Chapters 17-20 Summary and Analysis

The seventeenth chapter finds Arkady and Bruce setting out for Middle Bore but stopping to pick up Timmy, a Kaititj elder, at Skull Creek Camp. The camp is ramshackle and the Aboriginals living there are poor and crass. Timmy's wife, Mavis, is particularly surly but confesses she would like to come if she had thongs. Bruce volunteers his extra pair, and she snatches them from him to join the men, as well as Topsy and Gladys from Curtis Springs. Big Tom and his wife, Ruby are their last recruits, and on their way out, they pass a younger man being massaged by several women, as Bruce explains he is married to one of them.

Chapter Eighteen chronicles an encounter with a policeman investigating a hit-and-run in which a white man was killed, making it a much bigger deal than...