The dead man disembarks the Air New Zealand flight about the same time as the rest of us, and a good quarter hour before the suitcases follow him across the tarmac. His coffin – first item to leave the hold – is propelled, respectfully, by numerous hands around the side of the terminal and into the shade, bypassing the immigration booths. As this unfolds, the airport’s resident roosters and chickens, oblivious to it all, continue their military-style manoeuvres out on the expanse of white coral concrete which is the runway. With only one scheduled weekly flight in and out, there are but two or three hours each week when the tarmac doesn’t entirely belong to the poultry and other bird-life.

Today’s coffin contains the body of an esteemed member of the Auckland-based Niuean population. (With only 1,500 Niueans now living on the equatorial island, some 95 percent of Niueans live in New Zealand – a three-and-a-half-hour flight south.) The deceased has been accompanied on the flight home by a sizable band of mourners, most of them wearing purple T-shirts bearing his name, ‘Papa …’, and his dates of birth and death. Some garments bear his photo-portrait, and prayers in English or Niuean. Alongside the island’s modest tourist trade, the northward migration of the dead – usually, as in this case, with entourage – must account for a significant proportion of the island’s arrivals by air in any given year.

The graves of Niue are distributed in well-groomed clusters along the verge of the ring-road which ...