When the Village Shots exhibition went up at the end of 1972, people came from all over town to see the displays, which spread from the studio at the arts centre to the exhibition space at the spacious new library. Straggling lines of schoolchildren trooped through with their teachers. Laedi brought a bus from the mission, where she taught, and the women from her literacy class stepped out of the bus in bright dresses from the screen-print workshop, their notebooks tucked into their string bags. Every day was festive. Hawkers set up outside the library with watermelon to sell. Old women settled down on their mats with their betel nut and cigarettes arranged singly for sale in front of them. People came from settlements and outlying villages, and so did visiting dignitaries and government advisors. Gina said she’d never done so much meeting and greeting, and Aaron, called on to show the dignitaries through, had never had so many lunches in the vice-chancellor’s rooms.

Up on the wall was the image of the student in the forty-foot room. Around it were shots of house girls in bright dresses, a man carrying laundry through the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, a small outhouse away from the view.

Some students had stood at the gates of a hotel photographing the faces in the cars that drew up. It was curiously interesting. Others had been at street stalls and markets, their shots displayed alongside the rumours Sam’s students had collected: that Papua would become a state of Australia; that the Highlanders would make war on the coast, and everyone would lose their land; even that the Vatican was on its way to claim the palm oil.

A young man took a calmer route and photographed nothing but roof lines and house poles, slatted floors above water; he accompanied the clean, sharp images with ‘If this roof could speak’, a long poem of a house whose ancestor saw Captain Moresby sail into the harbour. That was Rika’s favourite, and Aaron’s.

Another series of shots taken over several weeks of the same old man as he adjusted to the camera and began to look back, then question, and finally repudiate it, found its way into the Sydney Morning Herald, and the series into a special issue of Oceania.

At the opening of the Village Shots exhibition, a historian visiting from New York gave a rousing speech. ‘This great experiment! This extraordinary moment! A privilege to visit, to be part of this quickening!’

In response, Rika spoke of pathways. She was looking particularly beautiful that night, in a dress made from a cotton print designed by students at the arts centre. Aaron lifted her hand to his lips and said the camera made visible the task of the future, and the capacities of the students who were preparing for it.

Their pathways were strong, a string band newly back from a tour of Australia was playing, and the future stretched ahead with everything in place.

The one threat to this happy view was Derek. He had left the politics department to run Michael Somare’s office, and he wanted Aaron there, working for the chief minister and the government that was coming. This was a greater task than to serve the university and its students. That was his view, and he’d put it to Aaron more than once. When it came to a particular request, a talk here, a weekend meeting there, Aaron would do as Derek asked, but he would not leave the university. He had the soul of a scholar. Martha saw him in the new, custom-built library most days, at his favourite desk by the windows with books piled around him as he worked. His lectures on Malinowski and Margaret Mead were becoming renowned, attended by staff from other faculties and patrol officers who were in town for a briefing. Yes, the life of the university suited Aaron.