We stared at each other. Like me, she was from ‘down south’. We didn’t know what this was about, these bits of the country brought into the foreign place of the library. But we knew it was something. The gaudy shirt, the swaggering gait in the boots—all that was surface decoration, laid on top of something else.

Back in Sydney, I made some decisions. I would get rid of all the Aboriginal dialogue. It might be historically accurate to have the Aboriginal characters speaking broken English, but it made them less sympathetic, more caricatured.

Their inside story—their responses, their thoughts, their feelings—all that was for someone else to tell, someone who had the right to enter that world and the knowledge to do it properly.

I might not be able to enter the Darug consciousness, but I could make it clear that there was one. To create a hollow in the book, a space of difference that would be more eloquent than any words I might invent to explain it. To let the reader know that a story was there to be told, but not to try to tell it.

Around about the same time I began to realise that the Aboriginal people were emerging in a way I hadn’t planned: through the descriptions of landscape. The rocks, the trees, the river—I realised that I was often describing them in human terms—the golden flesh of the rocks beneath their dark skin, the trees gesturing, the bush watchful and alive. Humanising the landscape could be a way of showing the link between indigenous people and their land because, in some way that I recognised without really understanding, the country was the people.

I had one other problem in depicting the Darug: I needed the reader to be aware of things about the Aboriginal people that Thornhill wouldn’t have known—the importance of those yam daisies, for example. How was I going to convey them without intruding too obviously into Thornhill’s point of view?

Once or twice I used another character, usually Blackwood, to explain things to Thornhill. But I knew it could sound phoney to have one character explaining something to another, how it could break the trance of reading. Draft by draft I removed scenes where Blackwood held forth, and kept only a very few. Even those felt laboured, but they were so important I had to leave them.

Once or twice I let Thornhill work things out for himself, as part of the journey of his thinking. For example, after seeing the Aboriginal strategy for burning the grass to attract game, he glimpses the idea that this is a kind of farming. I could get away with this a couple of times, but more than that and Thornhill would start to be too good to be true.

25. DIALOGUE

25
Dialogue