Back in my student days I’d known a lighting designer who called himself Mr Fogg. We lost touch over the years, but I was somehow still on the mailing list for his irregular ‘newsletter’. In the April 2003 edition, Mr Fogg told of a trip he’d made to the Kimberley in the remote north-west of Western Australia where he’d taken some photographs of a group of Aboriginal performers and artists. He’d exhibited the photos in Sydney and New York. Now he was going to take them back to the Kimberley and have some sort of exhibition there, so that the people in the photos could see themselves. Were there any sympathetic souls out there on his mailing list who’d like to join him?

I said yes.

I’d written scenes in which Thornhill deals with his Aboriginal neighbours, but I knew they weren’t working. I’d never known anyone remotely like the Aboriginal characters I was describing, not even seen them from a distance. I was inventing them out of the only resources I had: stereotype, cliché and guesswork.

I’d always known I wasn’t going to try to enter the consciousness of the Aboriginal characters. I didn’t know or understand enough, and felt I never would. They—like everything else in the book—would be seen through Thornhill’s eyes.

But Thornhill had one big advantage over his creator. He’d seen Aboriginal people, spoken to them, watched them going about their affairs. Heard them speak, seen their faces, their hands, their hair, their feet. I hadn’t.

In any other novel, if I’d had that kind of difficulty with characters, I’d have left them out and written about ones I knew something about. But that day on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, meeting the eye of that woman, I’d seen that there was an empty space in my own family story where the Aboriginal people belonged. The whole point of writing this story was to fill that space.

More than that—to place them in the story so that they were as fully alive, as complex and as individual as the settlers. I didn’t want them to be shadowy figures on the edge of the action or stereotypes.

I didn’t want to try to get inside the Aboriginal characters, but I needed to see what Thornhill would have: people of unmixed Aboriginal descent, living in traditional ways.

The Kimberley had cars and supermarkets, but it was the closest I was likely to come to seeing what he had seen.

In the end there were seven ‘sympathetic souls’ along for the ride with Mr Fogg: a minibus full of old hippies.