We with our maps and texts enter this land, to see the sights, to meet selected natives on our carefully planned educational tour. We are the nomads, seeing or Reading the Country in carefully constructed prose passages which straighten out the meanings implicit in Paddy Roe's seemingly wandering prose. Nomadism is only implicit in those journeys we make out from home. We are always centred, always constrained within the fences of our illustrations. Our journey thus become equated with those 146 filmic images we hold in our minds of true nomads.
Nomads are riders on camels that pass silently in the night.
They drift as dreams from place to place in an ever-moving series of homes, and we may be privileged, as the tourist brochures tell us, to experience that nomadism in a ride on a camel, in a glimpse of an oasis. It is something away from us and as romantic as a glimpse of Ayer's Rock in the moonlight, though it is not my home. My home is Roebourne, Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin, Broome and Fitzroy. My home is fixed and immutable. There are few nomads left in this world, though the convoys of mobile homes snaking up from Florida each northern summer and down again each northern winter may reflect the eternal round of the nomad visiting familiar place after familiar place season after season in a true state of ever being on the move.