handed our food when a woman picking dirt out from under her nails with a stick approached the table and asked me for change.

I had no idea what to do. The couple at the table next to us ignored her. My mother, going deaf, hadn’t heard her. She was looking straight at me. As tough as it is being confronted with yourself on screen, there is still a line between epiphany through art and the translation of that into real life. And awareness is nothing if it doesn’t translate into action. I knew this before the woman asked me for change, and I knew it all over again when she did. But it was disconcerting to realise that I wasn’t going to help her out, not like this, and that no matter how much good I like to think I’m doing in the world, no matter how many barriers I’d like to think I’ve torn down, I was still building this wall by choice. It was (and is) a product of class, of prejudice, of cynicism, of a blame-the-victim mentality, and ultimately, of selfishness. I had no idea how I could even begin to try to fix it.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ I said. I really was sorry. I tried to smile. I tried to smile genuinely.

‘Okay, have a nice day,’ she said.

‘You too,’ I replied.

She paused, briefly. ‘Thankyou,’ she said. ‘And thankyou for your manners.’

It’s easy to get lost on country roads at night. After awhile, the red dots and white lines blur together. You talk to yourself, you drive too fast. The only thing between 100km/h and 130km/h is a hair in your mouth.

The last time I drove these roads was a month ago, on a warm Friday night when the sky was clear and the air was thick with insects. The high beams glanced off the ferns and the bark curled in ribbons down the trunks of ancient gums. Even in the night-time, the forest felt alive—whispering and laughing as the car sped through it. Tiny prickles of excitement ran up and down my arms. Bursting out of the heart of the concrete city and straight into the hills, the heady scent of earth and undergrowth was almost overpowering. Bush magic.

At some point the following day, I got caught on the edge of someone else’s story. Four days ago, when I drove through Toolangi, it got stuck in my throat again—a choked moment. It’s not my story; it’s not this story. It’s the corner of another story, an edge protruding from the mess that I scraped up against, that bent February out of shape.

Sometimes, when I’m driving alone down long stretches of empty road, when the moon is bright, the windows are open and the trees arch overhead, I switch off the headlights. It only takes a few seconds—just long enough for the dark to flood in, for my pupils to dilate, for the grey shadows to thicken and spread out into branches and hills as I speed by; just long enough to feel the leap in my chest, to take a sharp breath—for my senses to shift out of neutral. The adrenaline rush is like a reset button. Start again—now.

When I arrived at our property on Saturday night, there was a ring around the moon. Here, two years on, the black scales scarring the trees are wearing veils of green. I spent two days listening to my parents’ vinyl, wrestling with the dogs, studying the Malak Malak native title claim, watching the light dance across the kitchen table and sleeping for nine hours a night. I drove the tractor. I dug rocks out of the earth. I took the corner too sharply on the dirt bike and slid three metres face-first into the dust. A lizard scampered over my jeans. On Monday evening, Jethro-dog and I sat on a rock on the ridge behind the house and looked down into the forest, and I thought, if perpetually bruised shins are the highest price I pay for living this close to the edge of the world, then here they are and welcome! Perhaps that split-second glimpse into the red eye of the February dragon was enough to stop me stumbling sideways and pull the blindfold off. Perhaps I was never really wearing one. The fact is this: that for the first time since I can remember, I’m alone in the world and I feel alone, and I’ve never been so happy.