Halfway through the main course, Lisa asks Carol whether she knows Billy Wilson, who has recently started sending his art into the art centre. ‘The only thing to do with anything he sends you,’ Carol says, ‘is take a match to it.’ She tells us the story of how Billy murdered his wife. She worked at the school with Carol, who goes into detail about how lovely she was, and how she would turn up at Carol’s place when she needed to escape further beating. Eventually, he killed her and went to prison, but he’s back home now, making artwork.

I am sickened by this story. I concentrate very hard on eating my meal. I’ve heard stories like this before. I’ve been in town six months and every so often someone who has been here a lot longer dusts off an old, terrible story like this. I also know that women are bashed, raped and assaulted every time grog comes into town, which is every second weekend, if not more often. In my time here, I’ve accumulated bits and pieces of knowledge, anecdotes and hearsay about this stuff. You learn to just keep breathing. It’s out there, in the houses all around me, but I keep going. There’s a man called Johnnie who was jailed for sexually assaulting his daughter. He speaks good English and he is always friendly to me. This man confuses me, but I can’t think of a better alternative than being friendly in return. What’s the safest option, for me? And what’s the smartest option, for the Aboriginal women who live here? Unlike me, they are not just passing through.

Carol begins another story. I concentrate on the fact that in exactly one week I will be flying south to spend time with my friends and family. Carol’s next story is about a man who set fire to his wife. I feel sick. I feel panic rising in me. I feel my insides going cold and rigid, and can feel the hot swell of tears behind my eyes.

I was harassed two weeks ago. It was a Sunday morning and I was at home, alone in my flat as I usually am, reading for the hour or so until I was due to be collected to go fishing for the day. A young man came to my door and asked for Simon, who used to live there. He wouldn’t go away, and I tried to get rid of him. I was a bit freaked by him, but when he asked me to have sex with him I felt pure terror. Bigger than me, and stronger, he was standing only inches away, inside the doorway of my living room. I have no close neighbours; my doorway is hidden from the street. He reached out and groped me. I reacted without thinking, pushed him out the door, slammed it, locked it. Panic set in: he kept calling out to me from the verandah. I called Toni and Edward, who live close by. I could barely speak, but I finally explained and Edward arrived in about a minute. Edward told the guy to go away. He said he was only looking for Simon, and then he left.

I don’t feel safe in this community anymore. Irrationally, but irrevocably, every young man I see makes me feel afraid. This man - who lied about his name, saying ‘Sebastian, I mean Stuart’ – came back that night, and then again two nights later, so I left my flat to stay with friends. Now Toni and Edward have gone on holiday and I’m in their house. There are neighbours on both sides and a view of the river mouth through the door. I think I can survive until I get on the plane. I check every door and window twice before going to bed.

Carol’s stories make me feel like there is no escape from violence in this community. She makes me feel as though this kind of thing is normal. Now she has moved on to a story about a man who kept his family under the threat of violence at the point of a gun. I find myself staring at her: why is she telling us so many of these stories? How can I go on sitting here listening to them?

My father died a week ago. I was in the middle of a different dinner party when I heard. I’m the fifth girl in our family. The middle sister rang me with the news. She said that Two heard first, and rang the eldest. They talked for a while and then Two said, ‘Maybe now we can stop having nightmares.’ When I told my sisters I was coming here, they asked me if I would be safe. I asked other people about it. Yes, they said – there is violence within the Aboriginal community, but it doesn’t cross over into the white community. My sisters and I know all about fear: we were raised on it. We know, from our insides out, that if you can’t be sure that you’re safe it’s like freefalling in nothingness. Carol’s third story hits me at the base of my ribcage: I think of my parents’ bedroom when I w

as four, the doorway, the wardrobe on the left-hand wall, the two rifles in the corner of the wardrobe. This memory is entirely grey and brown. And cold and tight with fear.

When I got to Maningrida, I was shown my flat. The previous tenant’s gun safe is still in the corner of my bedroom, grey-green metal about as tall as me. The person showing me around opened the safe and I saw the guns. After that I locked it and left the keys at someone else’s house, without a label on them. I have covered the gun safe with a blue and white sarong and put a teapot and a coffee grinder on top of it. It is no longer there.

Carol is still telling stories. I am trying not to cry, silently begging Graham and Laurie and Lisa to change the topic. Everyone but Carol is quiet. Though I can no longer hear the words, I feel each of them like a bruise. My mind buzzes with fear. I remember to breathe. I was four-and-a-half when my parents separated, and every memory I have of those early years feels just like this. My mind is providing a jangly slide show of images to illustrate Carol’s stories. She is telling them from her safe place on the ‘us’ side of the ‘us and them’ divide. She thinks that violence and terror belong only to Aboriginal families and that it’s our role to sympathise and to exclaim in dismay. I am longing for her smug distance from the ghastly innards of these scenarios. I don’t know what is holding me together – nothing but the force of habit. Finally, I push my chair back from the table and am about to stand and leave, just as she leans forward and says: ‘Just think of the horror these people live with, and then think of our own lives.’ By now I am out the door, on the verandah, crying as quietly as I can on the steps of the house of a woman who is alien to me.

Lisa follows me outside and sits next to me with an arm on my shoulders. Like many people here, she looks at the violence in Aboriginal women’s lives from outside of it. I feel as though it’s inside me, and I’m inside it. I am disgusted, sickened, frail and afraid.

I have tried not to burden anyone with the terrible truth: I am glad that my father is dead. His death makes the world safer. This is too shocking for most people to understand. And yet, in this town, violence, abuse, threats, terror are all just a part of life. When a white woman was raped by an Aboriginal man here some years ago, a contingent of other white women went to the council asking that something be done. The Aboriginal women said nothing can be done – they lived with this kind of thing every day. Everything I’ve been told since I was harassed confirms this: it is just a part of life.

I shake my head. What am I doing here? I have no place in a community where actions that make me squirm are commonplace. I wonder whether I can keep breathing from now until five o’clock next Friday when the plane will take me away.