I filled another big exercise book, and by then I’d sketched out most of the story: Wiseman grows up in London, is transported to Australia, settles on the Hawkesbury, and comes into conflict with the Aboriginal people.

For that last part, I couldn’t draw on my great-great-great grandfather, since there’d been no information about that part of his life. I adapted from other sources, giving to Wiseman the meeting between Governor Phillip and the ‘old man’ in Broken Bay, for example. I adapted loosely, but kept the basic shape of the encounter, and especially the piercing detail of the ‘three slight slaps’.

Governor Macquarie’s Proclamation, in which permission was given for settlers to shoot Aborigines, went into the writing exactly as it appeared in the Gazette.

The horrible details that I’d read about, of Aboriginal hands and ears being cut off, I gave to a character I called Smasher, whose name also came straight out of the notes I’d taken from the historians’ books. I wrote a scene in which Aboriginal people were poisoned, adapted from nineteenth-century accounts. On the basis of several descriptions in the Gazette and information about ‘penetrating injuries’ from my doctor friends, I wrote a scene in which a settler died an agonising death from a spear.

The historical account of the Waterloo Creek massacre gave me details and phrases to create an episode in which Aboriginal people are ambushed and killed. I could see the place (a particular spot on the Macdonald River) even though I found the events hard to imagine.

These scenes of violence were the most difficult I’d ever written. Even now I don’t want to look at them too closely. They had to be written because the story needed to include this aspect of the frontier, but I had to steel myself to get them done.

I didn’t want the book to end with defeat for the Aboriginal people. I had in mind a short scene at the end in which something about the land itself would demonstrate that the Aboriginal people hadn’t been destroyed:

There was a tree by the river that had grown over a rock, a big curving lip of tree-flesh, growing down and you could see the tree would eventually cover the entire rock like an octopus flowing over its prey.

But the tree, by the nature of being a thing that lived, would die, and there, underneath, would be the rock, not destroyed at all, ready to show itself to the sun for another thousand years.

It was a heavy-handed image for the idea I wanted to get across, a parallel that was much too neat. Tree equals settlers; rock equals Aboriginal people. No amount of tinkering with the words was ever going to make it work.

Never mind, fix it up later.