Eleanor explained how the calendar worked, days turning into weeks into months into years, and though Mathinna paid attention, she didn’t much see the point. The schoolteacher on Flinders had kept a date book open on his desk in which he jotted precise notes about the seasons, particularities of the weather, and his perambulations around the island, but the Palawa elders scoffed at such recordkeeping. Didn’t these colonists know that time doesn’t move in a line from past to present but instead is continuous? That spirits and humans, animals and plants, are connected by the land, which binds ancestors to descendants in an eternal moment? Mathinna started to explain this, as best she could remember, but Eleanor’s eyes got a faraway, glazed look and she picked at her fingernails until Mathinna stopped talking.

More successful was the study of French. They practiced with Eleanor’s collection of marionettes. After several weeks, their puppets—a blond princess in a powder-blue ball gown and a tiara, and a mountain maid wearing a dirndl—were conversing:

Bonjour, comment vous appelez-vous?

Bonjour, madame, je m’appelle Mathinna.

Enchanté de fair votre connaissance.

Merci, madame. Je suis enchanté également.

Mathinna grew to love the melody of the language. It seemed to her logical and beautiful—much nicer than English, pocked as it was with maddening contradictions and inelegant phrasings. Though she did like a play that started on a Scottish heath with witches around a cauldron and featured a royal couple who reminded her ever so slightly of Lady Franklin and Sir John. And another about a shipwreck on a remote island that Eleanor decided they should read aloud.

“‘But thy vile race,’” Eleanor intoned, in character as Miranda, “‘Though thou didst learn, had that in’t which good natures / Could not abide to be with. Therefore wast thou / Deservedly confined into this rock, / Who hadst deserved more than a prison.’” And Mathinna-as-Caliban responded, “‘As I told thee before, I am subject to a tyrant, a sorcerer that by his cunning hath cheated me of the island.’”

Spinning a wooden sphere, Eleanor identified the seven continents and five oceans. “Here,” she said, putting her finger on a kangaroo-like shape in the northern hemisphere on the other side of the globe from Van Diemen’s Land. “This is where I was born.” She tapped London, and Paris, and Rome—all the important cities, she said—and ran her finger down the spiky coastline to the bottom of Africa, and across a wide blue expanse. “And this is the route we took to get to this godforsaken place. We spent four months at sea!”

Mathinna touched the heart-shaped mass of Van Diemen’s Land. She traced her own reverse journey with her finger, as she’d done on the captain’s map, up the right side of the island to the tiny speck where she was born. On the captain’s map, Van Diemen’s Land had been huge and Flinders Island small. On this globe, it was merely a rock in the ocean, too slight and insignificant to have a name. It was as if the place she loved, and the people on it, had been erased. No one even knew they existed.