The thing that strikes you about it today is how small it is, how humble it seems. It’s a plain square box of a building softened only by a graceful roofline, shutters along the windows, and a columned entranceway.

In front of Government House in 1806, the gently sloping ground down to the Parramatta River was the site of a convict camp. It’s grass now, with the odd gum tree. There’s a sign that tells me that if I look to my left I can see the ‘shadow’ of the road that serviced that convict encampment. Oh, come off it, what’s this shadow business, I think, but I glance to my left—and there, like a photograph rising up out of the blank paper in the developing dish, is indeed the shadow of a road, a different texture in the grass, a scar in the ground that’s still visible after nearly two hundred years.

I had some lunch down there near the river. There’s a man down there in the dirt-coloured suit of a derro, his face and hands dark with dirt. He gets in and out of a car so ancient and rusty, so planted to the spot that I realise it’s not so much a car as a dwelling-place. He’s watching me as if he’s waiting for me to go so he can get on with his life. I’ve invaded his front yard.

By July 2001, I had about a hundred pages of writing. Some bits were lively, but lots of it was dry and dead. Never mind. I could fix it up later.

19. THE ASSEMBLY

19
The Assembly

Before I was a writer, I’d been a film editor. Not a very good one, and not for long. But a few films included my name on the credits.

I’d worked on some cinema verité documentaries. The director started out with only a rough sketch of a script. The idea was to go out and shoot life, as it happened. Later, in the editing room, you’d find the story in the shots. That’s what I had to do now: go through what I had written and find a structure for all those fragments.

Outside my workroom window the shutters and the roll of silver bubble wrap had been replaced by three glass-paned doors, a lawn-mower with a broken handle, and a clothes dryer that was perfectly good except that the door didn’t shut.

The pram was still there, but it was full of mirror tiles now. At my desk I was making lists.

What I’ve got:

1. The Family Story

2. Sol’s London

3. Lighterman

4. Sydney in 1805

5. Crime & punishment

6. Sol on Hawkesbury

7. Aboriginal people on Hawkesbury

8. Sol after 1826

9. Descriptions of Sol—the portraits.

I named a new document on the computer, Assembly draft 1, and arranged my bits of writing according to the list. Something was not right. I tried another kind of list:

Preliminary outline—Sol’s Story.