At the reception she stood like a pillar looking into the packed room, watching the guests with their smiling teeth, the thick swirl of cigarette smoke, waiters cruising the room with drinks. When Rika saw her, she left Leonard with the visiting professors and jostled her way towards her on the wide veranda that looked out towards the building site of the university, and across the scrub to the wild country behind. The cast of Our Ground was there, all dressed up, looking good and feeling good. Milton was wearing a tie, grinning, just for being there, with all those white bastard professors. Not many students had been invited, but the play was on the conference programme as the closing-night event, so Aro had sent in the cast list – chorus, stagehands and all.

Rika, Laedi and Martha were leaning against the veranda rail, talking to Wana, the girl from the Trobriand Islands who played the big fat planter’s cook. Rika recognised her from rehearsals, where her sense of her had come through the lens of the Leica, and here she was, transformed, in a dress nipped in at the waist. Without the cushions under her apron, she had a perfect hourglass figure. That would have added to Alex Penrose’s alarm when, at the end of his lecture on Malinowski’s Sexual Lives of Savages, she’d asked if he believed this account of Trobriand girls, or had the great anthropologist been duped, spun a tale of sexual excess the men thought he’d enjoy?

‘Was he duped?’ Rika asked her. ‘Malinowski?’

‘Partly,’ Wana said. ‘Anthropologists are.’

‘Why are you studying it then?’

‘I’m not. Moved to history. It’s cleaner.’

Simbaikan tugged at Rika’s arm. She was standing there, close to Laedi, with her back to the view, scowling as if she was watching a bad film.

‘All I see,’ she said, ‘is Highland men outside minding the cars. Are we Highlanders good only for building and digging and cleaning? Look inside – all Papua man and island man. Same these students.’ She pointed her nose at the cast of Our Ground and gave one of her celebrated snorts. ‘Where are the Highland students?’

‘Are there any?’ Rika asked Wana.

‘Some,’ she said.

‘Why not many?’ Simbaikan’s chin was jutting out.

‘Because education came late to the Highlands,’ Laedi said. ‘You know that.’

Simbaikan sniffed. ‘I don’t see none here.’

‘Not all the students were invited. Too many,’ Laedi said.

Wana took a step towards Simbaikan. A smile, and a hand on her arm. ‘Highland students are clever,’ she said. ‘They don’t waste time at parties. They study for the time to come.’

‘You are from where?’ Simbaikan said.

‘From the Trobriands.’

‘Huh,’ Simbaikan scowled. ‘Ol nambis lain.’ A coastal girl.

‘Yes,’ Wana said, arranging her face in a mock-sad smile.

‘Why are you here? Not studying, the same as Highland students?’

‘I come to see Laedi. To speak hello to her mother.’

Simbaikan looked doubtful. ‘You speak true?’

‘Some true,’ Wana said, and Simbaikan sniffed again. Not quite a snort. Rika wanted to laugh. There was something comic about Simbaikan’s ferocity. Her face had settled into an expression that wasn’t a smile exactly, but was no longer a scowl. ‘You a friend of Laedi?’ she asked Wana.