I left Thornhill with Wiseman’s quick temper, his tendency towards violence, and a certain cold-blooded determination. I gave him Wiseman’s consciousness of humiliation by the gentry. I also gave him Wiseman’s rough-and-ready sense of justice and even charity.

But in building a picture of Thornhill the family man, I went far beyond what I could guess about Wiseman. Thornhill’s deep love for his wife, his softness with her, his love for his children—none of that came from the Wiseman I’d met in the archives.

Once that softer part of his personality was drawn in, the violence he might inflict on the Aboriginal people took on a different quality.

A man who wasn’t altogether bad, but who did bad things, might feel something like remorse. That suggested a way the book might end—with Thornhill suspended between what he was, and what he’d done. He didn’t have the insight to bring the two together, he was even hardly able to think about them, but he knew that something wasn’t right.

Thornhill might have accepted that black people were not-quite-human ‘savages’. On the other hand, being regarded as inferior within his own class system might have made him consider other kinds of ‘inferiors’ more sympathetically. His lack of education would have spared him knowledge of the pseudo-science that justified racism. And, as someone who spent a lot of time around the docks, he’d probably met and worked alongside foreign sailors of all colours and cultures. More than many of his educated contemporaries, he might have realised that difference doesn’t mean inferiority.

When a man like that came into contact with the Aboriginal people in New South Wales, his response might have been pretty complex. I was starting to see that his attitude wouldn’t be a fixed thing arrived at by education or thought, but more fluid, driven by day-to-day events.

It might be something quite personal that would tip the balance and make him decide to act in one way rather than another: something to do with his family, or his love for his wife. Not a considered attitude to Aboriginal people, just a pragmatic response to a problem.

And what about that wife? She’d always been a vaguer figure in my mind than Solomon. Partly this was because there’d been so little about Jane in the records. I’d tried to find out about her, but if the life of men on the frontier was hard to see at this distance of time, the life of women—especially of working-class women—was almost invisible.

As I’d written her so far, Jane was a permanently unhappy creature, wistful and sulky. That picture of her had drawn on the three things I knew about Jane Wiseman: the frequency of her pregnancies, her ‘actual state of invalidity’, and her ‘lingering illness’.