Lift up their voice

West of Alice Springs, where gentle sandhills meet an ancient stone range, a frail cluster of corrugated iron shelters and rickety houses cling to the wild desert.

- Bernard Lagan

It was to here, Papunya, once a gentle glade of mulga trees, that around 1000 of Australia's last nomadic Aborigines were taken in the early 1960s to absorb white ways and ease their intended assimilation into modern Australia.

The heavy failures that flowed - here and elsewhere - are well known: constant unrest, breakdown of social order, chronic health problems, alcohol and substance abuse. It was the latter that led me down the 200km dirt track laced with wrecked cars and tossed liquor bottles to Papunya two decades ago, to the young petrol sniffers who were then dying in their scores across the desert.

Arriving at dusk, I was locked in a shed by the white boss, who would take me at dawn to where blazed-out kids would be finishing a night's petrol sniffing in the bush. The forlornness of my assignment built as I lay in the desert, cold under a grubby blanket, listening to a drunken fight.