‘That’s what comes of flying with the military,’ Don said.

‘It’s shameful,’ Leonard said.

At the office the next day, Leonard suggested to Alex that it might be better if Don didn’t come with them to the mountain. But Alex was vulnerable to Don’s argument that this was an opportunity unparalleled in anthropological literature: one anthropologist watching another in disciplined research. The effect of a 16 mm camera, as a metonymy for modernity, on tribal art and culture. A seminal paper from a new university.

‘He’s headstrong, I agree,’ Alex said. ‘But he’s doing some good work. Pushing the debate.’

‘It’ll make it hard for Rika,’ Leonard said. ‘With three of us men up there.’

‘Always best to go ahead of the women,’ Alex said. ‘Make sure there’s a house that’ll suit. Latrines and so on. You’ll need to prepare. Especially as she’ll be the first white woman to go up there.’

‘The first?’ Leonard looked surprised. ‘I suppose she is.’

‘It’s a hard walk. The only whites who’ve been up there are kiaps and missionaries, and then only on patrol.’

‘In which case, wouldn’t it be better to keep our numbers down?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Alex said. ‘It won’t be for long. I’ll have Don back here in time for second semester.’

OUR GROUND

OVER AT THE DORMITORIES, JACOB SHARED A ROOM with Milton. Two narrow beds, heads to the window, two desks, two lamps, two rails for their clothes. Not that their clothes amounted to much. Their stipends were a constant reminder that they were students in a poor country. A form of charity, Jacob said. Milton didn’t mind. He put his T-shirts on the rail, his one shirt, and enjoyed them hanging there like characters in a novel. He lay on his bed reading James Baldwin. Another Country.

Jacob didn’t hang anything on his rail. He felt foolish and resistant. He was studying law. He was going to make something of himself. Know their law, know their ways – that was his thinking. ‘Lazy boy,’ he said to Milton. ‘Where’s reading novels going to get you?’ But Milton wasn’t lying there lazing. Another Country was a set text. He was doing English and he was writing. He was on his third play. ‘Drama,’ he told Jacob. ‘It’s our tradition too.’ His first hadn’t really been a play at all, more a kind of poem. He’d acted it out to students in the canteen. Even he agreed there wasn’t much use in that if he was going to change the minds of Australians in their offices and his compatriots in their villages.

The second play had attracted a crowd of labourers and a trickle of staff. The drama group had started, and they put up notices in town, on trees, on shop windows in Boroko, where the road from the university met the road that went to the airport in one direction and the town in the other. But no one from Boroko came to the play. It was a white suburb in those days. From the university, Martha and Pete were in the audience, Laedi too, and it had been hard to believe that the skinny fellow they knew as Milton, all edgy energy, never still, was under the cloak of the samuna man who spoke with such gravitas of the land that had come to him from his father and forefathers and which had disappeared creek by creek, hill by hill, under the oil palm trees. The samuna man, clown and actor, carrier of ritual knowledge, stood bowed before them, lamenting that he must prepare for death watching his sons labour on the plantation that had swallowed the ground of their birthright. He had walked off with the slow dignity of an old man, disappearing behind the screen at the back of the hall, and Milton reappeared in his own shape. Jangling Milton, all arms and legs, and wide hair.