Munro spoke approvingly of Gideon’s performance in the afflicted house, and Gideon made modest demurrals: it is a shame to have to say such things. Louisa had arranged six bottles with cork stoppers by the door; lemon juice for our voyage, she told me with a kind smile. She and Munro served kangaroo that had been seared in a skillet on his wood stove, along with vegetables from their garden that would not have been out of place on a Sydney table. The other women fussed around us, set a table and tended the fire. Though it was not their house, they seemed at ease here domestically. The kangaroo meat was lean and dark, and they had made little effort to conceal its origin: tufts of skin and singed fur still adhered to the fillets. But it made a pleasant change from the various creatures the doctor dragged up from the seabed.

My father ate beside me. I passed things to him as his needs arose: the water jug, the salt. There was wine, too, Hobart wine such as the officers might keep. The things that floated ashore here.

‘It’s sad,’ my father said quietly to me at one point. ‘I could have stayed here.’

‘What do you mean?’ I asked him in return.

‘They want for nothing here.’

The sound of the tyereelores’ laughter cut across his words.

‘But what do you mean could have?’ I persisted. He merely shrugged. His fingers read the pewter dish they’d given him and found the food. He cut it, and ate.

Munro said nothing further about the meeting with his neighbours. Having ventured his endorsement of Gideon’s dire prescription, he retreated into amiable silence. And because the discussion at the table moved on, I did not have the opportunity to seek my father’s opinion. It bothered me still, seeing those simple people, suffering already, excoriated by the doctor.

Had he done it to impress me? If so, then I was complicit.

Louisa was telling stories of the islands, stories that revealed her to be deeply acquainted with them, though she was careful to make clear that this was not her country. ‘When I’m ere,’ she said, her hands making the geography, ‘I ben callem Louisa. Back there, Drummerrerlooner.’ The other women listened, nodding in silence. My mind turned it over: was it as simple as being known by different names in different places, or something deeper—stranger—than that? The fancy occurred to me that the places themselves might know her differently, the names being merely an expression.