When Leonard had shown her the map of where they were going, she’d seen a bird-shaped island leaping from the blue of the Coral Sea and imagined a world to match the names she read: the Trobriand Islands, the Arafura Sea, the Louisiade Archipelago. Her father took her through the museum’s gallery of canoe prows and ornaments, beautiful things airless behind glass, and into a research room where he’d opened a long, flat box. Carefully folding back the tissue paper, he lifted out a spray of brilliant orange plumes. It took a few moments for Rika to see that these delicate feathers were attached to a shrunken bird: a hardened tube of a body stripped of wings and feet. That’s how the birds were prepared for trade, her father told her, and when they were first brought to Europe like this, without wings or feet, it was thought that they lived in the sky, forever flying towards the sun. Birds of God: avis paradiseus. Just the look of the plumes, vivid colours from a closed box, made Rika sad. So beautiful and so dead, wrapped in their tissue and closed in a drawer.

Back at the house on the canal, she looked at the photographs of the mountain bark-cloth Leonard had given her as part of his invitation to marry and cross the world with him. Even stilled to a monochrome image, there was movement in them. The cloth sent in a parcel from Papua, leaves falling, a moon rising, zinged with existence. Pinned to the wall of Leonard’s study in Oxford, it had more life than the shadows moving outside the window. Yes, it was the bark-cloth that was the invitation. That, and the map.

And the photographs of faces taken before the war by an Australian anthropologist Leonard was researching. Like the cloth, and like the story of the old woman with her string bag, these gave life to the prospect of being there, so far away. The question, in the form of a private thought that she carried with her, as much a part of her as her camera, was to know how the eyes of the people in the photographs saw. What did that young bride see, photographed in the year her mother was born? She looked at her festoons of shells, at her painted face and decorated head; she could sense the solemnity of the girl and the husband who stood close beside her. She could see the shyness between them, but nothing told her what it was they saw, looking back at the camera and the white man holding it. The old woman making pots from spirals of clay, what was she thinking as she looked not at the camera, but at the clay in her hands? The child leaning against her, staring at the lens with curiosity, would grow into a world which her mother could no longer avoid. And the old man with the ravaged face and matted hair? For whom that grim expression? These were questions she’d put to Leonard and her father as they passed the photos between them in the upstairs study of the house on the canal.