The next morning Rika drove Leonard to the airport. Rifle was with them, bustling about, taking charge of Leonard’s luggage: the camera trunk, his tripod, oil cloth and bedding, lamps, a small generator to charge the camera, and film to last several months. He whistled up a troop of carriers and led them to the counter where everything was to be weighed. Leonard too. There was a great deal of shouting and gesticulating, and everywhere were lines of people, piles of boxes, out-of-shape sacks. It was morning, hot already, with small planes taking off over the mountains before the cloud set in.

When, at last, everything was loaded onto their plane, Leonard held Rika close. She knew that their last night together had not been as he’d hoped. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d turned from him. She didn’t know why; she was tired and something inside her resisted. A surge of tears stung his eyes. He blinked them back, kissed her carefully, once on each cheek, then softly, briefly, on the lips. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘Enjoy yourself,’ and something in his voice triggered tears in her as she watched him cross the hot tarmac with Don and Alex. He turned to wave, then climbed aboard. On the other side of the runway, the hills were vivid green in the morning sun.

She stood beside Rifle, waving as the plane took off like a buzzing insect, rising into the sky as it flew towards the mountains and vanished into the haze of distance.

JUST WALKING BESIDE SIMBAIKAN CHANGED THE VIEW. AT THE MARKET she strode along with Bili on her shoulders, squinting suspiciously at the garish colours of reef fish. She didn’t like the water, and scowled at it, letting out long, hissing breaths as if the ocean itself was of doubtful value. Laedi had told Simbaikan that in the time of history, the Highland ancestors had lived on the coast. All this had been theirs until the sea people came in their canoes with their different languages, different songs, and chased them away, up into their high, wide valleys. It enraged Simbaikan that now, here on the coast, her people were considered credulous and backward just because when she was a girl there were villages across the valley that hadn’t seen white-skinned men. And if this country was now to be one, and the Australians were to go, as everyone told her would happen, then what would become of her people, made strong from growing on strong ground, but not with time to grow strong on the new ways? At the market she hollered at every Highlander, asking what they did, sitting under the trees smoking. She’d tell them to go find work, get strong, think of the government that comes, gathering a retinue that accompanied her back to the car, carrying her load of sweet potato, kaukau that could never measure up to Highland varieties.

‘She’s a grandmother patriot,’ Rika said.

‘She’s like a yam,’ Laedi said. ‘Part of her root stayed in the ground.’