The book began with four images I have carried in my mind for many years. So my first thanks go to Russell Soaba for the image of the bird of paradise destined to vanish into ‘the massy green’ in his poem ‘Naked Thoughts’ (1978); to Gary Kildea for the image of the mimic with a ‘camera’ at the edge of the frame in his film Trobriand Cricket; to Tony Deklin for the story of the large bird of government causing confusion by laying its eggs in all the wrong places, which appears in his unpublished typescript ‘Is there a Melanesian way? Conceptualising the fundamentals of the Melanesian dream of development in the 21st century’; and to the Ömie women chiefs, or duvahe, who told me the story of the old woman who carries the sun and the moon in her string bag, and allowed me to carry it away to tell in The Mountain.

The lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Questions of Travel’, which appear as the epigraph to Book One, are used with permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

The lines from Russell Soaba’s ‘Naked Thoughts’, which appear as the epigraph to Book Two, are used with permission of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. My further thanks go to Russell Soaba for allowing me to give the image of the ‘massy green’ to the fictional Milton.

In Papua New Guinea my thanks go to the Korafe people of the fjords, who have shown me kindness and patience over many visits. In particular, thanks to Joseph Daubi, Gerald and Euphemia Masevaki, Jackson and Pamela Borime, Gladston Aguba, his sisters, and their mother, aya Gillian. While the fjords of The Mountain could not have been imagined without the fjords of the Korafe, they remain a place of fiction peopled by fictional characters, including Aaron and Jacob.

The same is true of the mountain, which took root in my imagination after a visit to Ömie in 2004. While I owe thanks to all who welcomed us, and especially the duvahe, as well as my dear friend Pauline Rose Hago, the mountain of The Mountain is fictional. There have been no ethnographic filmmakers in Ömie, and no Jericho.

The Ömie are, however, fine bark-cloth artists. Their work is held in many galleries, including the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Queensland Art Gallery. I thank curators Maud Page at the QAG, and Judith Ryan and Sana Balai at the NGV for their support and assistance. I also thank David Baker, who introduced me to Ömie. Tragically, he died suddenly in November 2009, just days before the opening of Wisdom of the Mountain: Art of Ömie at the National Gallery of Victoria. He is remembered well by the people of Ömie.

Brennan King, as manager of Ömie Artists, has been an invaluable source of assistance and support. The Ömie icons that appear at the head of each chapter of The Mountain are used with permission of Ömie Artists and the Ömie chiefs. Copyright remains with Ömie Artists.