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where too much cask wine was always drunk. Dimp’s turning up at the Labor Club, Prim found out, was considered such a political coup by a group of young Fabian socialists that she seemed to them a prize of the ideological wars. And though by now she defined herself as a thinking feminist, Primrose too was cherished by the Labor Club and found the sensation of being a prize less unwelcome than she was supposed to. From this glow, this delicious conceit, she found the courage for her intellectually stimulating but physically inept affair with the architecture student. While it lasted, she could for that time still be an icon, or – she wouldn’t use the term aloud – a trophy, while safe within her known status as the architecture student’s girlfriend.
    At heart, Prim believed she neither had nor needed the capacity for love and its attendant exultations and horrors, its retching tears, yowling ecstasies and general unnecessary fuss. She understood from some of her younger lecturers that falling in love was a bourgeois construct, a metaphor for the sort of deep hormonal craze which was capable, if both partners played along, of leading to a mutually shared belief that their particular compulsion was worth a year’s, or two or ten years’ most testing and intimate investment.
    She was thus taken by storm to find herself, in her first year as a postgraduate, bitten by the construct of falling in love with her graduate adviser, Professor Robert Auger. This occurred in an open-sided tent pitched at Turner Creek reservation in desert country two hundred and fifty kilometres south-west of Alice Springs, near a plug of conglomeraterock named Mount Bavaria or Gharrademu, a landmark which was the subject of a court hearing. Primrose and three other graduate students were seated on campstools in boiling air near the rear flaps of the tent that constituted the court. Since the other three were students well advanced on their dissertations, Prim had come here thinking of herself as Auger’s best first-year MA, the only one invited to this land rights hearing in Central Australia.
    Robert Auger, an American, had first come to this desert country in 1967 as a snub to the Vietnam draft and to study the Burranghyatti desert people. His being in Australia at the time was a matter of principle – he could have sought an exemption, but would not stoop to play that game. He ‘got’ the Burranghyatti at the right time, just as they were beginning to reconcile themselves to missions and reservations as a near full-time option.
    While the mysteries of the Vietnam War possessed the attention of the bulk of his fellow citizens, American and Australian, Auger spent his research time in the presence of Tracker Tagami, a man then of about sixty years. Tagami was an elder of the tribe, in so far as the Burranghyatti possessed shared elders. For traditionally they travelled their sparsely watered country in small family groups – coalescing with relatives only at such major ceremonial sites and waterholes as the one at the base of Gharrademu, Mount Bavaria. Tagami, who had made Auger’s repute, was deceased, but now his son, Noel Yangdandu, was the principal party to a land claim under the Land Rights Act for possession of the Mount Bavaria area. Professor Auger was the expert witness who could vouch for what Yangdandu’s father had told him long before. If Mount Bavaria was a locus of primary meaning to Tracker, it was necessarily so for his son.
    A Federal Court judge, appointed to hear the land claim under the Land Rights Act , sat in shorts and knee socks at a table deep in the tent’s shade, listening avidly to the respected Professor Auger, advocacy anthropologist, now a man in his early forties, authoritative in a casually American sort of way. The middle-aged judge asked Auger to describe the number and frequency of the interviews he had held with Noel Yangdandu’s father, Tracker Tagami, and whether there had been onlookers who