Martha talked most volubly, and as she told her story, elaborating each detail, she asked questions that had Rika open up as she hadn’t for a long time, not since her mother died. There’d been no one to talk to but her father, then Leonard, and she couldn’t speak to them, not as she did to Martha and Laedi. She hadn’t spoken to the girls at school. They’d had too many questions about the term she missed when she was sent to Amsterdam and they couldn’t visit her.

Laedi’s classmates had called her ‘Coffee’ – for growing up on a coffee plantation with skin that was ‘coffee-coloured’, and having to come to Brisbane to discover how to drink it. ‘Coffee’s drinking coffee,’ they’d taunt. ‘Want some coffee, Coffee?’ She escaped to the cinema when she could, and even when she shouldn’t. But Don, who was a student at the university, liked the colour of her skin. He made her feel a whole woman, not a schoolgirl. His parents called her Carol after the name on her birth certificate and passed her off to their neighbours as ‘Mediterranean’. He took her with him on fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, off the toe of Papua, and they talked each morning as they woke to the light of the sky through a woven door. When she fell pregnant, he married her in the Port Moresby registry office, with only her mother as witness. But when Bili was born and they moved to the university, somehow Don was different with her. Not that she talked to Rika and Martha about that, though she felt the tension ease in her as she lay under the trees at the top of the town beach and smiled into the camera as Martha asked her why she didn’t find Jacob attractive.

The film Rika used was black and white, and she developed it in a darkroom at the back of the library’s temporary offices. Leonard had made the arrangement, and went with her to a meeting set up by Alex Penrose with Gina, the manuscript librarian, a tall woman with an intelligent face. Her dark hair, showing the first signs of grey, was escaping its clips. Rika had seen her in the supermarket and outside her house in the university compound, where she was growing a hedge of red hibiscus. Her office, a small windowless room, was piled with archive boxes and folders. There was barely room for Leonard and Rika to sit down.

‘Donations,’ she explained. ‘They come in by the week from the old-timers, missionaries, patrol officers, magistrates. A few from you lot,’ she said, looking at Leonard.

‘Good material?’ he asked.

‘Most is surprisingly good. Good enough to have the historians in here, working wherever we can fit them.’ She gestured beyond the door to other rooms as congested as hers. ‘But the photos – what a mess they’re in!’ She opened a folder on her desk. Inside was a jumble of small photographs, with the negatives pushed into envelopes that were showing the wear of time. ‘The Anglican mission,’ she said. ‘A fabulous collection, going back to the 1900s. The north coast of Papua. Records from the war, including the journal of a priest who was mending a deck chair when the Japanese battleships appeared off the coast!’