‘It’s not a small thing,’ Joe says. ‘It’s important. I remember that kid.’

Sergeant Dent retrieves her notebook from her pocket. She looks from Isla to Joe. Everything slows down. Joe finds coffee cups, rinses them out, pulls out a chair. He is calm, measured; certain. His better self. Isla will think about this for a long time. It will be the memory she goes to, long after she has settled down and he is gone. She will think of the charge in the room, the sound of coffee dripping through the percolator, the cop with her notebook on her knees. It will come to mind sometimes when she smells his brand of cigarettes. She will nurture it, this moment, at the expense of the others. And she will think, he was not all bad.

Author’s Note

People often asked me, when I told them I was writing this book, why a British writer like myself was writing a novel set in Australia. I usually replied that I had spent some time living in Sydney in my twenties and wanted to write about this beautiful country that was never quite home for me, despite my best efforts. I sometimes explained that the book was originally about a British woman called Louisa who left Australia for England due to her overwhelming homesickness – I was trying to tell her story, which was close to my own, and found myself telling a different story in the process. What I didn’t often say, maybe because I didn’t want to admit my ignorance, was that in writing and researching this novel I was educating myself about Britain’s relationship with Australia and our colonial past. Having married an Australian, I’d come to realise I didn’t know enough about it. The English state schools I attended in the 1980s didn’t teach us about the violence our ancestors inflicted on Australia’s First Nations people when the colony was settled. What I knew about Australia, despite studying twentieth century history at A-Level, was limited to the fictions of Ramsay Street and Summer Bay.

Australians of my generation tell me they were taught a narrative of Australian history in which the white settlers were brave pioneers, taming the wilderness and building a land of opportunity. The anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner, in his 1968 lecture ‘The Great Australian Silence’, talked about a partial view of history in which the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had been disremembered:

‘It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned into a habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale.’

The silence in Australia appears to have lifted since Stanner’s day. The narrative of white settlement has widened to include the massacres that occurred in the aftermath of colonisation in 1788, and the often brutal treatment of the First Nations people who survived. But in Britain I’m not sure this is the case. It seems I’m not alone among my British friends in this knowledge gap around Australian history and our part in it. A look at the current history syllabus options for British schools suggests not much has changed. One secondary school department head I spoke to confirmed that Australian history is not covered at all at his state school in the English Midlands, other than a brief mention of the First Fleet.