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disputed anything Tagami had said. Robert Auger – in country-music shirt, jeans, boots, and seeming more an anthropological ranger than a narrow scholar – referred smoothly to his notebooks, which had been the basis of sundry distinguished articles. According to Tracker’s evidence, his hero ancestor, Baurigal, journeying in the void, had madestars descend, had hurled stones, turned beasts and two protean sisters, with one of whom he had copulated, into rocks. He had endowed a cave at Bavaria’s base with his sustaining blood.
    Tracker Tagami, Auger remembered, had been outraged by diamond drilling which had occurred west of Mount Bavaria in the mid 1960s. It had turned the earth inside out and chemicals had fouled two seasonal water holes in the rock plugs known as the Sisters. Later mining, said Auger, had destroyed tracts of land in which foods such as silky pear, flax onions, bush tomatoes, acacia seed and ngurturl trees with their succulent gum had been plentiful. This despoliation had been a powerful influence upon Noel Yangdandu to make the claim. ‘Without Yangdandu’s ceremonial knowledge and use of this country, the earth loses its significance, botanical, zoological or human,’ Auger assured the judge, ‘Though to us it might still seem peopled, to the Burranghyatti it will become a void, a fatal hole in the earth’s fabric.’
    Prim was enchanted by the vigorous subtlety of Auger’s arguments, the way in which the judge set possible barriers to the success of the land claim, and the casual elegance with which Auger vaulted them.
    Within the tent flap’s shade, she could see the unmoving back of the claimant Noel. She knew him to be a handsome man, preternaturally thin and bow-legged from working as a stockman. From the students’ campfire last night she and the other three aspirants had watched Auger and Noel drinking tea and laughing loudly but clannishly with other Burranghyatti men. The one male student had been invited over, and later went out with Noel and Auger in a four-wheel drive shooting feral cats, now a greater plague than miners in Noel’s country.
    And now, in the tented court, maleness rose and excluded her again. Some of the liturgical details of how Yangdandu and other men communally maintained and restored Baurigal’s inheritance could not be uttered in front of women. Various aged and ageless women, square-bodied, thin-legged, with the broad stable features of desert Aboriginals, had already departed before the judge asked the three female students sitting in the last of the shade at the back of the tent if they would mind leaving.
    Prim and the others gathered their studious notes and stepped out squinting from blue shade into brutal light. She saw the Burranghyatti women ahead of her, swaying to their own shade – the shade of brush dwellings fortified with sheets of plastic, wooden panels, corrugated iron and an occasional car door. Three such female householders who had not attended the court sat around a blanket in the shadow of a desertoak and began dealing cards, and in her giddiness Prim thought that they looked like world-makers as they passed magic tokens to each other, frowning, barely speaking. These women possessed the other half of their people’s mysteries, the part that could be uttered only to women. Why couldn’t she research the women’s cosmos, on which the literature was thin?
    Later, of course, she would blush for her vanity, for seeing a distressed and confused group as her potential material. Even then, in the early 1980s, Aboriginal peoples had begun demanding their totems be returned, the bones of their dead be restored to them from museums as far away as Scotland. It was an age in which a clamour arose about sacred and other native designs that had appeared, without acknowledgment of moral property, on tea towels and postcards. And anthropologists were the informers of the moral sense of the white majority. She felt her own moral sense, more than her