The air was still and hot, and it hung close like a damp cloth over the desert scrubland. I arose and walked out to the wooden patio to watch the early sunrise, a smouldering cauldron of crimsons and pinks that almost seemed to set fire to the distant horizon. There was always magic in the wakening morn, as the noises and colours of the sandy orange environment began to change, and morning spilled a bucket of orange paint across the plains and washed away the purple hues of the previous night. It was indeed a magnificent morning to be alive in the outback, amidst this swirling canvas of fiery colour that announced the coming of another morning. For a while I stared out at the beauty and wildness of the arid landscape, conscious that it lacked the rolling profile of the blue-green patchwork foothills that I was used to, and I thought of my home in Ireland. It would be evening there now, and the last glittering beams of twilight would be dancing through the darkening clouds, and the dragon flies would be dipping their legs for the last time into the tranquil waters of Lough Melvin.

From the vantage of the patio, I watched an old Aboriginal woman approaching along the dirt track that snaked through the small town. She walked with slow shuffling steps, dragging oversized shoes through the red murram dust, which rose in plumes about her. It settled on her green shawl and kilted clothing, coating her unkempt hair and rounded face, filling each in craggy line to make her look younger than her aged years. She came from the local Barkindji tribe, a clan supposedly charged with the custodianship of the land and all living things upon it. Her people lived in a collection of dirty tin shacks that nestled around the Darling riverbank, a sleepy place where children ran naked along the paprika sand and lethargic dogs stretched and scratched under the shade of the Coolabah trees. For a while I watched her getting closer, and noted how her graceless movements appeared to be in total contrast with the rest of the emergent dawn. It was almost as if some divine being still had some unfinished work to do here in the barren outback. Yet as I followed her on her journey, I knew that her aimless wandering in the bush pulsed with the very heartbeat of the desert itself. She carried a small stick, possibly to poke for roots or even catch one of those lizards with the whippish tongues that darted across the desert floor. Eventually she stopped beneath my patio, and began looking at some old stones that littered the edge of the roadside. The sun had started on its journey from the horizon and the morning light fell about the dry yellow grass and threw shadows on some markings on the stones that I hadn’t noticed before. I watched her as she cupped her jaw in her left hand, and began alternatively looking attentively into the pattern and then across at me. I knew that I was witnessing a moment of aboriginal ‘dreaming’, and went back into the bedroom to get my camera. A small breeze got up, and in the shadow of the setting, I remembered the words of a Gagudju Aboriginal who had recently said that whites would be much better off "sitting down in the bush and listening for the ancestral spirits as they looked after the land". For a while, we watched each other through the conduit of a camera lens before I embarrassingly took her picture and turned away. Those unwavering tea-bag eyes looked deep inside me, whispered to me, and told me tales about her dead forefathers and her people’s lost dignity. For a brief moment also, mine replied to her. They answered that I wished to get closer to her, to understand all about her harmony with nature and other things in the Aboriginal culture that were denied to me. Around us, daylight noises were beginning to merge into the other sounds of the new dawn. The irreverent cackle of a blue winged kookaburra called out from a nearby tree, insensitive to the old woman’s moment of spiritual retreat. Then she got up and left, wandering further out into the bush, and turning every now and then in the desert landscape as if the scrubland came complete with traffic lights and signs. In the distance I watched her continue this ritual, pausing to sit on the ground at regular intervals.