A keen folk historian, Rachel travelled the country twice, once cycling from Cape Reinga to Bluff, to find stories about immigrant women in the 1800s. She picked out six women with colourful lives – a fraudster, missionary wife, magician, goldminer, washerwoman and prostitute – then fleshed out their characters, set their stories into song, and created a theatrical framework with a narration and musical links “to give the sense of a journey”.