Through the lens of the Rolleiflex Rika focused in on Aaron’s face, framed by his hands, palms open to the audience. She knew she’d get some good shots and, watching for the moment – the camera moment – her mind drifted from his words back to Leonard, who’d be leaving for the mountain in the morning, leaving her here with life unfolding.

‘Consider these facts,’ Aaron was saying. He turned towards her, to the side of the hall, to the camera. Or maybe it was Jacob behind her, he was looking to.

‘By the end of the nineteenth century,’ he said, ‘the discarded plumes of the naturalists were not enough to supply the milliners and satisfy the desires of European women for hats.

‘By 1913 the plumes of the greater bird of paradise, paradisaea apoda linnaeus, were fetching just short of twenty-five American dollars each, and that year alone over sixteen thousand plumes were taken from German New Guinea.

‘The hunters brought disease to the villages.

‘The threat to the species brought the attention of conservationists, who, in their eagerness to protect the birds, told a story of tribal debasement that had less to do with the disrupted realities of tribal life than with European political agendas.

‘From birds circling the sun, marvellous creatures, we became wretched victims, acted upon, no will of our own, captive to Europe and Australia.

‘How, then, do we tell our history?’ he asked.

At the end of the afternoon, people were jostling to shake Aaron’s hand, calling out as Somare walked with him from the hall, one hand on his shoulder. Rika got a shot of him lighting a cigarette, the strain visible on his face.

‘Impressive,’ Leonard said, emerging from the crowd, looking for Rika. He was smiling. The day was ending well. The conference was ending well. Congratulations were in the air, and outside the hall in the shade of the building, the temperature was surprisingly pleasant. All around, people were shaking hands, mopping their faces, exchanging addresses. Rika, still at work with the Leica, heard only the shrill of cicadas. A strange and unexpected sadness had come upon her, and she couldn’t shake from her mind the disturbing after-image of a small, shrunken bird’s body laid out on a table in the museum in Leiden.

WHILE AARON SPOKE THAT AFTERNOON IN EARLY JUNE 1968, NO ONE in his audience knew that in Los Angeles, when the clock ticked over from midnight, Robert Kennedy had been shot dead on the floor of a hotel kitchen. Those who missed the radio news from Australia that evening saw its impact on the faces of colleagues when they returned to the hot, packed hall for the performance of Our Ground.

Poor Milton. A gun fires in California and in Papua a play gains an unwanted edge.

The atmosphere was still festive, and there were plenty in the audience for whom the assassination was not news, or not news of any significance. For others, and not only visitors from the United States, there was a chill that couldn’t be thawed by the heat. From the top of her ladder, Rika caught the roar of approval from the labourers and kitchen staff as the gun was held to Sam’s head. She caught the alarm on the few whites from town who’d made it their business to come, to see for themselves. She got Simbaikan’s scowl as she raised her fist to Milton. Raskol man! She also caught Jacob, his eyes narrowed, as he watched the audience, not the play, and the moment when Sam’s face, framed by Milton’s legs, betrayed a consternation that had not been there in rehearsal. But it was when she didn’t have the Leica at her eye that she saw Aaron watching her. How long, she didn’t know. When he saw her see him, he smiled, and she felt something smile deep inside her. In that moment, no longer than a heartbeat, she saw that Jacob had intercepted the exchange.