Martha leaned in towards Rika, who was standing next to her, and let her head rest on her friend’s shoulder. ‘Are you happy too?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Rika said. ‘Very.’

ON THE LAST AFTERNOON OF THE CONFERENCE, AARON SPOKE TO a crowded hall. The sun beat against the windows, and still people pushed in, standing at the sides and at the back, filling every space, spilling out through the doors. Labourers came from the building site to watch through the windows. Somare was there, sitting towards the front, with Derek beside him. Politicians from his party filled the row, talking affably and calling out to people coming in through the door. The Australian administrator was there, every visiting professor. Martha and Laedi were sitting halfway back, straining to see the front, where Jacob and Milton were leaning against the wall near Rika and her cameras. She was on a job for Gina, photographing the speakers. She turned the Leica towards Somare and the politicians, then took a wide shot of the full hall. She took a notebook from the back pocket of her shorts, looked at the camera, wrote something, then switched to the Rolleiflex – a gift from Leonard to mark their engagement – when the vice-chancellor came to the podium to introduce Aaron.

‘Our first Papuan member of the academic staff,’ he said, listing his achievements and degrees. ‘Welcoming him to the university is a moment of pride for us all.’ Outside, over the applause, labourers who’d come off the work sites to see him could be heard whistling and stamping their feet.

Aaron walked to the podium. He shook the vice-chancellor’s hand. The applause was loud, and Aaron raised his hand as he greeted the crowd outside. It was good to be back, he said, thanking Somare for attending and the other members of the party that’d formed during the years of his absence. Pangu, it was called, for the union of Papua and New Guinea, and it stood for an early move to self-government. It had chosen the bird of paradise as its symbol, and in the few days since he’d returned, Aaron had seen its logo on student notebooks, on classroom and canteen walls. What better symbol for an independent Papua New Guinea, he asked, than the rich spray of plumes that are worn in headdresses, traded between tribes, the hallmark of an island that is itself shaped like a bird? But symbols, he said, can represent warnings as well as ideals.

‘The plumes of our birds have a history that holds a mirror to this country and reflects onto it not our character, but the character of the colonists and traders, the collectors, the naturalists, the bounty hunters – and it is their view of us, mirrored on to us, that is given as our own.

‘When Magellan carried birds of paradise, stripped of feet and wings, to the king of Spain, the misconceptions that accompanied them had a life as fanciful as the plumes themselves.’ Aaron was reading from the pages in his hand. ‘Accounts of the passaros de sol and the avis paradiseus, living in the air until they died on the wing, became a metaphor taken into the poetry of Europe, and we went with them – people as strange as the birds.’