When they shop together, Santo Giardina places a jar of olives in the supermarket trolley and Audrey Napanangka adds a kangaroo tail.
Sometimes, the couple’s big, extended family eats pizza in the Italian restaurant in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, where Giardina has worked. At other times, on Napanangka’s Warlpiri country, her family will pull a goanna from a hole to cook on an open fire. Her ancestors would eat goanna to “stop them getting sick”, says Napanangka; seated on the red desert earth, she shares her goanna Dreaming story about a dancing man, as Sicilian-born Giardina wanders nearby, playing harmonica.
