When I learned, as a graduate student living in Virginia, that the local Rotary Club was sponsoring fellowships to Australia, I leaped at the opportunity. I’d been obsessed with the place since my father, a historian, gave me his marked-up copy of Robert Hughes’s 1986 book The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. (He spent a year teaching in Melbourne when I was in college.) Only one chapter in Hughes’s six-hundred-page book, “Bunters, Mollies and Sable Brethren,” specifically addressed the experiences of convict women and Aboriginal people. This was the chapter that interested me most. I wanted to learn more.

As one of four Rotary “ambassadors” to the state of Victoria, I toured farms and factories, met mayors and minor celebrities, and learned Australian folk tunes and slang. I fell in love with the wide-open vistas, the offhanded friendliness that seemed to be a hallmark of the culture, and the vividly colored birds and flowers. The Aussies I met were happy to talk about their national parks, their pioneering spirit, and their barbecued shrimp, but seemed reluctant to discuss some of the more complicated aspects of their history. When I did press them to talk about race and class, I was gently, subtly, rebuked.

Several years later, in the mid-1990s, my mother, Christina L. Baker, a women’s studies professor, worked on an oral-history project at the University of Maine in which she interviewed so-called second-wave feminists who’d been active in the women’s movement in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. I’d recently moved to New York City and met a number of young women who identified themselves as third-wave feminists, literal and figurative daughters of my mother’s subjects. My mother and I decided to write a book together: The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism. The experience became a powerful lesson for me in the value of women telling the truth about their lives.

Some years later, after learning about the limited resources available to women in prison, I created a proposal to teach memoir writing at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, an hour from my house in New Jersey. My class of twelve maximum-security inmates wrote poems, essays, songs, and stories; it was the first time many of them had shared the most painful and intimate aspects of their experience. They were terrified, relieved, and searingly honest. When I read aloud a Maya Angelou poem that contains the lines “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise,” more than one inmate wept with recognition.

As a novelist I’ve learned to trust a particular tingle, a kind of spidey sense. Until I stumbled on the little-known historical fact of the orphan trains, I had little interest in writing about the past. But the minute I heard about the American social experiment to send two hundred and fifty thousand children on trains from the East Coast to the Midwest, I knew I’d found my subject. The research I did for the novel Orphan Train laid the groundwork for another novel about rural life in early-to-mid twentieth-century America: A Piece of the World, the real-life story of an ordinary woman on the coast of Maine who became the subject of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. These leaps of time and place inspired me to pursue an even more ambitious story, this time a century earlier and half a world away—one that would address those questions I’d had about Australia’s complex past that were never answered to my satisfaction twenty-five years earlier.