Their bedroom, the only room where they hung a door, was at the front of the house. The bed was low, a mattress on a propped-up board. The sheets were covered by a pale green spread, and the bedside lamp was on a painted tea chest. Books were piled on the floor, open where they’d left them. Light shone through the louvres, filling the room with tenderness, lingering on the rumpled sheets and clothes that hung from a rail. Outside the window were pawpaw trees, and beyond that the bare open space where kids from along the street played during the day. The sound of their games – the thwack of a ball, the drag of tin cans across the ground – was a daily accompaniment to their lives.

Sam and Wana were the first to join them in Hohola. Their house was on the street below Aaron and Rika, near the trade stores. Its condition was worse, with broken louvres and a leak in the concrete sink. The paint rollers came out again, another weekend on ladders, with the radio playing and yams from the Trobriand Islands cooking on the fire outside. The exodus from the housing compound had begun, and when boom gates went up at the university and guards patrolled at night, Martha and Pete, and Laedi and Don also made the move to Hohola. It was their way of saying they weren’t temporary visitors safe in a white compound, where floodlights had been installed and tough wire put over the windows. Nervous Australians had begun their resentful exodus south, their absence barely noticed as new suburbs went up and cranes continued their slow move across Moresby’s skyline. New staff arrived at the university from Africa and from India. In Hohola Martha read Chinua Achebe and Rika learned to grind the spices that appeared in the Chinese trade stores at the bottom of the hill.

They were good years, those Hohola years. True, there were mean dogs and rowdy boys and men coming home drunk, and unlike the university compound it all happened on the streets, or in the front yards. But so did the dancing and the flirting and the fires and the string bands. Hohola was a life of noise and smells and music, and everyone talking, always talking. Stories of love affairs and school teachers and credulous missionaries were told, tricks and rivalries and feuds were reported on. Everyone knew what had been said in the administrator’s car, for his Papuan driver lived down the road from Sam and Wana. Porters from the Legislative Assembly lived in Hohola, and so did waiters from the hotels where deals were done. Good ears and soft feet, all of them. Visitors from Australia said they learned more about the place from one evening on Rika and Aaron’s veranda than they did at the government meeting or university seminar they’d come for. As one year moved to the next, and the vines grew over the veranda, their house became a sure centre in the midst of the comings and goings that made up the life of Port Moresby during those changing years. And at the centre of the house were Aaron and Rika, shining with happiness.