From that experience I’d developed a few mantras about writing. Never have a blank page was one. Don’t wait for the mood: that was another, because you could always fix it up later.

In the years after Lilian’s Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don’t wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me—one of my favourite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.

I wrote four more novels using that makeshift method. But I didn’t think it would work for The Wiseman Book, as I thought of this project, because it wouldn’t be a novel.

I wanted to tell the story of what I’d learned about the frontier, to explore that sad history of fear, misunderstanding and violence. It was a tale that drew its power from the fact that it was real. Interposing a layer of invention would defeat my aim: to tell the unvarnished story as truthfully as I could.

My workroom was the front room at home. It had too many things in it: two desks, two filing cabinets, two bookcases. A couch. A cello (in fact, until Alice grew that extra few inches, two cellos: a big one for me and a smaller one for her), music stool, music stand. Piles of books. The big sideboard thing that had been Grandma’s.

The window above my desk looked out onto the front yard, a constantly changing landscape of building materials and other objects brought home by Tom: a massive beam of wood, a stack of six brown shutters, several sheets of scavenged plywood, an antique pram with the word SWAN in curly letters along the side, a person-sized roll of silver bubble wrap and a prop from a university production of Snow White, a throne that doubled as a coffin.

Not long after that night in the bush on Darkinjung land I sat down with a brand new spiral bound exercise book and my favourite kind of rollerball pen.

I tried not to ask myself, what are you planning to do, exactly? because I didn’t know. Never have a blank page, I reminded myself, and started talking onto the page, thinking aloud: ‘Form—like The First Stone or Stravinsky’s Lunch—nonfiction, but a conversational style. Vignettes. Chapters like Moby Dick—for example a chapter called On Doing Family History. Some elements of memoir.’

Some elements of memoir. Who was I kidding with this pompous tone?