Solomon Wiseman was the biggest problem. If he wasn’t a character, nothing else in the book would work. If I could get him right, perhaps I could fudge it a bit with some of the others.

Who was he? He was out of focus, the way he had been in all those letters and petitions he’d produced: sometimes reasonable, other times flying off the handle. And he was real. I was beginning to see that the powerful reality of Solomon Wiseman was part of the energy of this book, but it was also part of the problem. I was trying to incorporate everything that I’d found.

It felt a little disloyal to step back from my personal relationship with him, as if I was turning my back on a family member I’d only just discovered. I came to it in stages.

My relationship with him shifted the first time I found myself thinking of him not as ‘Solomon Wiseman’ but as ‘the Wiseman character’. Using that form of words in my mind, and as it were avoiding his eye, I looked again at the scenes on the Hawkesbury, where his responses were so contradictory. Silently apologising to him, I came to see that there was a way of reconciling the contradictions. He begins with one way of thinking about the Aboriginal people, goes through several shifts of attitude, and ends up prepared to join an attack against them. By rearranging and reshaping the scenes, I could create a sequence.

This wasn’t quite how it was in the documents, but making a sequence out of these scenes wouldn’t distort what had ‘really happened’ in any significant way. It would, though, turn them into a story.

Now I could ask myself cold-bloodedly, ‘What is the function of the Wiseman character in this story?’ To answer that question I had to know what the central drama of the novel was, and now I could see it more clearly. It was the drama of watching a character make choices. The choices were to do with how to ‘be’ in the country he’d come to. That included his relationship with the place itself, as well as with the original inhabitants. The story was about the journey he takes in making his choices.

I’d written a number of scenes that I now saw had nothing to do with that central drama. They’d only ever been there because they ‘really happened’. A lot of unconvincing stuff about his business affairs was one of the main things that went.

I didn’t even bother with the ‘Good Bits To Use Later’ folder, just hit the delete button.

The suburb where we lived was nineteenth-century working-class turned gentrified. A few characters still hung on there, people born and bred when it was a school-of-hard-knocks shipbuilding suburb. We had one over our back fence: Old Mr Barnes. I had occasional conversations with him through the plumbago.