‘Why don’t you get a job?’ Rika said one afternoon when he was at the arts centre stirring up trouble. ‘All you do is criticise. How about joining in the work?’

‘I’m not working for Somare. I won’t do trade with the profiteers.’

‘Nor does Aaron, so lay off him.’

She made him look at the images her Village Shots students had taken of Aaron leaning against a wall at Somare’s office, phone in one hand, cigarette in the other. The shadow that fell across his face accentuated the burden, the weight on his spirit.

‘Look,’ Rika said. ‘Have a good look at him. He’s a friend. Think about it.’

But Eremiah didn’t need to think. The answer was easy. Aaron should leave Somare, take off his white mask and become a warrior.

Under the sagging roof of the platform at Hohola, with neighbours crowded in and kids playing football in the light that spilled into the yard, Eremiah accused Aaron. ‘Coconut man’ with a dark skin, but white inside. A coconut advisor doing the white man’s bidding. ‘You ask us to hand over our resources to foreign companies and call it development! You turn us into wage labourers for a meagre royalty, and that small insult of a reward goes to Port Moresby! Have you been to Bougainville? Have you seen the mine? Have you heard the weeping? Why not a federation of tribes? Build out from the village meeting ground. Let Bougainville make its own decisions. An autonomous province, the first in a new Melanesian federation. Why not?’ His hair was up on end, ablaze with indignation.

‘Because,’ Aaron said, ‘we have to travel as a viable government, and with unity.’ Not only because Australia demanded it; the reasons were obvious, and numerous. The world was imperfect, it had been shaped by colonialism, the mine would bring in much needed revenue, and at that hour of the night Aaron didn’t want to discuss it. He was exhausted. ‘For a start,’ he said, ‘if we don’t have foreign investment, we won’t have an economy.’

‘My point exactly,’ Eremiah was out of his seat. ‘You’re letting in the thieves and the plunderers. Making them legitimate. Ha! We think we’ve got this great thing called a state, democracy, and in exchange we welcome them in - help yourselves, sirs, our minerals are yours. Ha! You want our forests? Our fish? Our women? Help yourselves!’

‘We are a dem-oc-racy.’ Milton trilled on his ukulele. He didn’t object to what Eremiah said - the Pacific republic, the plunderers and thieves - he agreed with a lot of it. It was Eremiah’s manner he hated, his superiority. Milton would be off at dawn, back to the typewriter. Back to Rufus Baldwin, who, in that first draft, might as well have been named Eremiah.

‘You think we’re handing ourselves over on a platter?’ Aaron’s voice was defensive. ‘We’re negotiating.’

‘Compromising.’ Eremiah’s slightly nasal voice added to the sneer.

‘What do you want us to be? Some kind of pariah state?’