I was born in Perth, Western Australia, just over 500 kilometres, by whitefella roads, from the town where my grandfather was born, a town in the middle of his ancestral Country where our people have lived forever, or so close to forever that it might as well be. He never went far from Noongar Country, he lived there, he worked there, he was buried there. The only time he left Country was to fight in a war that whitefellas were fighting in the name of our colonisers.

In the 2016 dry season I was visiting the place whitefellas call the Top End, the northern half of the Northern Territory. The Territory is huge but mostly empty, having in its vast area far less than one-tenth of the population of Melbourne. That population is a bit less than one-third Aboriginal Australian (depending on who you ask), by a great margin the highest proportion on the continent. The national average is a tenth of that.