My hands had their task: I could not raise them to my eyes so the tears were let to run and fall. Argyle pocketed the notebook, took the board’s end from me and lifted it. My father’s body slid down to the sea, where it struck the surface and turned a half-circle in the lee of the Moonbird, then began its long journey, head-first, into the unknowable deep.

I threw the daisies on the ocean. The vague white shape grew smaller beneath them, further and bluer and less defined, until the ocean and what it had claimed could no longer be told apart.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Srinivas and his vessel the Moonbird and all the characters who sail upon her are creatures of fiction.

Readers of my previous novel, Preservation, will recall that the wrecking of the Sydney Cove in 1797 is very much a matter of historical fact. Similarly, the wreck of the Howrah in this novel is based upon the wreck of the Britomart. Because I have changed the date from 1839 to 1830, I felt it was appropriate to change the vessel’s name also. But the details of the incident—from the press speculation about false lights and plunder through to the various items that washed ashore on Preservation Island—are recited here as accurately as I could manage.

I have named all of the Bass Strait islands in this story as they were known at the time. There are differences, such as Forsyth Island being known then as Penguin, and modernday Vansittart being called Gun Carriage. The ‘second wave’ sealers who occupied the islands in 1830 are given their correct names, as are the tyereelore women who lived with them. George Augustus Robinson’s agents were indeed pursuing tyereelore women through the islands in 1830, and the sealers were taking measures to conceal them.

Tarenorerer, also known as Walyer, is a real historical figure, about whom far too little has been written. I have speculated as to her character and attitude, working from clues in the writings of George Augustus Robinson and others. But we do know that she was a woman of the Tommeginne people of Emu Bay in Tasmania/lutruwita, and she fought bravely against abduction, captivity and forced labour throughout her short life. She died of influenza on Gun Carriage Island in 1831, the year after this story is set.

Once again I would encourage interested readers to explore the non-fiction accounts of these islands and these people, particularly Patsy Cameron’s Grease and Ochre, and Lyndall Ryan’s Tasmanian Aborigines.

Any false lights that have been set by this account are my own doing.

A note on place names: these have been used and spelled in accordance with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s pulingina to lutruwita (Tasmania) Place Names Map: for more about the palawa kani Language program and reviving palawa names, see http://tacinc.com.au/campaigns/palawa-kani/