People, in their thousands, men, women and children, beggars and billionaires, fleeing to the sea, taking to boats of all sizes, out into the ocean, blindly, stupidly, not knowing where they are going, desperate to evade an all-consuming beast, washing up on lonely atolls and reefs, human jetsam and flotsam, littering the beaches with their trappings and staining the sand with their rotting carcasses.

Following a series of rolling global disasters, a ragged band of survivors gather on an isolated island somewhere between the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

As their numbers grow, and they learn more about their island, their thoughts turn from basic survival to the possibilities of a future and how that might look.

Will old ideas suffice or is a new paradigm required? Is this the beginning or the end? And in either case, is it worth the effort?

Philip Fitzpatrick was a kiap (patrol officer) in Papua New Guinea between 1967 and 1973 and from 1974 and 1994 he was a site recorder and then Registrar of Aboriginal Sites in the Aboriginal Heritage Branch in South Australia.

After 1994 he worked as an independent consultant in both Australia and Papua New Guinea carrying out over 260 heritage surveys and writing numerous detailed social mapping and heritage research reports.

He is widely published, both in non-fiction and fiction, and the author of novels set in both Australia and Papua New Guinea.

In 2010 he co-founded a national annual literature competition in Papua New Guinea and is the founder of Pukpuk Publishing, a not-for-profit independent publisher specialising in Papua New Guinean literature.

He publishes both his own work on KDP as well as the work of Papua New Guinea writers.

He attended the Australian School of Pacific Administration and has a double degree in literature and a degree in government from the University of Queensland.

He is now retired but still writing.