We were walking in the rainforests of New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago. Our porters were locals, men of the inland villages. They were happy men who talked and laughed freely. Smaller than us and stronger, they carried our many contrivances easily on their backs, but must have been secretly piqued when the gradients became steep because they had no kit of their own and ours surely seemed increasingly frivolous as the mountains rose.

At night by the campfire, cloaked in smoke to ward off anopheles, they told us what they knew of Australia. They told us Australia was a utopian miracle, though they did not use those words. They told us that we Australians were each rich to a head-shaking degree and that they had heard every child, on their 14th birthday, received a new Toyota car.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

Not wanting to fracture their romanticism or their hope for better worlds, and strangely proud to be a native of this imaginary country, I told them they were well-informed and what they said was true. Our teens drove themselves to school in shiny new........

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