CHAPTER 2 
1886
You’ll be just fine here.” The man’s words were syrupy and long. Eliza could not tear her eyes from his white leather shoes, polished so vigorously they had thinned to show the shapes of his toes.
The retreating steamer was now nothing but smoke on the horizon, and Eliza was alarmed at the hot air that clung to the insides of her throat. She thought of the fumes that belched from the factory pipes back home. Her chest caved slightly. How she longed for the familiar grayness of it all.
“Now, I do not wish to alarm you, but there can be some discordance among the folks here in the bay, I must warn you of that.” Septimus Stanson wiped the dust from his trousers and produced a silk fan that he flapped at his face. “We are, after all, something of a motley collection, quite an anomaly on this country’s soil: Europeans, Malays, Manilamen, Koepangers, countless Japanese, of course.” Globs of moisture clung perilously to the creases in his neck and quivered with every ridiculous flutter of the fan. “We Europeans are wildly outnumbered—by about a hundred to one during lay-up, I’d say—but we still hold power in the colony, naturally, and the Pearlers’ Association is a most welcoming place for newly arrived Britishers.” Eliza had looked to the thin man and his wife beside him. How much younger she seemed, how strangely beautiful she was in her bone-yellow dress.
“As president of the association, I have the pleasure of welcoming all new members.” He glanced at her father and at Willem. “I should hope you fellows will join me for a drop of squareface and a cigar this evening. As for you”—Eliza had felt her mother flinch—“I shall see to it that Iris introduces you to the Ladies’ Circle. It really is the best way for you to meet the other wives in the bay.” She could not decipher her mother’s expression as they looked around them at this unprepossessing place. Was this really where they were going to make their fortune? Eliza had glanced at her father. He could not meet her eye.
It was the heat of the place that was most oppressive. Trapped, as they were, under such a pitiless sun. In those first few weeks Eliza’s skin swam with sweat. She’d wake to find her nightclothes soaked entirely through. When she washed them, they’d emerge tinged with the orange of old scabs. Soon enough, things started to rot. Mildew sprawled like nicked blood vessels, and mold hunkered in dark corners. Eventually the moths and silverfish descended. Before long, all that reminded her of home was ruined. Out of the house, angry March flies would bite through her blouses, leaving welts the size of eggs. The bushes would spit all manner of birds, and ticks would tumble from the grasses to bury their heads in soft skin. They would swell with her blood until Thomas showed her how to burn them off, one by one, with matches.
She’d never seen anything quite like Bannin Bay, having always imagined the rest of the world to be much the same as London. But here—the rocks, the water, the air, they were all so unashamedly bright. Did the trees not know to be green and soft? Instead, they were formless, sloughing bark like old bandages. She was caught off guard when the rain arrived—hurling itself urgently against the walls, with thunder so loud it set the teeth rattling in the jaw. The kitchen seethed with unknown creatures. Bold, unblinking geckos, the crisp bodies of old roaches. In her bedroom, spiders worked on webs; in the morning she’d wake to see crickets caught breathless in their grasp.
She’d met the girl, Laura-Min, down at the foreshore one day. She’d looked so much, Eliza thought, like a sparrow picking her way through the waste.
“Hello, birdy,” Eliza had called shyly, and the girl had glanced up and grinned.
Min was the daughter of a Scottish nurse and a Chinese businessman come from a stint in the goldfields. When his wife had died, Xie Hong Yen had made his way to Bannin with his young daughter on his hip. At every town they reached, he’d told her, “No. The next one will be better.” And so they continued to this place where the earth appeared to stop. He’d found work as an interpreter for the association, but when he, too, died six years later, he took Min’s safety along with his life. As a prospector’s daughter, Min was smart, proud, and probing, but her mixed blood confined her to the laborers’ cottages on the outskirts of town.
In those early days Bannin swaggered like an animal: bony and bristling with a miscellany of men—Britishers, Germans, Americans, and Dutchmen; frontiersmen, whalers, colonists, and convicts, all drawn to the town like maggots to meat. Many had come to seek their fortune in pearl shell. Others had simply drifted by way of Sydney or the Swan River Colony. Some came via cattle stations and opal fields, parts of the country that sprawled like seas but didn’t appear on the maps in England. How many, she’d always wondered, were simply forced to leave, like her family?
Down at the foreshore, men made temporary dwellings using tin and burlap—a squat of humpies and fly-infested depots, worked at by salted, sinewy hands. It didn’t take long for her father and uncle to establish a small fleet, searching for shell beds, soaks, and watering points on far-off islands. It was strange and, at times, a little frightening, but what surprised Eliza most in those hazy, early years was how much men coveted and what they were willing to risk for pearl shell, for the treasures found within. A pearl has a glow like a fire or a lamp; she learned that early. It is a siren song in the shape of a stone, sending men to lengths they never dreamed they’d go.
When those ships returned to shore, Eliza would fling questions at the crews.
“From where does a fig parrot get its scarlet cheeks?” she’d ask.
“If you were to prod a man o’ war with a stick, would it hurt it?”
Willem would scoff, but her father would answer with detail, scratching diagrams with a stick in the sand. Sometimes, back then, he would even set her tasks. Mysteries to solve while he was away at sea. She’d find a key under her pillow and with it an order to find a locked chest and treasure within. Or he’d pose a question—Where do dragonflies sleep?—and she’d spend her days seeking them out, pushing her head into the geraniums to find them clinging on like old dried leaves. She remembers clearly one day waking to a hand-drawn map at the end of her bed. She spent a week following the instructions, pacing out distances in the garden, searching for spices in the kitchen as her mother looked on. In the end she had unlocked the clues and found what was hidden for only her: a tiny charm in the shape of a mermaid stashed in a hidden drawer of her father’s writing desk. She had rubbed it between her fingers and placed the cold thing in her mouth. She wanted to swallow the love she felt for it, keep that memory of her father inside her forever.
At other times she’d help him collect specimens for his papers. He was fascinated by the flora and fauna of this new land, and there was nowhere she wouldn’t go to find something they had not yet charted in their notes: into the crags of low, red cliffs to haul out fresh freckled eggs, to hidden bays to seek out ship-sized squid washed ashore in storms. Perhaps one day she would make a discovery of her own and be lauded in the way a man would. For now, she’d lost count of the ways in which her quests had resulted in bruises or blood. But those scars were merely marks of how far she was willing to go for her father.