The low spit of land on my left pointed into the main body of the Harbour. With my new eyes I could erase the Opera House and the fancy apartments and see it again as a long rocky arm protecting the cove. Ahead of me, the bay had been squared off to accommodate the wharves, but the shape of the land was still there. I could see the dish of the valley sloping up steeply left and right and running all the way back to where Central Station was now. I could imagine the creek—the Tank Stream—winding down the valley to the bay. Scattered along its banks were tents, huts, a few buildings like Cadman’s Cottage, with sagging rooflines and windows that weren’t straight.

This was the place Wiseman had been. The Sydney Harbour Ferry Sirius was idling, waiting for a spot at Wharf 5, near where the Alexander would have dropped anchor with Wiseman on board. They’d have brought the convicts up out of the dark hold—how painfully bright the light must have been! Over to my right, where the cruise ships tied up now, he would have stepped ashore, and glanced up, as I did, at the high ridge of The Rocks. The Harbour Bridge loomed above the whole place now, heroic and overwhelming, but he would have seen the steep hillside, with its angled plates and shelves of rock. He’d have seen the creek, the tents, the raggedy dirt tracks that were about to be named Pitt Street and George Street.

And, up there on the ridge, he might have seen the silhouette of another man, watching.

It was all gone, but it was all here. It had taken a foreign place to let me see what lay underneath my own.

In the library it felt different, too. The Public Record Office in Kew had shown me the power that a piece of paper could hold. It had shown me, too, not to be frightened of those arcane catalogues. I needed help with them, but that was okay. Kew had taught me humility as well.

The librarians walked me through all the catalogues: the Mitchell Library MSS Index Catalogue; the Mitchell Library Leaf Catalogues One and Two; the Sir William Dixson Library MSS Catalogue, including the Archival Estrays and the Supplementary MSS Catalogue; the Contents Lists of MSS Collections and the Small Pictures File. They explained about Webcat and Picman.

The Old Bailey transcripts, in their white boxes on the open shelves, had been beginner’s luck.

As my folders filled with Wiseman references—letters, petitions, lists—I was determined to keep things organised. I drew neat headings, made an index of references with circled numbers in colour-coded pens, wrote down all the call numbers, filed away my Request Slip carbons. I was discovering in myself an obsessive I’d never known was there.

I found dozens of references to Wiseman and slowly pieced together a life for him in Sydney.

He was sentenced in October 1805, sailed on the Alexander in January 1806, and arrived in Australia in September of that year. His wife Jane and the four-year-old William came out on the same boat as free settlers. (This wasn’t as unusual an arrangement as it sounds. The ratio of men to women in the colony resulted in a fair amount of what the authorities called ‘unnatural acts’. From time to time official policy was to increase the number of women, and allowing spouses to emigrate was an efficient way of doing that.)