Sky Eye

It comes at you slowly, ocean clawing back cloud, in the craned corner between the thin edge of the wing and the back of some businessman’s head. The water is the blue of almost-dawn until the sandbars emerge, smacks of bright turquoise clustering the coastline. This island is dark and busy, with slopes like breathing haunches. There are fires on the mountains. They send off great flags of white smoke, and, as the descent begins, visible flames, coconut palms in sharp focus above the tangled treeline, and the clay-coloured injuries of quarries.

I had a fear, more present than any other fears that might reasonably attach to this place. I was afraid of its maybe sameness – what it might mean, if The Last Place On Earth turned out to be unsurprising. It’s a bourgeois conceit in a globalised world, but I wanted so badly for this place to be new.

And from the sky, I felt it – that sudden pulse of strangeness, which is so addictive, it becomes a something that bypasses description, which cannot be imaginably imagined. A little like a first glimpse of PNG.