But this time I saw something different from Diana or Apollo. Each panel depicted an Aboriginal subject: Hunter with Woomera and Spear; Lubra with Fishnet; Man Making Fire. They were beautifully made, the people depicted as dignified, strong, skilful, the detail fine and convincing.

Had every generation done this then, from mine all the way back to 1788—tried to find a way to put Aboriginal together with European? The sculptors of these panels—had they been driven, as I was, to acknowledge something?

These images of noble old men with beards, these dignified women staring gravely out at the viewer, must have seemed progressive, even revolutionary when they’d been made. The world they depicted was still called ‘primitive’, and yet the sculptors had glorified it in bronze, giving it as much value as the classical pediment up above.

Now these images didn’t look so progressive. I didn’t quite know what to think. It was a long way up from boomerangs on tea towels, but it suggested that the Aboriginal people could be used simply as surface decoration, as exotics, as exhibits out of a museum. As something that was gone.

Let this be a warning, I thought, and pushed on into the library.

14
The News of the Day

To ease myself in, and because I didn’t know how else to start, I began with the simple stuff: the written record. I was an amateur researcher, but I knew how to find the governors’ despatches to their masters in London.

I was good at the nuts and bolts of the Mitchell now. I had a special dollar coin for the lockers that I kept with my reader’s ticket. I knew the best spot on the front steps to sit for lunch— on the side, behind the handrail, up against the most easterly column. While I was there I always greeted the ghost of Bea Miles, an eccentric who used to stand on these steps with a sandwich board offering ‘Recitations from Shakespeare. Sonnets Threepence, Scenes from a Play One Shilling’.

I started with the first despatches, from 1788, looking especially for references to the Hawkesbury and the Aboriginal people. It didn’t take long to find one. A few months after the First Fleet came to rest in Sydney Harbour, Governor Phillip went back out through the Heads and turned left. A few hours’ sailing time north, he found an opening in the coast he called Broken Bay, guessed it was the entrance to a river, and went in to explore.

He was right that it was a river—it was the Hawkesbury. What happened next took place less than thirty kilometres from where Wiseman settled twenty-five years later:

When the south branch of Broken Bay was first visited we had some difficulty in getting round the headland…having very heavy squalls of wind and rain, and where we attempted to land there was not sufficient water for the boat to approach the rocks, on which were standing an old man and a youth…after pointing out the deepest water for the boats, [they] brought us fire, and going with two of the officers to a cave at some distance, the old man made use of every means in his power to make them go in with him, but they declined; and this was rather unfortunate, for it rained hard and the cave was the next day found to be sufficiently large to have contained us all…