At the university, she felt herself part of the changes that were all around her. Her work flowed into the work of others, just as her life flowed between the houses in Hohola. She and Sam started Village Shots, taking their students into the villages and into the town, hers with cameras, his with notebooks and recorders for the essays they’d write. Milton said they looked like a bunch of tourists, with their cameras and shade-cloths and hats on their heads. He was back on a break from Melbourne, where things with Tessa weren’t going well. But he’d had a play put on, and a job at a new theatre in an old warehouse. He was in Rika’s class the day she pinned on the wall a photograph of one of Martha’s travellers, a stout woman from Dublin who had lived for many years in a house above the harbour. She was photographed there, before the war, in a forty-foot room with shutters filtering the light. Standing to attention near the stairs was a Papuan servant with a bare chest and a high bush of hair, lit from the light of the window.

‘What do we make of this photo?’ she asked the Village Shots students.

‘How do we answer them?’ Sam asked. ‘Can we?’

‘Why don’t you go there, and restage the photo?’ Milton said. ‘Make that your answer.’

The house was much as it had been thirty years before, with the same view over the harbour, a shaded garden and servants. A senior official in the Australian administration was living there, and his wife welcomed them with lemonade and ginger cake. In the forty-foot room, the students worked out where the photographer had stood, and rearranged the furniture. They chose the student with the highest hair to stand where the servant had stood, replicating the old photo, the shutters folded away as they had been. But in their composition, the figure in the light from the window wore a Black Power T-shirt and held a camera – which he turned to the wicker chair where the colonial writer had sat. In her place sat Rika, a white woman with a camera. The students directed the shots as if for the stage. In one, Rika had her camera raised, so that she and the student with the high hair vied for ascendancy. In another, her camera was gone, and she stood in the position of the long-ago servant. A student from Hanuabada, the village on the harbour, positioned himself to take in the view of the mountains across the harbour.

Back at the studio, students lounged on the floor smoking while others moved the prints around, arguing over whether it was Politics or Art that was on display. When images from the docks were up, was it the danger of the rigs or their silhouette against the harbour that was to be emphasised? When a deal was being done in a flash bar in a new hotel, was it the glimpse of money changing hands that gave the photo its power or the shapes made in the space between the heads that drew together? And all the while, Rika was bouncing on her toes, sparring with Sam. He wanted historical context, where she spoke of light and form. He spoke of documentary, where she saw the potential of performance.