‘Another of the parlour tricks that are integral to research.’ He stood, bent over the cabinet and ran his fingers along the upper edges of its sides. The fingers stopped when they found latches. The unseen lid now swung back from the top surface. Its underside was painted in a delicate landscape scene: mauve hills and a cluster of natives in the shade of a foreground tree. There was lacquer over the image that shone with the lamp’s reflected light.

I stood up and peered down into the cabinet. Inside were arranged an assortment of shells, some old and dull, others new and vibrant. The larger ones circled around the outside: whelks and cowries and clams, spiralling down to smaller snails and turbans, sand dollars and abalone, and vanishing at the centre through dozens of periwinkles and tiny maireeners.

‘How do they not move about, with the boat?’

‘I have created a gum adhesive. As you can appreciate, setting the very smallest ones requires some patience. And look…’ He reached in and his fingers found the edges of the display. With a tiny wooden creak, the tray came up and then hinged backwards on articulated brass legs so that it stayed level and revealed another tray beneath. This was deeper than the first, designed with a series of platforms inside, coated in rich indigo velvet.

Upon the little terraces rested hundreds of small bones. Some were clearly the bones of birds, hollow and slight, and among an avenue of skulls I could see beaked ones. But others were more robust, despite their small size: the skulls of mammals, I supposed, teeth sharp and pointed or sometimes flattened for grinding. Beside each specimen there was a miniature paper label marked with impossibly small cursive. Roman numerals, Latin forms, abbreviations that assumed an understanding.

The narrow front edge of this tray was scrolled with botanical motifs: fern fronds and flowers. Unlike the upper tray, this one did not take up the entire width and depth of the cabinet: instead it occupied half the space. The doctor now lifted out a cover of black baize to reveal another tray of the same size, arrayed with dried animal scat.

Before I could focus on the strands of grass and tiny flakes of chipped bone embedded in each, he had lifted out the tray and revealed another level beneath, this time divided into two equal squares on the left and a square double their size on the right. The upper of the smaller trays held gleaming coloured beetles, while the one nearer to me contained spear tips, flaked from stone and razor sharp, of the kind I had seen the native children trading in the streets of Sydney.

I realised now that the trays the doctor was revealing were so elegantly thin that barely half the depth of the cabinet had been revealed.

‘There is a pattern about it, I’m sure you have noticed.’ His voice, inviting me to congratulate myself.