‘What we’re asking for,’ he said, ‘is a larger gap between the two. Time, that’s all.’

‘And Whitlam?’ Leonard asked.

‘When Australia finally gets a Prime Minister who’s anti-colonial, he’s determined independence will come on his watch.’ Aaron gave a laugh at the irony of it. Then a sigh. ‘It’s not our timing that’s at issue. It’s the next Australian election.’

‘Is it vanity?’ Leonard sounded perplexed.

‘Partly,’ Aaron said. ‘It’s also Indonesia. Now they’ve secured the west, the Australians are nervous. They think they’ll have more traction if we’re decolonised – and they can keep us safely in their sphere.’

‘I see,’ Leonard said. Of all the views he’d sought, no one else had told him that.

After Alex Penrose had driven Leonard to his hotel, leaving Laedi and Martha to clear the table of its empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays, Rika and Aaron walked back down the hill to their house and went straight to bed. Such words as passed between them were in the language of their bodies as they embraced each other with such intensity that Rika called out with the sharp surprise of it. Oh Aaron, what will happen to us? But he was asleep already, his breath coming in the slow rhythm she’d lain beside for five years. For her, that night, sleep was nowhere near. She left the warmth of their bed and switched on the light in the living room. Wilkie had left his schoolbooks open on the table. Aaron’s rucksack was on the floor near the door. Home. Yes, this was her home. Then why was she so shaken by Leonard and his film? What she’d seen in it, and couldn’t not see, was the return of a man and a past she thought she understood, in a form she didn’t recognise. And with it came the question: had she misjudged him? It wasn’t a matter of regret, or of changing her mind. Or if it was, it lay deep and low. It was a glimpse of a mind she’d once lived with in innocence. Had she lived with it also in ignorance? Doubt came exactly where doubt had not existed: in her own capacity to see. In the nature of her looking.

When you’re certain of your approach, Leonard had told her students, question it. Trust your eye, and don’t let your idea of what you see, or what you want to see, or what you think you should see, take the place of what you do see.

In the silence of that night, Rika took out her photographs from the mountain and looked again at the catalogue of her exhibition, and clippings of the reviews. What she saw revealed that the critical headings, offered as acclaim, now told her exactly what was wrong. ‘The Strange Made Familiar.’ Leonard had not made the mountain people familiar to a western audience, as she had done, or tried to do; he didn’t bring the comfort of a familiar way of seeing into this other world, and turn them into friends like us. He didn’t let his audience assume it knew what it was looking at. Nor did he let the mountain and its people be strange, a spectacle for the eye, something to gasp at and wonder.