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to the pub, if that’s what you mean.”
    She laughs. “There’s more to it than that. Cummon, if you’ve got a few hours I’ll show you around.”
    I look at her a bit incredulously.
    “Cummon,” she says, and I follow her out the door.

    The tour that follows isn’t the sort that makes it into travel commission brochures. The first stop is the home of my guide, Hazel McKellar: a weatherboard cottage that she shares with four goats, twelve hens, three geese, and almost as many relations. Hazel feeds a few of the animals, then herds a half-dozen children onto the backseat of a battered sedan, introducing each one as they pile in. “This is Jackie and this is Little Man,” she says, patting a young girl and boy on the head. “They’re my grandchildren.” Then Kylie and Polly. “They’re Jackie and Little Man’s cousins.” Then a few little kids who just wandered in from a neighboring house. I climb onto the front seat with a small child squirming in my lap.
    Hazel drives down a dusty stock route for a few miles and parks beside an unkempt lot littered with rusting cars and broken glass. It looks much like the harsh and forbidding landscape I’ve traveled through since Bourke. But to Hazel it is “yumba”—home—the place where she was raised among the Kooma people.
    Like many of the Aboriginal clans in this part of the country, the Kooma once ranged across the bush, following the supply of game and water. When living off the land became difficult, they’d settle at the fringes of white civilization, taking jobs as drovers and housemaids, or collecting food and blankets distributed by the government. By the 1930s, this camp outside Cunnamulla had become a permanent home to a few hundred of Hazel’s people.
    Ever since, the Kooma have had one foot in their traditional culture and one foot in the white man’s world.
    “See that cedar tree over there?” Hazel says. “That’s where I was raised. We had a hut made out of posts and calico.” It is the first time I have ever seen someone point to a stand of timber and call it home. A little farther on, Hazel shows me a “scarred tree” that has a cavity in its soft mulga trunk where wood was cut out and carved into a clublike weapon, called a “nulla nulla.” There are bits of flake and flint on the ground, and grooves in the rock where axes were honed. It all has the feel of an archeological site, except that the cultural remains are still above ground.
    Hazel, like many Aborigines, went to work as a housemaid at a white station when she was twelve. At sixteen, she married an Aboriginal drover,by arrangement, and began raising eight children while her husband followed herds of stock through the bush of southern Queensland. The family would travel for four or five months at a time, building huts like the one in Cunnamulla, or as Hazel puts it, “living from tree to tree.”
    If the life-style was traditional, the schooling was not. Hazel taught her kids by correspondence, sending away for books and lessons from the Queensland government. She’d help the children study, then send the books in to be graded.
    And between droving trips, the family returned to the camp outside Cunnamulla, where the lean-to by the cedar tree was always there waiting for them.
    “If you caught an emu, the neighbor got a leg,” Hazel says. “Then maybe there’d be some mulga apples or kangaroo. That was a big night then, a real party. No one worried about going uptown in them days.”
    Uptown was Cunnamulla, the white fellas’ place, where the Kooma kept to the fringes. Blacks could go to the pictures, but they had to enter through a side alley and sit in front, cordoned off by a rope barrier. Otherwise, the two societies kept to themselves.
    Then, in the 1960s, the government began moving the Kooma into fibro houses in town as part of the grander scheme of assimilating Aborigines. In 1975 the government bulldozed the camp and turned it into the town dump. After an