When Colonial Travellers was published with a small print run to respectful, if muted, reviews, Leonard wrote her a kind letter. Maybe he meant it, or maybe he saw that it was important to her, the fruit of long labour, and also that it was disappointing. Not something to let pass without comment. It fell far short of the hope she’d set out with, which was to give expression to their paradoxical relationship to New Guinea and therefore, maybe, to her own. To give words to a place and a time that had changed the course of her life. To possess them. She came nowhere near. Worse, really – because the story she told had passed its moment. Ten years earlier, even five, an audience of her generation might have responded to their adventures, but by the time the book was published, six years after independence, no one wanted to encounter a ‘jolly crowd of natives’. Everything had changed: language, sensibility, politics.

Her travellers didn’t talk of covetousness. They were lured by dreams – of a Pacific imagined from Europe, all tall palms and blue skies. Dreams of steamships and rescue from the damp cities of their birth. Confident dreams that could win large audiences - of jungles and cannibals; dreams that landed them in a house above a harbour with shutters and cool walls and a servant standing at the ready.

At dinner that evening one of the Germans from the film crew told her it was ‘passion’ that brought him to the Pacific on a ‘mission’ to alert his country - in fact, the whole world - to the perfidy of illegal logging. He was a serious man with intelligent eyes. Martha liked him, and when he said he’d take something back with him that would be more than the film, more than the experience - something indelible - she nodded. Yes, she knew that feeling.

Sitting there, half watching the footage from Collingwood Bay, she sees the link she’d missed, the uncomfortable truth that connects her to her travellers, and then to now. We used a different language, she thinks as she watches this other film, but were we so different, all of us who came with ‘dreams of things longed for’ and hearts to be unlocked? The fact that we rewrapped our dreams as gifts and offered them in the spirit of service, or dressed as Research, or Art, or Film, doesn’t make them any less potent, or greedy, or blind. Weren’t our dreams also driven by some hidden something inside ourselves? Our own covetousness. Our own lack of ground, our dissatisfactions with where we came from. Our emptiness, perhaps.

When the footage ends, Jim rolls down the screen and they all move back to the cool of the veranda. The talk returns to the man with an interest in logging and fishing boats. When he heard that Archie and Bili were both in Collingwood Bay, he arrived in a helicopter at the small township where Archie was based. Bili had seen this man in court and knew he was ruthless. She and Archie walked to meet him with the elders, and the news they’d received from her office that morning: the injunction against the pirate boats with their winches and freezer units had been granted by the court. The man spat on the ground. ‘Whore-lawyer. No husband, no children. What kind of woman are you?’ He stood there with his security guards, threatening the elders that he’d win yet.