Of course, I could, but should I?

He'd be out of the way, next to the flaking trough straining to contain a pair of rootbound azaleas, which, for the past two seasons, I've neglected to replant, so instead of drinking in their crepe paper pastels, however retarded, I avert my eyes and hurry past as if the immovable object were the site of a past or future atrocity.

But that's gardening for you, shallow graves everywhere.

Side by side, the two pieces would afford the nook a tantalising equipoise of country chic and colonial kitsch. Symmetry shaded by a wisened white nectarine bound with a bandage to heal a long, deep would in its side, as if gored by something rushing through the yard at night, while we were sleeping.

He's already in an obscure alcove, my guess the proprietor, averting his own gaze from the aberrant nature of the antique, is unsure, himself, how such an item should be displayed. Meekly? Cravenly? Maybe gratuitously, with an old Akubra or a moulting boa to really take the sting out of the situation?

I suspect the owner is desperate for someone like me - a sin-eating picker - to slink in and take it off his hands, bundle the body in the back of the ute, so he can get back to filling the space with something less controversial but no less expensive; maybe bits and bobs from Malaysia or Japan or Bali? Places where occidental capitalism remains, for the moment, acceptable opportunism. It's just business, supply and demand with another shipping container arriving any day now. Nothing to get your knickers in a knot about.

The concrete Aboriginal (never the more correct "Aborigine") is in fact wearing a pair of knotted stone knickers. A shield is moulded to his left side and the hole in his clenched right flipper (the fingers so often the indicator of talent or its counterpart) the perfect fit for a wooden spear that could be wound with tinsel at Christmas.

Furtively, I circle the showroom a couple of times before leaving empty-handed, the ghost of Ted Bullpitt calling me a politically correct poofter as I step onto the street.

I assuage my disappointment with the knowledge that at least I won't have to battle with my wife (Where's your sense of humour? It's just a statue) for the stone age man's right to see out his retirement in a progressive garden such as ours, a sanctuary where irony is just as appreciated as rain.

I'm already wary because the last time the cultural appropriation polemic raised its head in our house, I'm pretty sure I lost the argument (there is no ambiguity in these cases, only bruised ego). As always, I played devil's advocate, this time to a dear friend's measured and educated denouncement after I quite deliberately defended Lionel Shriver and her latest incendiary visit to this country (before the fires, you were free to wallow in such fatuous masturbation).

Shriver rubs plenty of people the wrong way. She advocates writers should be able to write about whatever they want. Many argue she is wrong, particularly when it comes to white, middle-class authors horning in on the stories of minorities.

Shriver wrote a remarkable character; a mother who dared (with good reason) to dislike her child. Fans of We Need to Talk About Kevin know what I'm talking about when I say how much I love that book and Eva Khatchadourian, its more than slightly unreliable narrator.

I still get goose bumps when I recall the scene where the titular bad seed (nature or nurture, we're never quite sure), through a police car window, searches his mother's face for her knowledge of the true enormity of his actions.

If Shriver can give birth to such a woman without herself being a mother, I'm all for writers inhabiting whichever characters they like and conjuring them up from whichever combination of chromosomal building blocks they choose.

Similarly, to me, it would be a tragedy if Carson McCullers' portrayal of those blacks populating her Gothic American south of the 1940s should be banished because she wasn't of them but rather observing them, albeit with the detached forensic intensity of a girly swot boning up for her exams (by the way, Flannery O'Connor was no fan of McCullers', but that's another story).

Of course, just as planting an offensive sculpture next to the flowers is stupid and will and should court derision, any writer these days should be woke enough to know if they venture down such a fraught garden path, they'd better be prepared to defend themselves. Which is fine.

Voices are important, genuine voices even more so and they must never be permitted to be crowded out by the cynical and undeserving.

But, equally, storytelling should always be lionised (Lionelised?) just as it should be demonised because, in my book, fiction is purity, the same way reading is fundamental.

Like a stunning eruption of Popocatepetl, the literary world is again pulsating with the cultural appropriation debate thanks to American Dirt, a book (endorsed by Oprah) about Mexican refugees by an author who seems to have a foot in both white and Latino camps.

Jeanine Cummins' book was famously snapped up by a cash-splashing publisher, promoted with barbed wire table centrepieces (rivalling a nation of concrete "Nevilles" for bad taste) and, bizarrely, gushed over then disavowed by an actress who married a billionaire.

Depending on which side of the border wall you sit, American Dirt is either the next The Grapes of Wrath or as shoddy as of one of Enid Blyton's more unfortunate churns.

But, again, like Popocatepetl, this latest drama will sputter out and we'll just wait for the next one to blow its top.

I do, however, think it interesting that amid all this communal scrutiny of cultural sensitivity some of our best storytellers fly under the radar because they dwell in that strange netherworld of songwriting.

As with their poet cousins, lyricists, as much as any author, wrestle these issues down too; floating, like bees to pollen, from one exposed nerve to the next.

One such gifted songwriter is Suzanne Vega (unlike O'Connor, a big McCullers fan).

Vega is a white woman who was raised in a Latino household and didn't know her Puerto Rican dad wasn't her biological father until she was nine.

As you would expect, Vega grappled with her revelation of identity through song, the results of which are like the best fiction; simple and provocative.

"If your daddy is white,

You must be white too.

When you look into the mirror

What comes looking back at you?"

Vega's storytelling is vital and confessional and messy. I listen to her songs with the same adoration and suspense as I did 30 years ago precisely because of their equivocation.

A world set in concrete?

How uninspiring.