‘Don’t think of them as servants. They don’t. Think of it as part of the exchange that goes on every day in this country. They clean your house. You give them money and status. Though, I tell you, when the wind starts and the house fills up with dust, you’ll be grateful.’

In the party atmosphere of the house, Rika saw that she was defeated, and turned her mind to the more interesting question of Laedi being ‘half and half’. That’s how she put it to herself, looking at Laedi’s skin, a dark honey colour, and the strands of hair that had escaped the bright yellow cloth wound around her head. ‘So you’re half and half?’ she said.

Laedi, who’d never heard the question put like that, even from the girls at school in Brisbane, looked at Rika. Milk skin. Milk ignorant. ‘Mixed race is what they say round here. But half-caste – hapkas – is how I was born, and when I’m in town, that’s what I am. A mongrel.’

Rika looked at Tamba. All the same ingredients. Tamba was darker and the curls of her hair were tighter, but her nose had the same hook to it. And the child, Bili? She was a smooth, nut-brown.

‘So how did you get to be mixed and half?’ Rika asked. ‘Who was your father?’

‘He was Australian. He stayed on after the war.’

Rika still thought of the war as mostly European. The Netherlands had starved in an occupation that left her mother malnourished and her father deaf in one ear. It was from Laedi that she learned about the soldiers fighting in the mountains she’d seen with Jacob. She tried to imagine what loneliness could have kept Laedi’s father here after the war was over. ‘Didn’t he have a family?’ she asked.

‘A mother, that’s all. She worked in a pub way out past Adelaide.’ Rika was unsure where Adelaide was. Somewhere south, in Australia. ‘I went there once,’ Laedi said. ‘Don was at a conference and I hired a car, drove out there. A long, flat road with snakes on it. When I got there, it was just a pub at a crossroads. A couple of houses. An old man was nodding over his beer. I asked him if he remembered her. Carol? Yes, he remembered. That was all. I couldn’t get another word out of him.’ She gave a sigh that might have been a laugh.

‘And your father didn’t go back?’

‘No. He stayed on,’ Laedi said. ‘The Highlands were opening up, coffee was being planted, there were jobs for men like him.’

‘Coffee? In these mountains? They look too steep.’

‘Not these mountains.’ How could she be so ignorant? ‘Haven’t you looked at a map?’

‘The Arafura Sea,’ Rika said. ‘I like the names you have here.’

‘Well, most of them aren’t ours!’

Leonard showed Rika the map again, pointing to the thick body of the bird, where, for years, the settlers on the coast thought the mountains were as impenetrable as here in the tail, too steep to use. He pointed to the old colonial division between New Guinea to the north and Papua to the south, cutting straight through the Highlands, which were thought to be empty. The colonial governments paid them no attention, until the gold miners went up the rivers and found wide valleys up there, fertile and full of people. That wasn’t long before the war, Leonard said, and why someone like Laedi’s father would have stayed on. ‘Did he work on a plantation?’ he asked.