To avoid the dangers of that terrain, she asks Milton the question Pete would have asked if he’d been there. Did independence come too soon?

‘Helpers not rulers,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that what Whitlam said when he was determined to divest?’

‘That was the thinking of the day,’ Milton says. ‘We wanted independence. We wanted freedom. They are very great words we learned from you and we wanted to remake them in our own image. That was our ambition.’ He makes a gruff, huffing sound. ‘Those of us who didn’t have to deal with the day-to-day reality of it, and the power-play and the money and the foreign companies, and the tight rein of Australia. Aaron was right, we knew nothing – all ideas, no responsibility.’

He shakes his head and an aura of sadness descends on them, a heavy sensation as if the air has thickened, although the fan is moving above them.

Ruminating. That’s another thing that’s changed about Milton. The young man who sparked with words has become a ruminator. He has a way of sinking down into himself and thinking, or remembering, ruminating, before he rises back up onto the sweeping plain of words. And when he gets there, he’s lost none of the flair he had as a young man.

In her bag by her chair, Martha has a volume of Milton’s poems. She takes it out and puts it on the table between them. Milton looks down at his hands, but when she reads a short passage about a hut on a river, he smiles, and they are in the memory realm that feels more real to them both than the pleasant comfort of this resting place. Milton is back with Aaron, out at the river, the last two awake by the embers of the fire. The poem sets the scene, Martha can see them as clearly as the chair where Milton sits. Martha leaves him there by a long-extinguished fire until he rises up again and his eyes lift to hers. They, too, are sad. Large, brown, and sad.

‘“Milton brother,” he said to me,’ Milton says, ‘“I am afraid. Why is it I am afraid?” I said it was too great a task. Was it the last trip to Canberra, the big cut in the budget? He said no, though he was afraid for that. But that wasn’t the fear. It’d take courage to bring the country through to a real independence and not a new form of dependency. We couldn’t manage without money from Australia. We still can’t.’

He is quiet again. Out in the dark they can hear frogs croaking, someone singing in the kitchen. Lamps glow along the edge of the veranda. The mosquito coils on the floor aren’t enough to keep every mosquito away. Martha rolls down her sleeves.

‘We sat by the fire in silence for a while,’ Milton says. ‘I was chewing a lot of betel in those days. Then Aaron said again, “Milton, brother, why is it that I am afraid?” I didn’t know. I had every reason to be afraid – my life was in tatters. I was refusing to make anything of it, refusing to join the new class that was making money. I had no wife, no home, no money. But I wasn’t afraid. Morose and angry, but not afraid. I thought we’d muscle through, I thought we’d be safe as long as enough villages remained safe. That was my mistake.