Thinking about her now as ‘the wife character’ and giving her another name—Sal—once again freed me from the straitjacket of ‘what really happened’. Her health improved miraculously but her temper grew worse. She hated the flies, the trees, the sun. She hankered for England. That was always ‘Home’. Australia was one long punishment. Her husband bore the brunt of her outrage at what life had dumped on her.

The minor characters—the neighbours and the children— were so shallowly drawn that I considered getting rid of them altogether. Imagining the book without them showed me why I needed them. Settlement wasn’t a matter of individual men and women acting simply out of their own personalities. It was about an entire world transplanted to the new place, bringing with it all the pressures and rewards it had always brought to bear on its members.

I saw—with a sinking heart, how can I do this?—that I would have to create a whole society on the riverside. Different individuals responded differently to the choices they had. Social pressures from those around him—loyalty, fear of exclusion, shame—as well as temperament would make Thornhill act in the way he did.

Smasher Farrell and Sagitty Birtles were already present, based on the barbarous settlers I’d read about. Blackwood—a defender of Aboriginal people—was there from the beginning, too. He’d emerged out of that mysterious place where characters sometimes come from, fully formed and complete. One day he even showed me what he looked like when I found a photo of Jack Mundey, the union leader, addressing a public meeting—a big solid man with a magnificent nose and a face full of powerful character. Blackwood! I thought. So that’s what you look like!

I was shameless in rifling through research for anything I could use, wrenching it out of its place and adapting it for my own purposes: the man with a lump on the back of his neck from carrying bags of wheat; the gentleman down on his luck, proud of washing his own shirt; the man whose house was robbed by men who took everything, even the dinner on the fire—chicken, pot and all. But I was trying to be faithful to the shape of the historical record, and the meaning of all those events that historians had written about. What I was writing wasn’t real, but it was as true as I could make it.

24. THE ABORIGINAL CHARACTERS

24
The Aboriginal Characters