Alasdair’s cab had traversed Potts Point and was now making its way north towards the dockyards at Woolloomooloo. The morning, which had begun spectacularly with the sort of unending blue sky that brought the whole notion of winter into question, had continued on in similar vein and now the light was so bright it creased the eyes. It was almost certainly responsible for the accident on Victoria Street that resulted in two overturned drays and a large quantity of spilled beer and a queue of vehicles all the way back to Darlinghurst Road.

Alasdair heard the shriek of metal and the shattering thud as the two carts collided and he glanced out of the window in time to see first one and then the other split and fracture and topple over, but his own cab was ahead of the smash so he turned away, dismissing it.

The harbour was ahead of him now and the masts and funnels of the Newcastle colliers and the ocean-going steam packets came into view. The air was filled with smoke and steam and gulls circling, with the shouts of the men working on the wharves, and Alasdair thought of the Dunlevys.

Compared to the colourful, roguish Sussmans, the Dunlevys were insubstantial, ethereal, crude. There was a Conall Dunlevy from County Mayo who crossed the Irish Sea sometime around the beginning of the century to work as a navvy on the canals and later on the first railway lines. This Conall had a number of children, the eldest of whom, Fergus, showed enough early promise, despite his modest beginnings, to earn himself a scholarship to a small local grammar school—at which point, Conall and the rest of the Dunlevy family fade into background and no more is heard of them. The young Fergus acquitted himself decently but found that, on completing his schooling, his expectations had been raised but his prospects remained distressingly limited. Frustrated by this lack of opportunity, and seeing little prospect of change, he came out to the colony as a free settler and went to work in a clerk’s office for a legal firm where he remained and worked hard, eventually gaining a law degree. As the century reached its midway point he met and married Lily Sussman and had a son, Alasdair.