In the process of covering the Maungatapu Murders, the lurid account of which spread like lupin blossoms across the fields of Victorian sensation- such a sensational age, the students in my class started to lose focus on the details. I mean naturally they got the specifics right - the five bodies, the dead horse, the stolen gold; but everything else became a blurred mess, something malleable and reformed. I remember teaching them the definition of reformer, and getting them to model moulding clay with their hands making it into a tube, hands in the air. Their little reformation of the past: Sullivan as villain, Burgess as some gentlemen- this confused mess. For a week we had their pictures on the wall, four sepia men on the wall. It didn't really clarify anything for them, what motivates people to violence, their fears and the vast silence of the past.