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and authority in their traditional desert life than male anthropologists had suspected? Or was it thecrisis of coming in from the desert to the reservation which had diminished the male elders and given the women a new authority? Auger had referred Prim to the only other literature then available in this area. A dazzling article, he said, written in the seventies by a professor from the University of Minnesota, Dr Joyce Ackland. His praise for the material was spacious enough to make Prim faintly jealous, until Auger produced a conference program in which photographs of those who delivered the papers appeared, and Prim was despicably pleased to find Professor Ackland homely and nearing sixty.
    Ackland, in any case, had written on the subject more from a traditional anthropological point of view. The thesis of her article was that the provision of stored and bore water via taps had altered the balance between men and water. It had taken urgency out of male rites designed to ensure the recurrence of water, the ceremonial maintaining of water sources in the desert being up until then substantially men’s business. For it was the women who now turned on the reservation taps and fetched the water in jugs and pots from stand pipes. Or so Ackland’s proposition went.
    But Auger, though he admired Ackland’s article, wondered whether the women’s social powers had been increased not by tap water but by the way men succumbed to disorientation, bad diet, gaol and alcoholism. He showed Prim another article, by a West Australian academic – another elderly woman – who argued that, in their traditional life, women had had significant ritual input into maintaining water holes. Their new familiarity with taps, banal as such water might seem but ever a miraculous mother in the desert, was not a supplanting of the men but a continuation of female powers possessed before the reservation was put in place.
    So Prim was to write a dissertation on both views and either reinforce one over the other, or reach a new synthesis of both. On a minute research grant, she spent two blistering months interviewing two middle-aged desert women, the Pidanu sisters, who had taken, at their christening by Lutheran missionaries in the 1960s, the names Betty and Dottie. She sat with them by the hour, playing gin rummy before, out of politeness, out of pure kindness, they took her, sometimes together, sometimes separately, to some local women’s sites within hiking distance. At a cave beyond Mount Bavaria, the sisters each told her, sundry totemic beast-men, birdmen, lizard-children, disguising themselves as infants, persuaded a female ancestor, Kabiddi, to spill her milk for the convenience and succour of humankind.
    Before she could attend any women’s rites associated with this and other mysteries, Prim was privileged to find herself led off at dusk to a low escarpment near Turner Creek where, with white clay on her forehead and painful smoke from eucalyptus boughs in her eyes – the women smoking her ignorance out of her – she was admitted to the first, infant version of initiation. Great mysteries awaited her; she was certain of what would be a limitless, career-long association with these women, their aunts, daughters, nieces. She was a modern anthropologist, not looking at them through a long lens, but their intimate. For she was interested in all that awaited them – the solar-powered telephone, the satellite television – and not simply in the exotic aspects of where they had been in their previous, nomadic existence. And she would as a reward be one of those scholars who were named referentially, reverentially , in journals. ‘Bettany’s pioneering work with the Burranghyatti women in the Mount Bavaria region …’ She would, of course, be argued with by later scholars on the scene, but her authority would supersede theirs. And in the tent courts, or the courts convened in some community hall in remoter Australia, she would serve the