‘A black writer,’ Milton said with a grin, taking another slice of toast. He’d caught a whiff of possibility; Eremiah had returned and a character was taking shape.

In Chicago, where Eremiah had studied for an MA on Martin Luther King, he’d roomed with a student descended from slaves. Unable to compete with his roommate’s tales of lynchings and slavery, his own childhood in the village world of Bougainville took on a renewed resonance: the spreading breadfruit trees, the canoes pulled up on the shore, the songs stretching back through the generations. All the more so because this world - vivid in Eremiah’s memory, and still the ground of daily life for his relatives in Bougainville - was threatened by a mine that was digging out the rich seam of copper lying beneath the fertile soil. Entire villages had been evicted by helmeted riot police and by the time Eremiah was back in Moresby, the top of an ancestral mountain had been sliced off for the open-cut mine, which was making a profit so large even he didn’t anticipate its size.

Out at the river, Milton was at his desk. Baldwin Rufus, with a history very similar to Eremiah’s, was coming into furious existence.

Unlike most of them who returned home with foreign degrees, Eremiah didn’t go to Treasury or a university job; or to a job of any sort. He reappeared on the campus, refusing offers with a dismissive wave of the hand. At Hohola, the string band played outside Aaron and Rika’s house, and Aaron welcomed him back as a brother. Rika counted the beers he drank as he raged against the mine, and Somare for allowing it, and - even that first night - against Aaron for working for him. At the university, she watched as he gathered students around him - in the canteen, at the arts centre, in the forum. His talk was all of the mine, joining the voices demanding that Somare renegotiate the terms of the agreement. Can we trust our government to stand against the Australians and the mine? Can we trust them to protect our way of life if they’re willing to sell the minerals under our land? Eremiah had read the legislation that had been through the House of Assembly.

‘Is this the way we want to go to independence?’ he asked. ‘We’re tribal. Think what that means.’ He too had the gift of oratory, a voice touched with music, and each week his retinue of students grew louder and bolder. ‘Yes, there are wars. But within a tribe there’s also cohesion, law, authority, consensus. You want a Pacific republic? Make it worth its name! Devise a new form of black government that builds on the tribe! Why do Canberra’s bidding? We’re warriors! That’s what we are, and that’s what we should remain. Warriors!’ He threw back his shoulders. Eremiah the warrior! Eremiah, who never had a book out of his hand. Eremiah, whose scrawny arms wouldn’t know what to do with a club if you put it in front of him.