The two women, venerable grandmothers and veteran activists, are plotting revolution and dissecting the exercise of feminine power in Papua New Guinea over plates of fish and chips and salad.

There’s the white woman who in her lovestruck youth left the Brisbane suburbs to marry into Port Moresby’s Motu culture. Long since widowed, she nonetheless stuck around to become Dame Carol Kidu, PNG’s ‘Iron Lady’ of politics. The Black woman who as a young graduate began her own foreign adventure, reading deep into the canon of white feminism and politics. Dr Orovu Sepoe, political scientist, was supported on the journey by a singular husband whose loss is still raw.