But from the Aboriginal point of view it must have seemed that strangers had come in and annexed the back verandah, or the kitchen, put a fence around it and defended it with guns.

You could get by without your verandah, but you might starve if the kitchen was taken, and that’s what those fertile river flats on the Hawkesbury were. When the strangers grew corn, and grazed sheep, it must have seemed reasonable to pick the corn, spear the sheep.

No wonder there’d been trouble.

I understood a lot more now, and I was glad I’d waited before speaking to Aboriginal people. If I was anxious about what kind of settler Wiseman had been, that was my own issue. I had to deal with it myself. I couldn’t ask Aboriginal people to help me with it.

But I also felt the importance of speaking, if I could, to descendants of the Aboriginal people Wiseman would have met. The story about my ancestor intersected with their stories. Talking to them wasn’t research, it was a matter of courtesy.

One of the things I’d learned in the course of my reading was that it was as useful to talk about ‘the Aboriginal people’ as it was to talk about ‘the European people’.

Where Wiseman settled was the country of the Darug. The other side of the Hawkesbury was Darkinjung country. They were different groups, with different (though related) languages.

The Darug was one of the groups which bore the full brunt of European expansion. The smallpox epidemic in 1789 killed many of them. Many of the attacks the Gazette described were made by Darug men and many of those killed would have been Darug. Those first thirty years of warfare, disease and displacement must have severely disrupted their culture.

This meant that the Darug weren’t easy to learn much about, two hundred years later. But there were descendants who were reconstructing the language and the culture. I asked around, found a contact and picked up the phone.

I expected a polite rebuff, but Auntie Edna Watson, a Darug elder, and later another descendant, John Gallard, heard me out while I tried to explain Solomon Wiseman my ancestor. My need to fill in some of the holes in the family story. My awareness that the story I was exploring wasn’t a comfortable one.

Trying to explain made me realise how little I knew what I was doing and where all this obsessive work might lead me.

As these Darug people began to speak to me I listened and scribbled, page after page. They told me some stories I knew already, others I didn’t: stories about boys thrown into the river to die, about men’s hands being cut off, about burnings and shootings.

And they told me about the yam daisies.