‘I'm Alice, this is Honour, and you'll be Jo, right?’

A fair and solid woman from Perth, Western Australia, standing on the river bank trying for the first time in her life to bathe in a muddy river without taking her clothes off – which, in black polyester slacks, was proving difficult. In my absence downriver with Great Lake, nine of them had come to Riverside, under the baton of Greg. He was a real missionary, but his party were ordinary churchgoers, mostly middle-aged farming men and women. They were here for two weeks and they were eating the Karen into submission.

‘These are just church people who have never been outside Australia before’, said Greg. ‘They've come to experience faith in another land.’ As usual, it was Ruth and Edward's house that they came to, and most of them slept in a row on mats on the verandah. Two of the women went to Pipi's teachers' hostel, while one man said firmly that he hadn't come all the way from Perth to sleep in a row of fellow Australians, and took himself off to Bastion's house.