Srinivas spoke on and on, eyes closed but feet somehow never stumbling. He spoke of the arrival of the settlers on the south coast, taking up the land and turning it into industry of one kind and another. There was conflict, he said, and I took him to mean that the natives did not go quietly. The lascars, who had seen occupation before, knew the cards in that hand. They got work with the settlers, clearing cedar for timber; in time, they began to hire their own cutters and millers. Srinivas discovered a particular talent for finding ways to ship the timber north to Sydney. The planks came back from Sydney as handsome vessels that collected more timber, and the lascars—former lascars now—worked out that they could employ shipwrights on the coast and turn the timbers to good use where they were.

They made a success of it, he said. Old differences persisted—the Indians were never invited into the drinking, the shooting parties—but a basic level of respect was shown. It raises a question, he suggested. If each of us—and by ‘us’ I understood him to include me—came from the old world, from Dublin and Birmingham and Leith and Massachusetts…from Calcutta, perhaps, then how much of that is left behind and how much becomes this place?

‘I walked that coast until my feet broke open. I do not wish to make grandiose claims, miss, but it is likely I was the first outsider to meet the Thaua. I sailed waters that Cook himself never found. But I will always be desi here, no matter my intimacy with the land.’

I was still wary of the wild anger in this man but I found myself warming to his sense of grievance. Perhaps one must nurse a grievance of one’s own to fully appreciate another’s.

His story meandered and stalled as we reached the Cooper property, Juniper Hall, perched on its rise and cut from a sandstone bluff at the back, a great fig tree towering over it. I led him along the path that skirted the main residence and ended at my quarters among the other staff. I tied the mare off, brushed her down. She dropped her head and ran her mouth over my hand: when I pushed back, she snuffled and shook her mane. It was a habit now, a paying of the fare for coming to town, though I knew her to love the walk anyway. I gestured to the Hindoo man that he should enter and he hesitated. When he relented, he made a point of removing his shoes.

Inside I stirred up the morning’s coals, hooked the kettle on the idleback and swung it over the new fire. I cleared the clutter from the table to find space for his cup: fabrics I’d been sewing, plates with old food adhering, the books—Lord, the books. I watched the man’s eyes wander over the space, taking in the chaos, trying to assemble something from it.