The third was a real play – three acts, a cast of characters and a title: Our Ground. It was in rehearsal when Rika and Leonard arrived. It was the son’s story, the labourer on the plantation. The first act was one of wretched humiliation as the white planter strides over the men, and the old man father is sent away, too feeble to work. In the second act, the planter comes to the village, tries to snare the hero’s sister, sets traps for her and brings a bottle of rum to divert the men. They trick him in turn, and talk of revenge and revolution. Are they not men? Melanesian men? The sons of warriors as well as of samuna men? In the third act, they rise up – how could they not – and Milton, who played the lead, defeats the planter, rescues the girl and reclaims his people’s ground. Not a subtle plot, but what was lost in subtlety was regained in the quality of the words Milton wrote, the string band and the high energy of the chorus.

The drama group was presenting Our Ground on the last evening of the conference, when the university would be full of visitors. That’d stir things up. Jacob didn’t think much would come of it; still, he offered some advice. ‘If you want to get an audience, you should ask that Dutch woman to photograph a rehearsal. Put it in the paper.’

‘The one you took to the swamp?’ Milton was on his feet and laughing. ‘Your girlfriend, eh?’ Some students had pinned a white centrefold on the wall over his bed. Jacob had ripped it off, punched out a louvre, and had to report to the warden. This time he slammed out of the door. Gone.

‘Hey, brother,’ Milton called after him. ‘You ask her.’

Rika did take the photos. ‘Publicity shots,’ Milton called them. Jacob didn’t ask her. Milton did, though not directly. He asked Martha to ask her. They were in the same English tutorial, or were meant to be. Since reading Another Country, Martha had avoided tutorials and made do with lectures. The flaw in Pete’s theory about English being mobile was that it didn’t take account of the curriculum. If Martha had stayed at Sydney University she’d have read her way from Chaucer to the Victorians. Not only that, but all the students would have looked like her, and many of them would have been women. Well. Here, almost all the students were men, and black at that. And the courses on offer at the university that was still being built had titles such as New Writing from Emergent Nations, or the Literature of Oral Traditions. That semester, Modern World Literature 2, the class she was in with Milton, began with Another Country. At first Martha kept quiet, shrank herself down to the smallest possible size, and it wasn’t as if the rest of them didn’t have enough to say about the anger of black men. Their tutor tried to draw her out by asking her what she thought of Rufus Scott’s relationship with Leona. She took it to be a question about Leona. How could she answer a question about a white woman who took whatever a black man gave in a class like that? Black. White. She didn’t even want to say the words. Better to think that underneath everyone’s the same. Anyone would despise Leona. Martha’s face was scalding and Aro, their round-bellied Samoan tutor, took pity on her. The white girl might be craven at the level of what she does, he said, but consider what she says. Isn’t she a voice of truth about Rufus? In that classroom it didn’t help. Martha was barely able to breathe. It was all sex, that book. Rufus was all body. ‘Flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair and skin’, as Baldwin put it. So was Milton. So was the class. So, come to think of it, was she. She missed the next class, and didn’t go back until they were on to A House for Mr Biswas.