Two birds landed on the TV aerial across the road—a big one and a very small one. They perched there facing the same way like two people on a bus.

I was slowing down. My rule of thumb was to cover at least five pages a day with writing. It didn’t have to be good writing or even useable writing. It just had to cover the pages. So I kept going.

In the same way that I’d skimmed through The Letters of Jane Austen all those years ago, I skimmed through the transcript of the Old Bailey trial. The drama of the moment leapt out at me again, as freshly as when I first read it, and got me writing:

For God’s sake Mr Rowey have mercy, you know the consequence. What was in his mind as he pinched those lumps of Brazil timber was that if he was caught he’d be killed by having a hard rope put around his neck and he’d be suspended from it, perhaps killed outright but more likely die a slow & excruciating death by suffocation, his hands tied behind his back, his feet kicking frantically at air, with a crowd watching, perhaps you’d hear them laughing and calling out as you flailed and twirled (find eye-witness account of a hanging) in a blind congested panic of airlessness.

Find out about the physiological realities of hanging & how they would have done it at Newgate in 1805.

Would Sol have seen a public hanging? When did it stop being public?

No man shall know the hour of his death & just as well. The whole of the time leading up to it would be spent in horror & grief & panic. Watching each minute, each second tick away. This is my second-last sunset, the last time I go to the toilet, the last time I will ever blow my nose. Apart from the physical pain & fright of execution the worst part of the punishment would be knowing for sure, exactly, to the minute, how long you had left. We all know death is a finite number of nose-blows away, but that knowledge isn’t really something we can live with.

Over the next six months, I wrote many pages like this, about Newgate, about Wiseman’s early life in London, about what it might have been like to be a lighterman on the Thames.

Then I started opening the other set of manila folders, the ones about Australia. I wrote about what things were like in Sydney in 1806, about the convict system, about the way convicts were assigned to free settlers as servants, about the ‘ticket of leave’ system. Now and then I’d write something that could be called ‘some elements of memoir’:

Wiseman would certainly have had reason to go to Government House at Parramatta, perhaps to receive his pardon.