There are books I read standing up. I have an old lectern given to me by a friend leaving town. It stands by a door opening onto the back verandah and I can read there by natural light. Standing helps me concentrate and the books I particularly need to do that for usually address, in some way, Alice Springs and central Australia, the place where I have lived and worked as a journalist and arts writer for 25 years.

Books in this vein that have recently been the most rewarding are all ones I keep coming back to. For a start, there is Iwenhe Tyerrtye: what it means to be an Aboriginal person by Margaret Kemarre Turner OAM. Its alluring subtitle has probably prompted many people to open its covers, but even in Alice, where Kemarre is a leading and much loved figure, many would be daunted by its text. Essentially a transcription of conversations with Kemarre, sometimes in Arrernte (reproduced and then translated), sometimes in her idiosyncratic English (which she speaks as a second language), it is not an easy read. But throughout are gems of insight into exactly what its subtitle promises: the cultural realities of contemporary Aboriginal life in central Australia that, for outsiders, are so often confounding. There are also many expressions of Kemarre’s generous and hopeful view of the future between black and white Australians, looking beyond blame for past wrongs towards making the most of what the two cultures can offer one another.