I want to die. I do not want to be mad.... It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there.

After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a disturbing story to tell: strand by strand, the mystery of the officer's past is unravelled. But what of other visitants, like the unidentified flying object and the cargo cult it has inspired on the island?

Informed by Randolph Stow's experiences, Visitants is an astonishing original investigation of colonialism.