I decided to start by doing some homework on my own. I would see what came next.

Walking up from the Quay towards the Mitchell Library one more time, I felt the pinch of the slope in my calves, the November sun hot on my shoulders. Up Phillip Street, past the corner where the first Government House had been. The hill was steep. Wiseman would have felt it in his calves as he walked up here.

As I pushed at one of the grand doors of the library, for perhaps the five hundredth time in my life, I thought to look at them. They were covered with panels of bronze bas reliefs. Scenes from antiquity, I’d always assumed, to go with the fluted stone columns: Diana the huntress with perky little breasts, Apollo with his lyre hiding his rude bits, that kind of thing.

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

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’.