LAST WINTER I was lying in the red dirt in the middle of the Sandover Highway two hundred kilometres northeast of Alice Springs. I was trying to get the jack under my Hilux campervan after a blowout. I remembered the quizzical expression on my gym instructor’s face some months before. I had just told her I wanted to come to the Gym for the Ageing so I could crawl under my truck. Her eyes flickered down to the birth date on my application form as she tried to calculate my seventy-eight years. 

Now all those leg and arm-strengthening exercises were being tested. This was the fourteenth year I had driven north in the winter to volunteer in remote Aboriginal communities. But this year I was on a mission to solve some educational issues and was about to visit a community that had a possible answer.