Communications is always cross-threaded here. Language, or its lack, formulates the oddly-shaped compromises of our daily intercourse. Many of the old painters are desert people, born in the bush, who did not see whites until they were adolescents. Their concessions to English are token, and most of the whites don’t stay long enough to acquire more than a smattering of Kukatja. We converse in a child-like language of hoots and squeals and exclamations. For those to whom this form of communication comes naturally, a great bond of affection is forged. For others, like me, whose currency is words, it feels patronising and clumsy. I wonder sometimes if we whites seem to these austere old people like a race of demented children.

We talk about them incessantly. Do they talk about us in the same way? You hear the word kardiya all the time. Kardiya, kardiya, kardiya! It means whitefellow, but it might as well mean stranger, outsider. Skin names notwithstanding, and most of us have them, one does not cross the barrier of whiteness. Kardiya ask too many questions, and usually the wrong ones.

Eubena, grand matriarch and number one painter, burrows her ancient head against my shoulder. She has designs on my car. I emerge from these encounters unnerved by the possibility that I may have agreed to sell it to her. A car for hunting, to take her away from the endless demands of family, of painting. She churns them out, signature works which, to my eye, lack the finesse and subtlety of her earlier paintings. Or are they the works of a master, all excess gone, great simple statements of country, of memory, of dreaming? Who knows enough to tell?

There are language classes one night a week. I thought it would be too much to take on, with everything I hoped to achieve while here. Now I think I may have done better to abandon other projects. Jo has come back from class with the information that Kukatja verbs have not only singular and plural subjects, but dual. We two, they two. The Tjukurrpa is full of dual entities. Is this twinning a feature of all Aboriginal languages? And are the dual beings of the same nature, or do they complement one another? What does this imply culturally, conceptually?

I take some women out hunting. The ground is too damp for the tell-tale cracks to show where to dig for yams, so Margaret takes the opportunity to burn some country. A wind springs up, and within minutes the flames are racing across the spinifex in the direction of three of the old women. Margaret and Tjama seem unperturbed. I ask Margaret tentatively whether she may have cooked them, and she finds this hilarious. Her mother is one of the trio. Enough time passes for me to become genuinely alarmed, but one by one they return. Maudie is cross. This is the second time Margaret has scorched her tail. I suggest that Margaret is a dangerous person with matches, and the others agree. A good joke bears constant revisiting. Days later, in the art centre, Margaret leans confidentially towards me and whispers, ‘I got matches today’. She chortles like a young girl. I pretend to be alarmed.

Helicopter and Dominic discuss Dominic’s latest painting, hands flickering with wonderful creature animations, silently conjuring a goanna, a kangaroo, a hunter. Many years ago, Dominic transgressed some law, and hasn’t spoken since. By Kardiya standards, the painting is a botched, lazy job, but the story excites Helicopter. The story is all. Why do Kardiya buy some paintings and not others, when the stories are all important?

A young man, one of the new generation of painters, brings in his latest work. The design is dramatic and powerful, the paint applied with care and delicacy. When asked for the story he replies, ‘Snake, waterhole. You make it up.’

Out here, the horizon is inescapable, and the feature that Aboriginal people don’t paint. A conceptual fault-line, echoing the fault-line that runs through the culture and psyche of Australia. How do I express this in paint? And how to resist the desire to dot, when the visual patterning of the country is all dots.

In a week or so I have to leave. Margaret tells me that if I am going to keep coming back it’s time I learned some language.