Arnhem is a brute chunk of land, harsh, beautiful and wild. It was declared an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931 and includes some of the Kakadu National Park. Permits to visit these areas are only given to official tour operators, so, out of pure necessity, I found myself sitting next to a lily- white English lady on a tour bus full of tourists. She kept on telling me about her lovely home in London.  I was brutally uncomfortable on the 40-kilometre journey to Injalak Hill — a site of some of the most famous Aboriginal rock art. At the base of the rock hill an aboriginal guide named Ezariah met us. For the climb up the hill, the lily-white English lady put up a frilly pink brolly to shade herself from the blazing son.  I don’t think it gets visually more brutal than that. For lunch we were taken to a rock overhang that overlooked the floodplains of Gunbalanya where the aborigines have been living for thousands of years. I really felt that we were just naive ‘Balanda’ intruders into their space. Ezariah removed himself from the group and went to sit alone on a rock, dreaming into the distance. I asked him what the Malay word, ‘Balanda’, meant in his language. I guess, (too late) that was a typical ‘White Fella —-Black Fella’ jabber. “ In our language we say of white-man —– ‘balanda’, means people with skins like the white clay”, he answered. On the way down, the lily-white lady’s very white ankle got jammed in a crevasse. The guide ran after her frilly pink brolly that had rolled down further into the craggy chasm. Before we departed, she thanked him, then asked him if he’d ever been to London. Brutal. “People with skins like white clay”, I said to myself in the far corner of the tourist bus.

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