He heard me out as I stumbled through my story. Wiseman my great-great-great grandfather. Trying to piece together what happened. Writing a book.

I could hear my voice go uncertain on the word ‘book’. But Patrick didn’t ask any hard questions, like ‘what sort of book?’

‘Yes, well,’ he said, ‘I can show you a few things if you like.’

It was getting late, but we drove in his battered four-wheel-drive, up the hill to Courthouse Cave, where in the family story Wiseman sat in judgment over his convicts (except that in the story it was Judgment Rock). To Wiseman’s Well, a dank mosquito-filled hollow where you could still see the flagstones lining a small pond.

As we looked around I learned a few things about Patrick, mainly that he was a man whose greatest pleasure was to be in the bush. He wasn’t indigenous, but he had a deep respect for the place and the people whose place it had always been.

I was probably the thousandth person to ask, but he patiently answered my questions about being barefoot in the bush. ‘Your foot doesn’t get hard like leather,’ he said. ‘More like a cellist’s fingers—hard but sensitive as well.’ Winter or summer, he told me, he wore the blue singlet and the shorts. ‘I never feel cold,’ he said. ‘Give it the chance, your body adjusts.’

He voiced my thought: ‘It’s how the Aboriginal people could live here, they understood all that.’

The sun was dropping below the high ridge behind Wiseman’s. I had to get back to Sydney. But Patrick offered to take me up into the bush another time.

He hardly knew me, had only heard a few words about what I thought I might be doing. But, as I came to learn, Patrick was a generous man as well as a knowledgeable one. Over the next couple of weeks we met several times and looked at many things.

He showed me a tree growing by the side of the road with a cigar-shaped scar four metres long in its side. The scar was made when a canoe was levered out of the bark, a hundred or so years ago. The scar started a couple of metres up the trunk. How did they get up that high? How did they lever out such a huge piece of bark in one piece without it splitting?

The tree was astonishing, but even more astonishing was that on my earlier visits, driving around looking for graveyards and so on, I’d sailed past it many times. I’d never noticed the scar. I might have looked, but I hadn’t seen.

He showed me caves with stencils of hands: big hands, small hands, hand after hand outlined in white pipeclay on the rock. I held my own up beside one. A bit different around the thumb. But a hand like my own, greeting me.