Bram’s parents had tried to shield me, rushing me past the cameras and hustling me into their car so they could drive me to the police station in Den Helder on the mainland where a coronial inquiry had been set up to investigate the circumstances leading to my parents’ tragic deaths. They didn’t understand that the adrenaline rush of dressing up and being noticed after a lifetime of parental rejection was what got me out of bed in the morning. It was a bizarre reaction, a memory I’d buried deep inside myself until this moment, too ashamed or confused about what it all meant to unpack it properly. The phase had lasted less than a week, just long enough for media interest to wane and for Marieke to reach the island and start taking care of me. Although exhausted after crossing six time zones, she quickly dispensed with any remaining reporters and ruthlessly excised my parents’ effects. The morning before our departure for Australia, I woke to find their wardrobes stripped bare. Marieke had set aside anything valuable – my mother’s wedding ring, my father’s gold tie pin – but she’d thrown out all their clothes. Even their undergarments weren’t spared. Everything they’d ever worn was gone, destined for landfill. It was as if they’d never existed.

Olivia called us over.

‘La Dragon. Built in an Amsterdam shipyard in 1649 and purchased in 1650 by one Maarten Horst, a senior officer with the VOC – the Dutch East India Company. Maarten did very well for himself, by the sounds of it. Worked his way up the ranks, accumulating wealth and status until he was the Governor’s right-hand man. It probably helped that he had a good deal of money to start with. His family owned a number of plantations in Sumatra. Like many others, their wealth was built on the slave trade – something a lot of contemporary audiences seem to forget. The Golden Age wasn’t very golden for those who weren’t colonialist traders or settlers. All this – ’ she swept her hand around the archive, ‘all our modern conveniences, all our little luxuries have been paid for by the brutal labour of countless slaves. How do we reconcile that? How can we make reparations for something that is so inconceivably cruel and heartless that it’s almost impossible to read about without weeping? People torn away from their families, locked up like cattle, transported to a place so far from home they couldn’t hear the voices of their gods and ancestors for all the noise?’