But it was becoming less important to fill in the blanks of that specific story. Another story was taking over: the larger one of what happened when white met black on the edge of settlement across the country. If you wanted to put it in one word, you’d say there’d been a war.

When the library closed I walked down Macquarie Street to the old Moore Stairs that ran to the water’s edge near the Opera House. This part of the point would have been, before buildings and roads, a kind of tabletop falling away steeply to the harbour. From here I could see the whole bay. Wiseman had been here, yes, but there’d been another bay before he’d arrived, and from the top of Moore Stairs it laid itself out before me, detail by detail.

There’d have been a little beach there in the corner where the creek (the Tank Stream) met the bay, fine yellow sand with a rim of water-smoothed sticks and tiny star-shaped shells at the high-tide mark. Behind that, coarse pale grass and casuarina trees with their needles whistling in the breeze. Embedded in the sand there’d have been rounded boulders slippery with bright seaweed, dotted with periwinkles and oysters. Across the bay the slope would have been honeycombed with overhangs and caves, cold and dank even in the blaze of midday. The whole hillside would have been strewn with gigantic flakes of sandstone, cut-grass growing in the cracks between the rocks.

How did I know? How was it that I could see it, hear it, almost smell it?

Because I’d spent my life knowing this place. In other parts of the harbour, away from the Opera House and Circular Quay, I mucked around in boats through my childhood. I’d slipped on that seaweed that was like brilliant green hair, cut my feet on those oysters, picked off those periwinkles to admire their humbug black-and-white stripes. I’d gone into dank overhangs on other slopes of canted sandstone, felt the chill strike up from the cold rock, ran back out into the sun. I’d discovered thumbnail beaches at the head of coves where runnels of fresh water splashed down and angophoras shook their leaves overhead. I knew this place in my bones.

And this—this paradise of blue water, yellow sand, a cove orientated perfectly to give shelter from the cold winter wind but let in the cooling breeze of summer, a cove with all the fresh water and oysters and fish that a person could need—this was the place where those ships had come in, those strange people stepped ashore and planted their flag and said, all this is ours now.

15. HISTORIANS

15
Historians

Back in my workroom, books by historians piled up on my desk. As the days of summer wore away, I kept scribbling notes and sorting them in folders.