IT WAS JULY 2019 when my partner and I arrived in Sydney. Not knowing how much the world was about to change – Covid was soon to be breaking news – we’d embarked on a journey, leaving behind our family and the home we’d made in Cairns over the past ten years.

We were headed to Canberra (Ngunnawal Country), a three-hour bus trip from Sydney. Further inland, the traffic grew quieter, and tall buildings gave way to vast bushes scattered with various native trees. The roads here were certainly much smoother than on the island of Iama in the Torres Strait, where I grew up and where I’d ride over rocks and potholes in an all-terrain vehicle.