But we were back at the hall the following morning for the more serious stuff: the forum and the keynote addresses and the plenary discussions. A stick of a man with an authoritative manner – a retired ex-army infantry officer who had seen the light – introduced the speakers, the first of whom, and the one we most wanted to hear, was Diane Cilento. A Queensland girl originally, she was back home now and well-known in the area for her work for causes such as these. She too, I’d heard, had joined in the protests over ‘That Road’.

I hadn’t seen a Diane Cilento movie for years, but the voice was immediately familiar. The lovely throatiness seeming to give an almost Scandinavian timbre to a not quite standard English. And the dying fall. She was good-looking still, if a little more fleshly than in her films, and she had that tinge of sadness about her that is always the legacy of a glowing past. ‘Peace has to be worked at,’ she told us, working the modulations of her voice beautifully, ‘it has to be earned. It cannot be found in any kind of mushroom or hallucinogenic pill.’ Private peace, it soon became clear her subject was. Peace unto thyself. She spoke of that ‘right and necessary third force of love and compassion which neutralizes that aggression which is in all of us’. But the aggression she alluded to was a watered-down version of the great quarrelsome impulse, a small-town nuisance of a passion, such as people exhibit when someone steals their parking place or the bank manager refuses them a loan. I thought we were here to think of ways of minimizing the danger when mighty opposites clashed, and all along we were just looking at how we might lower our blood pressure. ‘Let’s see if we can begin to trust our adaptation to misfortune and the Godhead in all of us,’ she concluded. The whole speech had been an extension of her natural cadence – one long plaintive dying away. A throaty voice, I realized, was bound to determine your view of the world.

Dr John Waiko – the first Papua New Guinean ever to become a full professor – introduced himself in a novel manner. ‘If I have to describe myself,’ he said, ‘I’d say I was the son of a cannibal.’ He was the most intelligent person we’d heard all weekend – a passionate, blazing man with a wonderful storyteller’s gift and an indomitable resentment. A credit to the cannibal who’d fathered him. Describing life in the village he came from and the commitment of his people to sociability, their need to talk, to have out communally every detail of what they’d dreamt individually the night before, he made the only convincing case I have ever heard for the inviolability of human relations.