My copy of Ad Borsboom's thesis Maradjiri: A Modern Ritual Complex in Arnhem Land, North Australia is notated on the imprint first page ‘J.C. Altman, Dept of Prehistory + Anthro, The A.N.U., May 1979’ so I must have taken this book into the field with me when I travelled to Maningrida in April 1979. Nicolas Peterson, my supervisor, must have given it to me.

It was a year later, in May 1980, when I first met Ad. Actually, it was Elfrida whom I almost met first. I had been living at an outstation called Mumeka with Kuninjku people over the wet seasons, cut off from Maningrida owing to seasonal flooding of the bush track that ran past Mumeka. The contact that Mumeka residents and I had with the outside world was via the Liverpool River and a landing called Manbulkardi about 10 kilometres from the outstation. I had been living at Mumeka since October 1979 and in May travelled to Maningrida by boat for one of my rare visits to the township. I went into the local MPA (shorthand for the Maningrida Progress Association) shop, and there I saw this exquisite Balanda (non-Aboriginal) woman and my mind raced. Unfortunately, I soon found out that she was Mrs Borsboom, living at Maningrida, with two young daughters Jacqueline and Sandra and the anthropologist Dr Ad Borsboom. Despite my initial disappointment, the Borsbooms and I formed a long-standing intercontinental friendship.

Maradjiri was a big part of my early bonding at Maningrida with Jimmy Burinyila, a Djinang man of the Mildjingi clan who had also worked with Borsboom; I was then a young economist metamorphosing into an anthropologist and Burinyila and I used to talk a lot about ceremonial exchange. Burinyila was the son of Raiwalla who had been a close collaborator (we used to call them informants, but they were actually the people who made our cross-cultural engagements possible) of the anthropologist Donald Thomson. Thomson had written an early book Economic Exchange and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land that struggled with explaining the hybrid economic and social institution embedded in trade ceremonies. Maradjiri was one of these ceremonies and Borsboom's thesis had investigated how the pre-colonial Maradjiri had transformed in colonial times from a post-burial ceremony to a ‘birth pole’ ritual that celebrated a child's birth several years after the event.