One morning in October 2001 I lay on the couch in my workroom, delaying the journey to the desk, where I was starting to hate my latest assembly draft. I promised myself I could read for half an hour. It was warmer under the rug on the couch, too. In spite of a new gas heater, my workroom was draughty and a cold spring wind was pouring in around the window frame.

Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje, is a very good book, but that wasn’t why I stayed there reading it for the rest of the morning. I was wolfing it down because Michael Ondaatje was telling me what to do.

Anil’s Ghost is a novel. Its main character is invented. But it is based on historical events, and some of the characters are apparently versions of real people. Ondaatje’s main character is on a quest to uncover a hidden episode of history.

I was thinking that Ondaatje was showing me a way out of my deadlock. The ‘I’ character in The Wiseman Book, the ‘quester’, was myself—but it didn’t have to be. I could try the sleight of hand that Ondaatje had pulled off: to fictionalise the quester, but not the quest. I could step out of the limelight, leaving the search for Wiseman and his dealings with Aboriginal people centre stage.

Sitting at the desk with the rug now wrapped around my legs against the fierce draught under the door, I thought about my fictional quester. He or she would be around my own age. He or she might have had a country childhood—even better, have grown up on the Hawkesbury. He or she would come across some evidence of a massacre—half-burned bones, something like that. He or she would start to think about those bones and what they meant. He or she would go off on a quest to find out the story behind them. And so on.

Thank you, Michael Ondaatje.

I glanced through the folder called ‘London—Wiseman’s Places’ and saw a note I’d made watching the tide turn on the Thames. No more lists, no more ‘Preliminary Outlines’. Back to what I knew: free association. Not a novel, exactly, but using some of the novel’s techniques. And, for me, the relief of being back on familiar territory.