‘Bili got an injunction against them,’ Archie says.

‘A double victory,’ Jericho says, as Jim comes in and shakes Archie’s hand.

‘Well done, man,’ Jim says. It’s not Archie’s first time over here on the track of the pirate ships.

After the quiet evening when Martha and Milton ate alone, tonight the table is crowded and the talk noisy. There’s laughter, and Bili standing up to make her point, and Archie with a guitar. It’s their last night with the television crew, and they are celebrating. After the meal, Jim sets up a screen so the cameramen can show their footage.

Milton clucks gloomily as he watches the old men speak of the oil-palm plantations they’ve seen in other parts of the country. Jim recognises where the camera is as it tracks along a river bounded by forest. An elder leads the way to the border between the village and the hunting grounds. He points to medicinal plants and names the butterflies that cross the camera’s path. In a village, another elder lists the work they did to stop the logging, and the women show the sewing machines and the hats they made. An old woman tells of the dreams she had before they knew of the loggers, and she’s having them again. It’s fishing boats now, she says, pointing out to the still water of the bay, but the loggers will come again. There have been sightings of trees weeping blood for sap.

‘We won,’ Bili says on camera, giving a lucid account of the legal issues. In another scene, the villagers dance in celebration, and she and Jericho sit with the elders.

‘No victory is conclusive,’ Milton says as Jim opens a bottle of champagne. ‘Never was, never is.’

Watching with them, Martha finds herself drifting into the memory of Leonard’s film. She’d watched every screening of The Mountain during that wet week of his visit in 1973. She’d slipped into workshops and seminars and, as soon as Leonard left, she shut herself in her room at the library, took out a clean sheet of paper and wrote ‘The Mountain’ at the top.

She wrote each day for a week, and when Laedi took the girls out to Milton at the river, she spent a weekend alone on their platform – Pete was in the Sepik – and wrote on. Rika came and read for a while and still she said nothing, though it was of her on the mountain that Martha wrote. When she finished, she put it in a drawer and did nothing with it until after she and Pete returned to Sydney and she’d published Colonial Travellers. It was 1982 when she showed it to a publisher. ‘No one’s interested in Papua now it’s independent,’ he said. ‘Besides, your view is surely romantic. Isn’t the place depressed and disaffected?’ So she put it away in a folder, and it was only after her lunch with Jericho that she went back to it. What came to her as she read was the surrealists’ remark about Oceania arousing covetousness in them. Covetousness. What a strong word. An ‘irresistible need to possess’, Breton called it.