We arrive at night. On the way, traffic clogs the M4 and we move slowly up and over the range. Fog swarms across the road, retreating into wet gullies. Isla falls asleep, dribbling. ‘Thank fuck,’ mutters Jay as he turns the engine off. ‘Two hours, my ass.’ He unfurls long legs. I pull Isla from her booster seat, cheeks hot, arms stuffed into her red corduroy jacket like a fat rag doll. The others are inside, with every light on.

Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Objects from the British Museum is nearing the end of its time at the National Museum in Canberra. I have no wish to dismiss the significance of this large-scale exhibition, the engagement with communities and the hard work of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators coming at these issues from the inside. But we should also be prepared to look critically at the consequences of acknowledging and listening, as if this were a political end unto itself.

Ray Jackson, a long time Sydney activist who drove campaigns against Aboriginal deaths in custody and racialised policing, died at home last week.

Writer Sunil Badami and sociologist Gabrielle Gwyther, among others, have detailed the ‘othering’ of Sydney’s populous western suburbs which are perceived, says Badami, as ‘some bloody hell, beginning somewhere around Annandale, blurring into a distant blank space … a no-man’s land of strange terrors and cultural desolation that evaporates into Emu Plains’. The western suburbs, insists Badami, are heterogeneous, dynamic and complex. Here, multiculturalism is made a meaningful fact of life.