I’M on a winter search for the sun, a few weeks of warmth to help me through to spring. With my friend Roger, I set off north on a drizzly Friday afternoon. We drove to Tocumwal, on the Murray River, and camped in state forest on the Victorian side.

Roger has bad knees, so he can’t walk much. But what he lacks in mobility, he makes up for in curiosity. That’s why we bumped all the way to the end of the muddy track in the dark before deciding on a camp spot: he wanted to see what was round the next corner. I took the wheel next morning, windscreen still foggy, my attention on the conversation, and promptly got us bogged. We got bogged a second time that day, driving off-road to look at an interesting house we’d glimpsed from the freeway.

Our drive to Brisbane, on the Newell Highway – mostly – continued in this fashion: detours, pauses, slow circumnavigations of every town and back again. Ooh, look at that old building! Maps. More maps. A lazy morning spent on the sloping balcony at the Imperial Hotel in Coonabarabran. Fried food. Bains-marie. We got to Brisbane in five days.

Along the way, I finally began to learn about stars. (Here’s Leunig’s take, for the election.)

I’d never before understood the movement of the night sky. I like to look for the Southern Cross, but I’ve never been sure where it would be, or why. I remember reading a picture book called My Place in Space over and over again, and understanding the smallness of Earth had a profound effect on me. But on the whole, I didn’t pay much attention to what was overhead, besides special occasions – school camps, summer holidays at the beach, or travelling here and there.

I’m only partly to blame. Growing up in the suburbs and then living in the city, stars are the exception, not the rule. When Galileo was stargazing on a clear, moonless night, the Milky Way was bright enough to cast a shadow. It still is – but not where people are, not where lights crowd out the cosmos.

The Newell Highway is an observatory tour, of sorts. It passes the Dish, at Parkes; the big telescope near Coonabarabran and the radio telescope compact array near Narrabri.

We bypassed the Dish, but visited the second two. And in the evenings, when we stopped for camp, Roger looked up. He explained how to find south using the Southern Cross and its pointers, talked about the varying expansion rate of the universe, and sung the galaxy song from Monty Python. He also sung the praises of Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer, whose Cosmos television series he’d watched as a young man. “There have been others since with better graphics, but none with better politics,” Roger said.

At Roma, in western Queensland, Rog turned north for Carnarvon Gorge and eventually, Cairns. I hitched further west, to Charleville.

There’s a tourist site on the edge of town called the Cosmos Centre. I think it’s the best attraction I’ve visited. And there, I found the sun – but not in the way I’d bargained for.

I saw it through a telescope. I was in a group and each of us, in turn, peered, paused, and gasped. A rough looking man wearing tracksuit pants and thongs limped up and put his eye to the telescope. “I see it,” he said. “Oh, wow.”

Through the filter, the sun appeared molten red. I saw dark sunspots, only pinpricks on the lens but larger than Earth in reality; and huge solar flares on its edge, like wisps in the wind.

(The Sun: a photo on my phone through the eyepiece of the telescope – it’s nothing like what I saw, but you get the idea.)

I returned to the Cosmos Centre in the night time too, and saw Saturn and its rings through a telescope, and a globular cluster – stars as bright and close as a field of flowers – and the Swan Nebula, a great dust cloud from which stars are born. The guide pointed out a puff of white in the sky, the Small Magellenic Cloud, and suddenly I could see another galaxy 200,000 light years away with my naked eyes.

It is several days ago now, but it still feels like revelation.

The final episode in Sagan’s Cosmos was called ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ He despaired that it might be inevitable for technological civilizations to self-destruct. For humanity, he was alarmed about nuclear war, and later, about the hole in the ozone layer and about the greenhouse effect. He died in 1996.

But he did have hope: “A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet,” he said.

“One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the Earth, finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.”

I HITCHED home from Darwin in four days. I googled the distance and found this answer:

“The road distance between Melbourne and Darwin is around 3752 kilometres. The journey would take approximately 45 hours, so would best be undertaken over a minimum of 5 days.”

I won, and without a car! Here are some other non-vital statistics…

7: different lifts

6.5: hours waiting by the road

97: roadkill carcasses (an estimate), attended by

283: contented crows (also an estimate)

13: roadhouse pitstops

18: pee breaks

1185: kilometres covered in the longest lift, from Katherine to Alice Springs

3: hours I drove the (government) car during that ride

2: other hitchhikers we picked up, including the owner of a roadhouse near

1: roadside bushfire we braved, with

5: metre flames on either side of the vehicle

1: crocodile-skin vest, borrowed from

1: itinerant tree-dweller named ‘Bushy’

20: hours in the longest driving day, from Coober Pedy to my door

1: free lunch given to me by picnickers in Port Augusta

1,3 &5: the only functioning gears in the backpackers’ bombed out Nissan Pulsar (no reverse)

1: stop by the police highway patrol, and

0: charges laid

It all adds up to…

1: happy traveller/tree-dwelling protégé

ONE day, while I was staying in Yuendumu, I took a trip to the Laramba Sports Weekend. My friends collected me in their troopy and we drove east for two hours on dirt roads.

Teams and onlookers from four remote communities showed up and camped out for a few days. The women played softball and the men, football. The night before we arrived, there’d been a song contest. Sports weekends are a regular, lively fixture in desert life.

Yuendumu is about 300 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs. Laramba is a smaller settlement, on Anmatjere land, closer to the Stuart Highway. On the way, we drove through a community called Mt Allen (or Yuelamu) and past a few outstations – clusters of houses where families live out of town.

There are several hundred remote communities in the Territory, most of them very small, and all of them profoundly different to mainstream Australia. Visiting Yuendumu and Laramba, I realised I was travelling to different countries. I spent three years taking Indigenous studies subjects at Monash University, but strangely, I hadn’t grasped this reality. The land is still occupied; the spoken languages are not English.

When we arrived at Laramba, a lengthy debate was underway in the timekeepers’ stand about which sides would play each other. We waited, lathering sunscreen and looking at the red dirt oval, its boundaries marked by lime dust.

On the Mt Allen team there was a big lump of a lad, a little chubby, with a plaited rats tail. My friend pointed him out: “I’ve heard he’s the one to watch,” he said.

The games were relaxed affairs. Play was skilful, but not physical. There was little chasing and few tackles – you wouldn’t want to risk your skin on the raspy surface. The big lad positioned himself at centre half back, intercepted several balls and cruised through the middle. It was a fun afternoon.

A couple of weeks later, back in Alice Springs, I watched the inaugural game of the Central Australian Redtails in the NTFL, which is the competition held in Darwin over the wet season. I noticed the big lad playing at full-forward, and found out his name is Daniel Stafford. He’s only 18.

He kicked four goals as the Redtails surged in the last quarter to win by five points and, later, was named the competition’s rising star for the round. The team did a long, raucous lap of honour while the crowd cheered and whistled. The newspaper reported effusively:“Pandemonium struck the ground as the final siren sounded, with emotional scenes of jubilation and local pride”.

The day before, one of the new club’s founders, Rob Clarke, said the Redtails were about more than sport. “This football team is about changing people’s lives here in town and in communities.” He’d decided to start the club two years ago, after a promising young player died in the summer off-season. The Redtails are playing a four-game trial, and seeking to join for the full competition next year.

A couple of weeks later I arrived in Darwin and stayed with my friends Charlie and Ness. Charlie is the director of the Clontarf Academy at Kormilda College.

The first Clontarf program was started in Perth in 2000, and it now operates in nearly 50 schools all across the country, with thousands of students enrolled. It uses football – Australian rules or rugby league – as a drawcard to keep Indigenous boys in school. The website explains: “Clontarf is a sophisticated behavioural change program, not a sporting program”. Many schools have set up similar incentive-based sports schemes for girls, such as Katherine High’s Stronger Smarter Sisters.

For now, school retention rates are low among Indigenous students. Less than half make it to year 12, compared with nearly four out of five non-Indigenous students.

I visited the Clontarf common room one morning before school started. About 30 teenagers were in there early, playing table tennis, pool and video games. On the walls were photos of the camps they’d been on. The staff run footy training sessions twice a week, among other things.

The build-up to the wet season has begun, so the weather is hot and steamy. It’s the witching hour, the time when tempers fray. Later that day, Charlie told me, there was a nasty fight. For many of the students, there are no easy answers. But the programs boost attendance and retention rates and support school-leavers to find work or more training. The boys have a place to be, somewhere on campus where they belong.

When he lived in Katherine, Charlie helped start the Big River Hawks, a new team in the Darwin under-18 competition. To get a game, you’ve got to be attending school or work.

Players travel to Katherine from communities spread across an area the size of Victoria: south-west as far as Lajamanu, east to Ngukkurr and north-east to Numbulwar on the Gulf of Carpentaria.

I saw them play one week in Darwin. Gosh, can they play. At half-time, up by nine goals, the young men ran off the field whooping and cheering. After the break, they emerged from their rooms whooping again and jumping with joy, literally. They won by 128 points in the fierce midday sun.

I’ve watched local football nearly every weekend I’ve been in the Territory. In part it’s because I like footy. It’s something here I understand. But it also feels like I’m witnessing something constructive, both on the field and in the crowd. The players are talented and determined. Among supporters, the game is a shared language.

So, of course, I went to the footy another weekend in Darwin too. There was an NTFL triple-header on at Marrara Stadium. The Central Australian Redtails were playing the reigning premiers, the Tiwi Bombers. They were behind all day, but late in the last quarter Stafford, that big lad with a rats tail, kicked a goal that put them within reach.

The sun had set and the grass was luminous beneath the lights of the stadium. I glanced up and saw a skein of geese flying in formation across the purple sky. This week, it wasn’t to be: the Tiwi Bombers kicked away again. There will be another week. 

I SPENT a day in court in Alice Springs. I knew it would show me only a sliver of the whole, but in central Australia, the whole is unfathomable. As it turns out, so is the sliver.

Initially, I felt awkward being there, observing the cases as though they were sport. So I paused in the foyer instead. A few families and individuals were sitting along the vinyl benches. The courthouse opened in 1980, replacing the low-slung heritage one on the opposite corner. It’s a blockish, concrete building, with a central atrium; the two courtrooms, the Magistrates and the Supreme, are set on either side at the back.

It was quiet. Or it would have been, if not for Ray, one of the security guards. He approached a thin young woman across from where I sat, who’d stifled a tense cough.

“It’s not the coughin‘ that carries you off, it’s the coffin they carry you off in!” he said, with fatherly glee. The woman looked perplexed, and eventually, amused.

Ray went on: “I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s son. Can you say that? No swearing in here!”

He laughed good-naturedly and smoothed his dyed brown hair. “It goes like this: I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m the pheasant plucker’s son. I’m only plucking pheasants till the pheasant plucker comes.”

The woman smiled with him, and mouthed the first line. Ray was well pleased. I watched as he worked the room, winking and testing the tongue-twister on everyone. With one young man, he progressed to “She sells sea shells by the sea shore”, and shortly afterwards, he entertained a toddler at length with the mysterious beeps of his metal detecting paddle.

I stepped into the Magistrates Court and sat through about a dozen cases. All but one of the defendants was Indigenous. (In the Territory, Indigenous people make up less than a third of the population, but more than 8 out of 10 of the prisoners.)

That day, the offences fell into two broad categories: drunken, senseless violence in town; and sober, inconsequential traffic violations on remote communities. Everyone pleaded guilty and the judge handed out very small fines, in view of the individuals’ limited capacity to pay – none had jobs. The defendants walked in silently and left without remark as the next matter began; the proceedings happened around and without them.

When the morning session adjourned I sat in the park across the road and sent a despondent message to my friend, who is a criminal lawyer in Melbourne, explaining what I’d seen. “Yeah, that doesn’t sound surprising,” she replied. “Unfair targeting or higher prevalence, I don’t know.”

Or both, I thought.

In the Supreme Court, in the afternoon, I watched the sentencing in a case that seemed to sum up the way of things, and the futility of the judicial response.

A man from a remote community was charged with two counts of causing serious harm, offenses that carry a maximum penalty of 14 years imprisonment.

He’d come to Alice to bring his mother-in-law to visit her grandson in prison. One day while he was here, he began drinking in the early afternoon. Later, he began playing cards with two uncles. They started arguing and one punched him. He punched back and broke the man’s jaw. The other man tried to stop the fight and the defendant picked up a large stick and struck and broke his arm.

When he was taken into custody, he was 33 years old, married, with a daughter he cared for while his wife was working on the Indigenous night patrol. He played footy, worked occasionally and lived simply. He had a criminal record: traffic offences ten years ago, then rioting and assault four years ago when there was a large feud between families on his community.

His barrister requested a suspended sentence, as he’d already been in custody for four months, and in that time, had apologised to the victims and resolved not to come into town to drink.

The judge disagreed. Given the man’s previous record, he sentenced him to three-and-a-half years, with a non-parole period of 21 months. The accused sat quietly. The judge called the next case.

Later, I read a report on recidivism (re-offending) posted on the Northern Territory Supreme Court website. Of all the demographics, the highest rates of recidivism are for Indigenous men between 25 and 34. Over half are caught again within two years. To what end then, is jail?

In his sentencing remarks, the judge commented that this was “yet another example of drug-fuelled violence in central Australia”. He said it wearily.

Afterwards, I sat slumped on the bench outside the court, cowering at the thought of three-and-a-half years. I watched Ray give two children photocopied drawings and coloured pencils. By the metal detector, I noticed, there was a pin-board full of finished ones.

I was unlocking my bicycle when he came out for a cigarette. “It was really nice to see you in there,” I said, “chatting to everyone, lightening the mood.”

“Oh you gotta. Everyone knows me, anyway, I’m Uncle Ray,” he said. “The managers didn’t know how to take me when I started. ‘That’s not security!’ they told me.”

We spoke for a while. Ray said his mother was a “half-cast” and his father a “whitefella”, that he and his siblings were part of the stolen generations. They’d grown up rough, in a home. He’d gotten into boxing, trained hard, and later, run a boxing gym for a long time.

“Sometimes people ask me if they’re going to be sent to jail. I say: ‘I dunno. I’m just the security guard. You better hope the judge got naughty in the mornin‘, or he’s just having a good day.

“I say to them: ‘You gettin‘ sentenced on Friday? Well, you better enjoy your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday! Nothing else you can do. You’ve gotta change what you can – if you can’t change it, don’t worry about it. Worry about it on Friday.’”

Cheerily, Ray told me to come visit him at court whenever I was in town. He perked up my afternoon. And his advice is better than any response I could muster. Trouble is, that day felt worrisome, like a Friday. Every day in Alice is like a Friday.