FOR MARTHA, THERE WAS NOTHING EXOTIC ABOUT NEW GUINEA. Rather the reverse. For her, the bird-shaped island north of the large flat continent where she was born evoked jungles, stretchers, an uncle fighting the Japanese during the war. Mud. Mosquitoes. Tent hospitals. The only reason she was here at all was because she’d married Pete. She’d met him at a dance at the end of her first year at Sydney University. It was a hot night just after the exams. A band was playing, and Pete came through the crowd and asked her to dance. He had long hair and John Lennon glasses. She had a fringe that covered her eyes. They danced all night, bought hot dogs at dawn, went back to his house and made love for a week. She was doing English which, he pointed out, was a great deal easier to move than anthropology. He was a postgraduate, and what with the job as a tutor at the new university, and the prospect of his own research, he could be in New Guinea for years. So they married, and even then she had to wait for months before she could join him. The Australian authorities didn’t give out permits lightly. Occasional stories made it into the news papers of entry denied – to a Russian journalist, or a member of the African National Congress, or a researcher from an Australian university who’d come to the attention of the security service. There was no way a girl like Martha would get an entry permit for no better reason than that she wanted to keep sleeping with her boyfriend. So they married, and he went on ahead, in time for the start of the term. She was barely twenty, lost a year of study during the long wait for the permit, and when she got to Port Moresby she wasn’t at all sure she’d made the right decision. She was in love with Pete still, and while the sex remained good, it had a lot to make up for. The endless heat. The mosquitoes. The dreariness of the hills.

It took telling Rika this story to make Martha see that it wasn’t just a list of events, and that it mightn’t be so dull, being here, in this place she’d been close to considering a penance. The story of growing up over the shipyards where her father worked suddenly seemed a story worth telling. She described her mother taking in ironing, and the library at the top of the hill, with its books from Europe – a place no one in her family had been, except her grandfather, who was shipped there during the First World War and returned with shrapnel in his knee. If that story could take on colour, so could the town where they were, with its harbour and dry valley, which she came to see anew through the eye of Rika and her camera.

Wherever they went the camera was with them, and in those first weeks they went everywhere – to markets and street stalls, to beaches and villages. They drove out of town, along the edge of the harbour, or followed the road inland, along the river, or up onto the plateau behind. Wherever they went, they talked, even as Rika circled them, accustoming her eye to the brightness of the light.