At Waterloo Creek in northern New South Wales in 1838 (the year Wiseman died), a large group of Aboriginal people was ambushed as they camped by a waterhole and an unknown number (accounts varied between four and 300) were killed. At Myall Creek, not far away, the Aboriginal men were sent off working and their women and children, with a few older men, were tied together, force-marched to a clearing and hacked to death. The bodies were burned: the fire was tended for a full day but a witness some time later could still see the half-burned remains of between twenty and thirty people.

Taking notes about these atrocities made me feel sick. I could feel my eyes going starey and fixed, close to tears. My pen moved slowly over the page. The last time I’d felt like this—shocked, tainted—was when, as a student, I’d accidentally come across a book full of pictures of people in the Nazi death camps.

The poisoned, dirtied feeling came from the closeness of these events. They hadn’t happened on the other side of the world. The Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek massacres occurred within a hundred kilometres of my mother’s birth-place. They weren’t done by the Ku Klux Klanners or Afrikaners I’d been brought up to despise for their racism. These were my own people.

The perpetrators were separated from me by time and culture, that was true. Solomon Wiseman and his neighbours grew up in a crueller world than my own. And there was the logic of the situation, too, of newcomers moving into a place where other people were already living. One set of people wanted things another set already had. How could there not be trouble?

Reminding myself of that wasn’t enough to make the sick feeling go away.

But the historians drew a complex, nuanced picture of those times. Among the stories of brutality were others of honourable, even courageous behaviour by settlers. At great cost to himself, the ex-convict David Carly in Western Australia in the late nineteenth century protested to the authorities about the mistreatment of Aboriginal people:

Again I write to you…from this land of murder and slavery and fraud…I have defended these murdered Slaves to the best of my ability for 13 years and to my Complete Ruin so I will defend them to the last as I have long since given up all hope of aid from any quarter.

In South Australia in 1838 the settler Robert Cock, a Quaker, insisted on paying ‘rent’ to the Aboriginal people for the land he occupied. Other settlers wrote of their friendships with Aboriginal people. I read several accounts of white men who lived with their Aboriginal wives and children and protected them, in spite of the hostility of their own society.