In July 2009, two artists from Ömie, high on the slopes of Mt Lamington in Papua New Guinea, were in Sydney for an exhibition of their barkcloth art. Early in their visit, their sponsor David Baker, then director of the now-defunct New Guinea Gallery, drove them and me, and Alban Sare, the Ömie man who’d come down with them, to a shopping mall to buy shoes and warm clothes. To Alban, who’d been to Sydney before and had spent time in Port Moresby, the mall was not so strange—just larger and shinier; he liked it. For Pauline Rose Hago, the younger of the two artists, familiar only with the town of Popondetta on the plain below Ömie, the cars in the car park were enough to give her a headache. But Dapene Jonevari, a senior artist and a duvahe (rather inaccurately translated as chief), went into a state of shock when bad spirits congregating on the escalators stole all her strength. I do not tell this as a comic story. I mightn’t believe in bad spirits on escalators, or not entirely, but I don’t doubt that Dapene, one of the strongest women I have encountered here or in PNG, was assaulted by the force of a world of which she’d never seen the like. What nature of beings were the new people she’d seen often enough down on the plain, and of whom she’d heard stories, though none to prepare her for this?

Back at my house later that day, Dapene was still limp, her expression glazed. Two cups of strong sugary tea didn’t seem to help. I looked to Pauline for guidance—as I had when I was in Ömie. She had been alongside me on every path, in every village, in the forests where Dapene led the women to cut the trees for their bast, in the houses where the women paint, in the rivers where we washed. Always Pauline; certain, strong-voiced Pauline. And here we were, in my place, in my house, and I was asking her for help.