It is in places like Alice Springs and remote towns like Yuendumu that the fleshy, malignant knot in the corpus of the settler-colonial nation state becomes utterly, obscenely visible. If you’re drawn to these places, you will find that regardless of who you are, at some point you will have to sit in your discomfort. In that profound culture shock, you have to accept that you are a foreigner in what you might regard as your own country.

The Walkley Award-winning journalist Kate Wild did precisely that when she embarked on what can feel like a personal investigation into the malignancy, travelling to ground zero where systems are not just broken; they are haemorrhaging. The gulf that separates two societies, or ‘us’ and ‘them’ – wherever you position yourself – is as vast as the continent.