Tarenorerer blended in among the tyereelore, laughing raucously. She had shed the fearsome exterior we’d seen. She was one of them in this place: a Van Diemonian, in their speech palawa, but I could imagine that she was separate too: she had not relinquished her native life, and I had the strong feeling she would sooner shoot one of these men than marry one. She had taken our vessel with a gun in her hands, but it no longer mattered: she had what she wanted, apparently, for the time being.

I was watching her thus when Peacock came and sat beside me again. ‘That there’s a rare one,’ she said, as we both watched Tarenorerer. ‘You wondering what you got, hey?’

I admitted that I was, without making the obvious point that it was she who had got us.

‘She been taken, all the time. No matter how much she fights, always taken again. Black people took her, Port Sorell mob, back when she was a little girl. An they sold her to the sealers—Hunter Island men over west, Bird Island over here. Catching seals, catching mutton birds…wasn’t like now—this was back in the wild days. Made her a slave, made her work, lie down with them at night. She didn’t just take it, but. She waited. She waited and she watched. Learned wadjella language, how to fire them guns. All that anger, buildin up in there. Make her heart go dark as night, right enough.

‘She got mixed up with a bad fella, call im Norfolk Island Jack cos he been a lag over there, see. Used to call her Mary Anne, and by Christ almighty don’t never call her that. But she got away, two years ago now, went back to her country, back to the Tommeginne, cos she never let em go. She talked to the people, men, women, an she said we gonna take the settlers down. An she meant it. All that bad treatment, all them beatings, she wanted to take it out on the squatters, an the troopers an…she didn’t care who, long as it was white men.

‘Here’s how to use the guns, she tell her people. Go kill the bullocks an the sheep. She not stupid, see, this one here. She knows it’s a feed, but bigger’n that, it makes the white man mad as hell, an then he come out for a fight. Get the luta tawin in that little bit o’ time after they fire their guns an before they can reload em. Stand up on a hilltop an laugh at the whiteys and tease em. Come on! she say. You come up here an get yourself speared.’

I thought of her shaking her breasts at the brig that pursued us.

‘So Robinson’s men ben chasin her, ben lookin for her. An I don’t think to make a Christian outa her.’