‘Do you think this is it?’ she asked Laedi. ‘That this time Derek will persuade him?’

‘It was always going to happen,’ Laedi said.

‘It’ll kill him.’

‘No, it won’t. You talk gaiman. He’s virtually working there anyway. How often do we see him before midnight? It might be better if he gives up the university and isn’t stretched between two.’

Rika put her hands on her ears and moaned. Bili came in and started moaning with her. Some kids were arguing out on the street, playing ‘independence’. ‘Is it true we’ll get to live anywhere we want?’ Bili asked.

Laedi sighed. ‘Of course it’s not,’ she said, and put the radio on. Aro’s calm voice was reassuring. He’d moved from tutoring to work at the new radio station. ‘Return to your houses,’ his voice said. ‘Do not be afraid. The town is coming under control.’

Wilkie and the boys took advantage of the radio and the neighbours coming and going to escape down the hill to the roadblock that had gone up at the turn-off. Every car was stopped and each driver was told that Hohola was now strictly Papuan. And then anyone who lived there was let through! Including the coastal New Guineans, who made up a good proportion of Hohola’s inhabitants: families from above the line drawn on the map from west to east – New Guinea above and Papua below.

Which, Wana pointed out, showed just how stupid the distinction was. It wasn’t New Guineans whom the Papuans wanted to keep out, it was those tough-minded fighters from the Highlands, who seemed to think that because they worked on construction sites across town, they had some stake and ownership in the place. In any case, Wana said scornfully, almost as many Highlanders are Papuan as New Guinean, for the line drawn by the Europeans ran plumb through the middle of the Highland populations.

She’d been at the university all afternoon, reading in the library; she was a tutor now and she didn’t have time to waste on football. It’d been a quiet afternoon with most students at the match, and when she heard shouting outside, she thought it was just exuberance. When she realised the antagonisms of the match were being played out on the campus, she went and found Aaron in the shade by the door, smoking with Sam.

‘The teams weren’t even made up of Papuans and New Guineans,’ Wana said, when she and Sam arrived on the platform. ‘Only five New Guineans were on their team, and they had a Chinese captain. And half the Papuans were white.’

‘Which goes to prove Aaron’s point,’ Sam said.

‘What point?’ Rika’s voice was sharp.

‘The usual,’ Wana said. ‘That Papua’s an artificial idea. That you can trace all this back to the colonial carve-up. He’s been getting the students to understand the consequences of going to independence divided.’

‘Don’t be fooled,’ Aaron had said. ‘You are students well able to understand the history of colonialism and the complexity of this moment. Our relationship with Australia is changing, not ending, and we must understand why and how. If nothing else, understand this: Australia will always play this place of ours to its advantage, which right now is to recast its relationship with Asia.’ That’s what Aaron wanted understood. Indonesia had claimed Dutch New Guinea, and already there were tensions along the border. The new Labor government in Australia needed a decolonised Papua New Guinea, safe within its influence, for exactly the same reason that their conservative predecessors needed it as a colonial territory: as a buffer between their large white continent and Asia. ‘Don’t be diverted by the wrong fight. Australia isn’t interested in Papua versus New Guinea, and if any of you think it’ll take on Papua’s separatist cause, you’re fooled already.’