Aboriginality and the hope of art: explaining Australia in Arkansas.(AUSTRALIA)

I EXPECT YOU all noticed at the time, and I'm hoping you still vaguely recall, the Sydney 2000 Olympics at which Australia, briefly, assumed centre-stage. If, like most in the developed world, you watched the opening and closing ceremonies on television, you would have observed there a stocky black man performing a pivotal role. He was a dancer, also plays didge and sings. Djakapurra Munyarryun. A real black man. Top Ender from the Gove. A real big man.

Depersonify, because 'Purra didn't drink when he first came to Sydney aged sixteen, six years after he'd left school, add real drunk, as he would be if he were ten years younger than he is, multiply by 200, and you have a world I have survived on a Saturday night. Not many outsiders get in, because you need a permit, and even so, locals won't accept you straight away.

Largely through my kinship ties, I believe I can glance at much of what obsesses contemporary Australia, and offer a dissenting view. A surprising amount of it has to do with these impopulous outback locations, these unruly blacks' camps--that is to say, has to do with their recently idealised desirability to city dwellers, so nicely described by Roger Sandall as "designed tribalism", has to do with the consequences of British and Irish colonisation of these vestigial hunter-gatherers, who lived, at first contact with Europeans, a life frozen in the Paleolithic, has to do with race, culture, urban guilt over their denomadicised way of life in largely squalid camps, the environment we share--they blame us for stuffing it up, but we could just as easily blame them--white sense of superiority well concealed within a simultaneous decadent envy of barbarity, the problem of what to call and how to deal with the offspring of our miscegenation, and in the midst of this, for a few creative souls fed up with the state of our nation, confusion and bewilderment at why the island continent cannot seem to "make it" in any real global sense, although it is the same size as the USA.

Bear in mind that I speak as a rural Australian and that 85 per cent of Australians live in coastal cities and have never so much as seen a black Aborigine or a topographical map. We are the driest continent and Aborigines like Djakapurra from the Top End of the Northern Territory are blue-black, indigo black. Those who don't have to live next door hold strong views on the subject of their rights. I could spin a few yarns here, and these would be my currency during a dry season, when whites with permits, those half-dozen resident teachers, builders, administrators--but not the clinic sister, who is in for a busy time--gather behind some compound fence, beer in hand, feet up, to peruse the action after the first slab of Foster's has gone down. Hang onto your hats, though the place will be quiet as an Irish village from dawn till 10 a.m. and that is the best time to sleep. Sleep comes easier when iron walls are not too hot to touch.

To a Top Ender, I could fearlessly describe that black man who was dancing at the Olympics, Djakapurra Munyarryun, as a fullblood without the quotes, though the word would educe a shocked grimace from folk in Sydney and Melboume. The Northern Territory has desert blacks, freshwater blacks and saltwater blacks. Well, that's how they see themselves. Djakapurra is a saltwater man.

I subsistence farm--cattle, poultry, bees and the like--in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, on a patch of volcanic soil within a very flammable, heavily timbered mountain range where we get a bit of annual snow. My elder son Seth, twenty-eight, is a builder in Darwin on the Arafura Sea, and I have spent a bit of time in the Territory over the past twenty-odd years, visiting family, both black and white, and working, with a son-in-law, as a trawler fisherman in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Djakapurra's territory, up into the Torres Strait to within sight of New Guinea. The tiger prawn we catch is good enough to be bought by Tokyo. I am not proposing that Arkansas is the US equivalent. I don't believe you have a frontier any more in the USA. Alaska, maybe. Nothing down south. How else account for the number of US-born cattlemen in the Territory?

Blacks and mixed-bloods constitute 33 per cent of the Territory population. My Darwin daughter-in-law, Dolly, comes from a large and powerful part-black, part-Chinese, part-European Darwin clan and Dolly too would allude to Djakapurra as a fullblood. Dolly's uncle, John Ah Kit, was the first indigenous minister in the Territory parliament. He was Minister for Indigenous Affairs in the Labor government, and in 2002 he said to the parliament, "it is almost impossible to find a functional Aboriginal community in the Territory".