Thank you to my brilliant editors—Carina Guiterman, Sarah St. Pierre, Sam Humphreys, Bev Cousins, and Kalhari Jayaweera. I am amazed at the care, patience, and dedication you have shown me and this book. I couldn’t have wished for a better (or more enthusiastic) team of women to have by my side. Thank you also to Lashanda Anakwah, Alice Gray, and the amazing design, production, sales, publicity, and marketing teams at Simon & Schuster, Mantle, and Penguin Random House Australia. I am so grateful for everything.
Maddy—agent, cheerleader, mighty protector of authors. Thank you for sending me the best email I have ever received and for changing my life. Thank you also to Rachel Yeoh, Liv Maidment, Georgia McVeigh, Georgina Simmonds, Liane-Louise Smith, Giles Milburn, Vanessa Browne, Ursula Buston, and the rest of the team at the Madeleine Milburn Agency for all the kindness, support, and invaluable manuscript feedback.
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who lent me their expertise for Moonlight, particularly (Broome legend) Bart Pigram, mentioned in the previous Historical and Cultural Note, whose extensive knowledge of the early pearling era helped shape this book and the character of Balarri. Any errors in this respect are entirely my own. Thank you to Vinnie Antony for your generous advice on Kimberley flora and fauna (next time we’ll find the dingo pups, eh?), to Barry Kirkham for sharing your much-needed maritime nous, to Xiaolan Sha for your help with Hong Yen and Laura-Min, and to Graham Kenyon for the crocodile anecdotes; I hope to revisit LimilngaWulna land and share ghost stories with you again some time.
Thank you to the friends, family members, and colleagues who read early versions of this novel and were kind enough to encourage me to keep going—particularly Iona Sweeney and Kate Burke. Thank you to the early supporters of my creative writing and journalism, specifically Mr. Palmer of St. Mark’s Primary School in Salisbury, and Lisa Smosarski at Stylist magazine—a true women’s-mag hero who let me do all the weird stories.
Thank you to Richard Mellor and Joe Minihane for keeping me positive and accountable during the Great Lockdown of 2020. To Laura Adams and Robin Miller for the lifetime of laughter and friendship, and to Anita Bhagwandas, Nikki May, and Collette Lyons for the enduring moral support during this mad publication journey. I feel very privileged to have met so many talented debut authors via Twitter and Facebook along the way, too. We made it! Here’s to you all.
Finally, to my family—Tom, Lucy, Martha, Rufus, Phoebe, Max, and Sam—and all other Pooks, Kirbys, Gardiners, and Arnotts. I am so grateful to have your support and I am very sorry for stealing your names and gifting them to morally dubious characters. Thank you to my mum, the strongest woman I know and the one person who will never tell me it’s good when it’s not. I am grateful for everything you do. To Bobby, the kindest, most supportive soul around; I love you, always. To Rose, the other half of me (I could never put it into a sentence so here are eighty thousand words instead). And to my dad, no longer with us, but whose influence can be felt on every page of this book. I wish you could have seen it.