Introduction

Warri and Yatungka of the Mandildjara tribe

In an age when man travels faster than the speed of sound, when he can both hear and see events happening on the other side of the world the moment they occur, where he has journeyed to the moon and returned, an aged Aboriginal man and his wife were still living amongst the sandhills of the Western Australian desert, completely oblivious to all these wondrous things and with little knowledge of the world beyond the horizon.

They were thought to be hunting and food gathering over the land as their fathers had done before them, unaware of, and uninterested in the happenings of the outside world. War, famine, revolution, acts of terrorism, things of great moment for civilisation meant nothing to that man and woman. On the infrequent occasions when outsiders had made contact with them in recent years they had never expressed any interest in life outside their own land, their ‘country’.

Why did this couple, the very last of their tribe, choose to live alone in the desert?

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