Cape York: The woman under the hat, working alone and concentrating intently on painting her section of a wall, is Renee Leon, one of the country's most senior bureaucrats.
Nearby, two more federal department heads, Kathryn Campbell and Finn Pratt, are similarly engrossed in unfamiliar manual tasks and utterly anonymous.
Out front, the cameras are focussed on Tony Abbott and half a dozen ministers, bantering among themselves as they paint and landscape out the front of the community hall at Injinoo, about 40 kilometres from the tip of Cape York.
Viewed in isolation from afar, it's a photo opportunity to invite cynicism, fly-in pollies performing token tasks in a place they are unlikely to ever see again once they fly out.
But that is not the impression up close on Thursday morning, not from the pollies and the public servants and not from the local men who are working for My Pathways, a community employment program.
Ask Nathaniel Barkly, a 27-year-old father of three, whose team worked with Mr Abbott to create a garden. "This has made me feel pretty proud of myself and the team," he says.
"I've seen him on TV but not face to face. He calm, he's a good bloke," he says of the Prime Minister plagued by high disapproval ratings.
"It's good to see ministers and Canberra-based public servants getting their hands dirty and doing the work that needs top be done in these places," says Ms Leon, who was awarded a Public Service Medal in June 2013 for outstanding public service to public administration and law.
In a former role as head of the department of justice and community safety in the ACT, her main contact with Indigenous people was at the "pointy end of the justice system".
This is an altogether more satisfying place to be. She calls it the "create-opportunities-and-help-communities-build-and-grow" end of Indigenous engagement.
Injinoo's version of Backyard Blitz came after days of meetings and touring the region, seeking out information on what is working and where the problems lie.
If there is a general consensus, it is that communities in this top end of Cape York and in the Torres Strait are doing better than many elsewhere, with a vibrant culture, emerging young leaders and many good news stories.
On Wednesday, Ms Leon visited tiny Masig island with assistant employment minister Luke Hartsuyker, where the local school has NAPLAN results in the top 10 or 20 per cent of the nation. "It really fills you with hope when you visit a community that is really working from the kids up to improve their lives," says Ms Leon.
But there are also reminders of the past failures and flawed decisions, even in the community hall that is being refurbished. Joel Nona, 61, helped build it back in 1989 without the help of scaffolding or cranes. It is no longer owned by the community and has to be hired out, he tells Fairfax Media. "We want everything to come back to the community," he says.
It's a call being pressed by others, too, like Robbie Ropeyarn Salee, and being heard by Mr Abbott and his ministers.
"We've got to look at the lessons of the past being the footsteps of the future," says the pragmatic Indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion. "The secret of success is to keep at it and be a reflection of the wishes of the community."
If the other workers shared Mr Barkly's sense of pride and achievement, they were not alone. "I'm just so proud of those I was able to spend a couple of hours with this morning doing good things for their community," said Mr Abbott, "having a go, making a go of their lives and helping their community to be better tomorrow than it is today."
