The two naked men were Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri and his half-brother, Piyiti, the principal hunters in a nine- strong nomadic group that roamed a relatively small area south of Lake Mackay. The others in the group were Warlimpirrnga’s mother, Papalya Nangala, his sister Takariya, his aunt Nanu and her three adolescent children – Yalti,Yukultji and their brotherTamayinya – along with a 14-year-old male cousin, Walala Tjapaltjarri. Warlimpirrnga and Piyiti must surely have been a fearsome sight in the desert in 1984, as photographs later attested – two lean, bearded hunters in their mid-20s, their long hair tied back, clutching perfectly straightened, four-metre-long spears.

Today Warlimpirrnga is a grizzled, grey-bearded 50-something with a generous pot-belly who lives in one of Kiwirrkurra’s unprepossessing houses, surrounded by his extended family of children, grandchildren and great-grand​-children. A wily storyteller whose recollections are not always to be taken literally, his story first became widely known via the 2000 television series Australia: Beyond The Fatal Shore,presented by Robert Hughes. An inveterate traveller and artist of some stature, he was sitting on a kitchen chair in his front yard one recent morning, clutching a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke and recalling younger days when he could launch a spear from his lankurru (woomera) with such deadly force that it would bring down a camel. “Yes, I speared a camel – young one,” he says through an interpreter. “Cut off that meat with an axe made from stone. Good feed – all my family ate that camel.”