The weight of an old envelope marked 'Early RAAF' had sat in my drawer for years before I finally understood its pull. Inside were my grandfather's wartime photographs from Papua New Guinea - not of battles or military life, but peaceful portraits of villagers he'd met in 1943. Fred Thies had documented these communities with his Box Brownie while stationed there, capturing a world that seemed both timeless and impossibly distant. In 2018, 75 years after his lens first found these faces, I returned to the same villages with a question: what endures when everything is supposed to have changed? Village of Paradise became that answer—a visual conversation between past and present, between his simple camera and our 50kg of equipment, between the PNG he knew and the one that exists today.