I hadn’t thought for years about that out-of-focus visit in my childhood to Wiseman’s Ferry. Now, for the first time, I wondered what had happened when Wiseman had arrived there and started the business of ‘settling’. Until this moment it had never occurred to me to wonder who might have been living on that land, and how he’d persuaded them to leave it.

In that instant of putting my own ancestor together with this woman’s ancestor, everything swivelled: the country, the place, my sense of myself in it.

The wind had got stronger and colder as we’d walked. It was ruffling the harbour the wrong way, making the water a hard dull metal. I wanted to get away from it all now: the smiles, the benign feeling of doing the right thing, the shuffling crowd of people whose pleasure in the moment hadn’t been sliced open.

I urgently needed to find out about that great-great-great grandfather of mine. I needed to know what he was like, and what he might have done when he crossed paths with Aboriginal people.

Until I knew that, it felt like nothing but wilful blindness— even hypocrisy—to go through the symbolic motions. The imagery of our walk, across a bridge, suddenly seemed all too easy. We were strolling towards reconciliation—what I had to do was cross the hard way, through the deep water of our history.

This is the story of what happened when I took the plunge and went looking for my own sliver of that history.

When the Reconciliation Walk took place, I’d just published my fifth novel, The Idea of Perfection. I hadn’t yet started another.

This was unusual for me. In the past, the end of one book had always overlapped with the beginning of another. I had a horror of a gap, as if fearing that if I stopped writing I might never start again.

But this time there was no new novel on the horizon. I wondered if I’d written all that I had in me to write.

When I decided to look for Solomon Wiseman and his dealings with the Aboriginal people, I thought there might be a non-fiction book of some kind in the material—perhaps something like a biography of Wiseman and a portrait of his times. I didn’t know what, if anything, I’d find, or whether there would be enough of interest for a book. This would be something I would do just for myself, because I needed to know.

Whenever Mum had told me the family stories about Solomon Wiseman and his descendants, I’d hardly listened, could never get the generations straight in my head, forgot the details.

But something of her passion to keep those stories alive must have conveyed itself to me, because a few years before the Bridge walk I’d sat down with her and recorded the stories into my cassette player.

When our two children were babies, Mum minded them a couple of days a week so that their father, Bruce, and I could work. They loved going to her place because she truly believed in children playing, in them finding their own play. One day either Tom or Alice got hold of a roll of toilet paper and when I came to pick them up it was everywhere, looped around the backs of the chairs, winding in and out of the stair-rails, out the window and back again. Mrs Next-Door had visited, apparently, and was scandalised.