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'In the Time of their Lives is a wonderful book that honours the extraordinary heritage and historical trajectory of Western Desert (Ngaanyatjarra) speech, the importance of speech and the management of its varieties with a complexity and insight we have rarely seen in print. With a blend of interviews in translation, close examples of speech, first person testimony, photographs, film clips and historical material, Kral and Ellis have brought attention to the changing sensory world of Yarnangu, of sight sound and bodily experience as central to Ngaanyatjarra sociality and personhood. It is rare, indeed, to have such respectful research flow from the intimate and personal perspective of a committed member and active participant in Ngaanyatjarra life.' - Fred Myers, Silver Professor of Anthropology, New York University

In the Ngaanyatjarra Lands in remote Western Australia children play a guessing game called mama mama ngunytju ngunytju 'father father mother mother'. It is mainly girls who play the game, along with other members of their social network, including age-mates, older kin and adults. They offer clues about target referents and establish mutual understandings through multimodal forms of representation that include semi-conventionalized drawings on the sand. In this paper we show how speech, gesture, and graphic schemata are negotiated and identify several recurrent themes, particularly focusing on the domains of kinship and spatial awareness. We discuss the implications this case study has for understanding the changing nature of language socialization in remote Indigenous Australia. Multimodal analyses of games and other indirect teaching routines deepen our understandings of the acquisition of cultural knowledge and the development of communicative competence in this context.