The Surrealist Map of the World first appeared in the Belgian magazine Variétés in 1929; the lines quoted from André Breton were first published in Océanie, 1948; ‘amour fou’ is Breton’s phrase; the lines from Paul Eluard were first published in cahiers d’art in 1936. The speech in which Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam spoke of Australia being ‘no longer willing to be the ruler of a colony’ was given in Port Moresby on 18 February 1973.

Captain John Moresby published an account of his Discoveries and Surveys in New Guinea and the D’entrecasteaux Islands in London in 1876. Charles Lyne, the Sydney Morning Herald correspondent in 1884 published his Account of the establishment of the British Protectorate over the southern shore of New Guinea in London 1885.

Paul Ham, Kokoda, HarperCollins, 2004, an excellent history of the Kokoda campaign, tells of the missionary mending his deckchair when the Japanese warships appeared off the north coast of Papua. Howard Tilse’s poem ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ was first published in The Musings of a Moresby Mouse: Papuan Poems, Barker’s Bookstore, Brisbane, 1944.

James Baldwin’s Another Country was first published in 1962, The Fire Next Time in 1963.

Anthropologist Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone worked with the Korafe in the late 1980s. I am grateful for the opportunity to read her PhD thesis, ‘Power or Paradise? Korafe Christianity and Korafe Magic’ published by ANU in 1991. Her essay ‘Parallel journeys in Korafe women’s laments’ appears in Journal de la Société des Océanistes 124(1), 21-32.

C. A. W. Monckton’s account of his encounter with Giwi, as he called him, appears in Some Experiences of a New Guinea Resident Magistrate, John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1921. I am also grateful to Jan Hasselberg for sharing his research on Jiwu, as Giwi is called by his descendants, and to the Royal Anthropological Institute in London for showing me Captain F. R. Barton’s photographs of the early government settlement at Cape Nelson, some of which can be seen on www.drusillamodjeska.com.

For answering medical questions, I am grateful to Dr Liz Rickman, Dr Susan Pendlebury, Dr John Daniels and Dr Charlotte Hespe. For answering legal questions, I thank Paul Blackett SC. For advice on the practicalities and complexities of ethnographic film, I thank Bob Connolly, Gary Kildea, Patsy Asch, Les McLaren and Annie Stivens. The Decisive Moment is, of course, the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s influential photobook of 1952.

Hilary McPhee and Liz Jacka both read drafts, and their responses have been invaluable. I thank them both, and doubt that I could have finished the novel without them. Patsy Asch read with an eye to photography and ethnographic film, for which I am most grateful. Jeremy Steele has read various versions at various times, and has remained patient, for which I thank him. My sister Jane Victoria Bentley, and my niece Amy Bentley Cochrane both read the manuscript, as did Virginia Heywood and Susan Hampton, and their support has made all the difference. As has the support of all my family, both in England and Australia.