1. Which Wiseman was he?

2. Crime & punishment

3. Arrival in Sydney

4. A free man again

5. Bankrupt

6. Land grant

7. The man of property

8. Wife dead.

Another new document, Assembly draft 2, another few weeks of rearranging. As I went, I subdivided some of the pieces, deleted some, rewrote others, and wrote new ones.

Then yet another list called ‘Preliminary outline’ and another new document. Assembly draft 3, Assembly draft 4, Assembly draft 5, Assembly draft 6.

All the lists looked great. But as soon as I tried to make the writing correspond, everything went wrong.

Most of it was boring, that was one problem. Pages and pages of stuff about the assignment system and how important yam daisies were. The order worried me, too. Should I begin in 1788 with Governor Phillip slapping that old man? Or with Wiseman in London?

And there was something about the tone I didn’t like. The ‘memoir’ bits had a jocular feel, like a clergyman visiting a kindergarten. The ‘research’ bits were terrible—where did that awful starchy schoolmarm tone come from? Surely not me?

The main problem, though, was something I was reluctant to face. I was determined to write a book of non-fiction, but the only parts of this ‘assembly’ that were interesting were the ‘flights of fancy’ where I’d created the flesh to put on the bones of research. Where, in a word, I’d written fiction.

The mirror tiles had gone from the pram and the dryer was replaced by two non-working whipper-snippers. What was wrong with this book wasn’t the order of the pieces. It was the writing itself. I could either write a truthful book that would be so dull as to be unreadable, or I could write a made-up book that might be read but not believed.

It had all seemed so wonderfully simple that night in the bush, listening to the wind.

20. THE FICTIONAL QUESTER

20
The Fictional Quester

When I was a short-sighted child, reading was my whole life. I read in the bath, I read on the toilet, I read under the desk at school, I read up in my treehouse, feeling the branches of the jacaranda swell and subside under me.

One of the unforeseen griefs of becoming a writer was that I could no longer lose myself in a book the way I had as a child. I still read, of course, but now part of me was always watching how the writer had done it. There was always something to learn, something I could try in my own writing. It was a rare and compelling book that made me forget that it had been made.