This first draft had a definite voice: stately, serious, even pompous. It used informal phrases now and then but it never used contractions. I hoped I could make it less precious later.

Some parts came out in the first person, sometimes it was in third person, but it was always from Wiseman’s point of view.

The first-person point of view seemed right. The book was about the choices of one individual. I didn’t want the reader to see him from the outside in an abstract way. I wanted the reader to be right there with him.

But by the time I was onto my fourth exercise book, it was clear that first person wasn’t going to work. That stately voice didn’t belong to an illiterate Thames lighterman. If the book was to be in the first person, the voice would have to become much rougher, less literary, to be convincing.

Peter Carey had published The True History of the Kelly Gang not long before. He’d brought off a virtuoso act of ventriloquism of exactly the sort I’d have to do if I wanted to write the book in Wiseman’s voice. Carey had done it so well I was sure I’d only look foolish in attempting something similar.

I was also starting to see that there were things I wanted the book to say that Wiseman couldn’t say. He didn’t understand even the small amount I did about Aboriginal culture, for one thing. I knew that the Darug would starve without the yam daisies, but Wiseman didn’t know that.

Third person it had to be, then, but ‘third person subjective’— from Wiseman’s point of view, but only partly in his voice.

I put off transcribing the contents of the exercise books into the computer, keeping that as a kind of reward. It wasn’t until about March 2002 that I gave myself that treat.

The title was already in the machine from the day I read Michael Ondaatje’s novel: The Book of the Fictional Quester. Now I started to type.

Some time later, I had a fat folder of printout and I knew for sure what I’d been suspecting for a while. There were no ‘elements of memoir’ in here at all. The fictional quester had never so much as put in an appearance. In spite of all my certainty that this book shouldn’t be a novel, I’d written just that.

I sat staring past the laptop, out the window. Someone walked by on the other side of the hedge. I couldn’t see the person through the screen of leaves, only the movement they were making. I sat very still. I liked to look out, but I hated thinking that people out there might be able to see me.