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Burranghyatti people eloquently when they made their claims.
    Returned to Sydney, Prim wrote a confident and combative dissertation – a critique both of Ackland and of the other scholar, Judith Verner – studded with footnotes from Strehlow to Tindale to Auger. Auger, who was a computer whiz, introduced her to the then fresh wonder of word processing and what it could do for a dissertation. ‘I don’t know how anything got written before the PC,’ he told her.
    Her writing ran parallel to her affair, which, though by now it made her as much miserable as ecstatic, she saw as her destiny. She entered a calm but firm phase of her discourse with Auger on the subject of what she called ‘an honest confrontation’ with his wife. The more Prim argued, and the more he delayed, the more a certain sort of confidence grew in her, something hollow, stale, yet somehow rampant and addictive. She became the demanding party in sex, he the frightened one who wanted to retreat to a few well-tried options. It was love in a kind of war. She was strangely delighted when Auger, gushing into her, yelled like an angry peon delivered of a load. ‘Oh Christ,’ he would say, ‘that’s it, that’s it.’ His voice seemed also to threaten that she might have earned other, fiercer degradations, and these would be delivered in time. It was amazing to her how long she was willing to live like this, in a kind of unresolved tranquillity.
    Her dissertation done, she gave the computer disk and one of two copies she had printed from it to Auger’s office. Then she applied to be admitted to the doctoral program at Sydney. Her fellow graduates, she was vaguely aware, nodded and said, ‘Of course, of bloody course.’ For they were applying to other places, to the University of Western Australia, to Northwestern or UCLA or Constanz or Tubingen. But they understood why she wanted to stay with Auger. After the event she would wonder at their casual good humour when more malice was justified.
    Auger’s office, near the university’s renowned neo-Gothic quadrangle, was crowded with paintings of Central Australian dreamings from a range of desert cultures, carved birds from Arnhem Land decorated in the ‘X-ray’ style which celebrated the creatures’ chief internal organs, and a spectacular bone casing with a shark painted on it. When she’d first visited it as an undergraduate, the office had impressed Prim as a sort of druid’s cave, imbued with all that saved Australia, in her eyes, from its own torpor: the romance of the Aboriginal cosmology.
    Now she was due to visit it because there was a perfunctory note from Auger in her mailbox, a note without the intimacy of an envelope. It asked her to visit his office any time from three onwards.
    So she went. In this mood she was more ready to be robust, jolly, bossy with him than to be afraid at his unaccustomed mode of summons. When she went in there was a kind of shyness in Auger as he came around his desk, held her almost perfunctorily by the shoulders and kissed her cheek.
    ‘I know what all this means,’ she said, thinking he was about to tell her she had not been accepted into the doctoral program. He was about to tell her that there had been some fierce doctoral committee argument about her that he had lost.
    He asked her to sit and they faced each other like strangers on opposite sides of the desk. ‘Prim, listen. There’s a problem with your dissertation,’ he said at last. Her expectations fell another notch. Her Master’s would be delayed.
    He explained he had read her dissertation first and was concerned, ‘for your sake as much as anyone’s’. So he passed it on to Professor Rabin, because he wanted ‘a more detached view’.
    Prim would ever after remember precisely the way he looked out, levelly but with a small, painful, magisterial squint into the bright leafy trees across the lane, waving above rowdy students on their way toalfresco study in the Holme courtyard. She had a