They were eager to talk about their lives, and interested in mine. A woman named Poll was the wife of Charles Peterson, the invalid I’d seen on the beach. Another woman, heavy, with hair in matted pipes, said her husband called her Peacock, but that on her country she was Ghoneyannener. I asked her where that country was and she lifted her chin to the south-west. ‘Port Dalrymple,’ she said softly. ‘Leetermairrener, my people. Stoney Creek nation.’

‘Do you miss it?’ I asked. I don’t know what I meant by the question. It was something my parents’ generation would ask each other—Do you miss Birmingham? Have you heard from Leith? Peacock looked at me gently, the same way I would look at the Cooper children when they came up with some gemstone of sweet naivete: ‘Hasn’t gone anywhere, honey.’

Peacock had an easy intimacy about her and an endearing habit of placing her hands on mine when she wanted to emphasise something. She told me the islanders lived by hunting kangaroo, which they did all year round, and by birding and sealing, which had their particular seasons. Gun Carriage was the heart of the islands, she said, the place where most of the men had settled, and from where they did their trade. They knew Munro and respected him, but he was an outpost to them, retired to his chosen patch of rock at Preservation. He was the necessary avenue for their product, nothing more.

I tried to imagine these people as wreckers. As they spoke to me, as they listened to me, I tried to picture them setting false lights, murdering survivors, stealing cargo. The evidence—the cargo—was there before me, but nothing about Peacock’s wonderful brown eyes suggested she would condone such barbarity.

As the tyereelore spoke to me, I found myself looking at the hands that held their drinks and, occasionally, hunks of bread or butchered meat. They were often large, but always scarred and knotted. Their nails were chipped and broken and bruised. The skin peeled away in painful-looking curls from the sides of the nails, and bled where the runs ended. My hands were similarly pitted, but only because a lifetime indoors had rendered them defenceless against the elements. Theirs, I could see, were permanently battered.

They did much of the sealing work, they said. They did the flinching, the flensing of blubber. If there were tasks that required swimming, like retrieving a mooring, they did those too. ‘We look out for each other darlin,’ said one old woman.