And when I peered closely I could make out a man in a blue coat sitting on the verandah, taking his ease, legs apart, a servant bending over him: Mr Wiseman, new-hatched gentleman, lord of all he surveyed.

After all this research I was the world authority on Solomon Wiseman. Whatever he’d left behind to prove that he once lived on the earth, I’d found.

But my work didn’t seem finished. I felt I’d hardly started.

Was it because I needed to know more about Wiseman? How much more? I wondered what it would take for me to feel I had enough. Was there any way a search like this would ever end? Or would finding out more and more about Solomon Wiseman become a hobby, compulsive but useless?

A whole other part of the story remained hidden, too: the part that was the answer to the question I’d been faced with on the Sydney Harbour Bridge a year earlier. What happened when Wiseman encountered Aboriginal people, up on the piece of land where he’d built that fine stone house?

After four or five months’ work in the archives I was no closer to an answer. In the hundreds of pages of documents by and about Wiseman, there was absolute silence on the matter of the original inhabitants.

I’d once asked Mum about the Aboriginal people on the land that Wiseman took up. She said she wasn’t sure, but she thought that, by the time Wiseman had arrived there, they’d all gone.

Wiseman’s villa, with its high stone wall, blank back and cleared surrounds.

I’d accepted it then without really thinking about it, but now I did the sums. Wiseman went to the Hawkesbury around 1817. That was about three decades after the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbour. Was it possible that they’d all gone, already, from a place so remote you could only get to it by boat?

The silence about the Aboriginal people in the documents about Wiseman could have meant anything. It could have meant that they were all gone. Or that they weren’t gone, but that nothing happened significant enough to write down. Or that the things that happened were events no one wished to record.

There were no Aboriginal people in ‘Wiseman’s villa’. Just the house, the horses, the man on the verandah. But beyond Wiseman’s high white wall, beyond that almost-bare hillside, was a gesture towards the bush that lay beyond Mr Wiseman’s hundred acres. In the picture it was hardly there: a smudge like smoke on the page.

If they’d been anywhere, that’s where the Aboriginal people would have been: out there in the bush. I had to move the eyeline along, re-frame the scene. I had to put them back into the picture.

First, though, I needed to see the picture properly: not these smears of watercolour, but the place itself.

12
The Ghost Room

For Wiseman in his boat, the trip to his place would have taken a day or two, depending on weather and tide. Out of Sydney Harbour, along the coast and in at Broken Bay. Then through the gorges of the lower Hawkesbury up as far as the place where the river did a right-angle turn.