But seeing this made me realise that I was already looking for a shape for the book. The fact that there were precedents— Drusilla Modjeska’s book about women artists, Helen Garner’s about a case of sexual harassment—was reassuring. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Suddenly I was all fired up. I stared past the front yard, past our crookedly clipped hedge, over the top of the house across the road, into the sky, empty except for a television aerial.

I could see this book, feel it, almost taste it as I stared up at that odd-shaped patch of blue framed by the neighbour’s roof and the edge of our upstairs porch. It would be a wonderful and subtle mix of memoir, history and speculation. I’d allow myself flights of fancy—elements of fiction, you might say— where I put flesh on the bones of what I’d found out. Modjeska and Garner had both done that, and it gave their books richness and life without compromising their factual basis.

I got the pen moving across the paper again: ‘Never had faith in a book before and never had this urge, craving to get to it. Always an effort before. Now—real excitement plus sense of doing something worth doing.’

And I didn’t have to start where I usually did: with the nothing out of which a novel must be drawn like a spider’s thread. I had all these notes.

They were heaped up in one of the bookcases: four high piles of bulging manila folders with titles scrawled on the spines. ‘London—Wiseman’s places.’ ‘Research—books— Aboriginal people.’ ‘Family history.’

There were forty-seven folders. The folders had labels, but they didn’t really tell you what was inside. I’d found that my idea about tidy card catalogues and colour-coded this, that and the other didn’t work when applied to the real world. Should information about the Old Bailey go in the folder called ‘London— Wiseman’s Places’, for example, or the one called ‘Convicts’?

Inside each folder was a muddle of scrawled notes, photocopied pages, pictures torn out of magazines, newspaper clippings. I opened a few. Each bit of paper was interesting, but nothing went with anything else.

Just keep writing, I told myself:

Need to make a list of where to go next. Can’t see how to organise what I’ve already got. Already a muddle. Overlap, the researcher’s problem—life isn’t in tidy boxes. My feeling of smug control, tidying history away into compartments starting to evaporate. Still the desire to control, limit, categorise. My feeling that the sad muddle of the past can be reduced to a succession of neat questions with or without answers—that I can stay outside it all, in charge. But it’s already a muddle.