It’s no good asking friends and family to read your manuscript. If they say they love it, you don’t believe them. If they have criticisms, it stings. It puts friends in an awkward position if they hate it, and it’s asking a lot of anyone to give up the amount of time it takes to read a manuscript and think about it.

But in the middle of 2004 I laid this burden on several friends and on my husband. They read the manuscript, they made notes, and they talked about it with me.

They all liked the book (or they said they did). They had a list of queries, suggestions, insights. Two Aboriginal readers, Melissa Lucashenko and John Maynard, pointed out in the most tactful way that didgeridoos (described at enthusiastic length) wouldn’t have been seen around Sydney, since originally they were used only by Arnhem Land people.

But they all agreed on one thing: Sal wasn’t working.

They put it in different ways. ‘Sal’s character needs a bit of development.’ ‘Sal needs to be more interesting.’ ‘Beef up Sal a bit.’

They were right, I agreed with them, and I appreciated their frankness. I looked at the scenes they pointed to and tried to develop Sal along the lines they suggested. I extended some of her scenes. I gave her more dialogue. I worked out what she looked like, what she wore—the ragged fringe on her shawl, the patched bonnet. I gave her likes and dislikes, had her plant geraniums and yearn for nice teacups.

It all helped. But when I gave the book to its publisher, Michael Heyward, for the first time, in March 2004, Sal still wasn’t working. I didn’t know what else to do.

All my previous novels had had fine editors who’d suggested changes for the sake of pace, consistency or clarity and caught my errors of fact, grammar and punctuation. The publishers who employed them had reassured me that the books needed only ‘a light edit’ and had scheduled accordingly. I’d enjoyed working with those editors and valued all that they’d added.

But for one novel—Dark Places—I’d had a session with the publisher Hilary McPhee, then at Macmillan. We met only once, and hardly looked at the text. Instead we’d had a conversation that allowed me to see what sort of thing the book was and what it was doing, and what changes could be made to allow it to be more itself.

That experience told me what I’d always suspected: that an editor and a writer could together do something more than a ‘light edit’. I was hoping to find that again with my new publisher.

Michael told me he was doing a ‘broad-brush read-through’. Then in June 2004 we got together across my agent’s dining-room table and did what he called ‘turning the pages’.

I hadn’t worked with Michael before. The first surprise was how little he’d written on the manuscript. Like Hilary with Dark Places, Michael hadn’t burrowed into the words—that would come later in rigorous detail—but into the meaning of the book and its characters.

We turned quickly through as far as page 78, where Thornhill and Sal have recently arrived in Sydney. On this page he’d written ‘Sal has changed’. He explained what he meant. The Sal we meet in London is happy, tender, playful, but as soon as she arrives in Sydney she’s moody, grumpy, a nag. Thornhill notices it too:

It was plausible that a nine-month voyage into exile would change a woman. But the change had all happened off-stage, between pages 74 and 75. That made for a very bumpy and unsatisfying experience for the reader.

That was straightforward enough, and I was scribbling notes as he talked. Change too abrupt. Show change. Smooth transition. I was still thinking of it as a technical problem.

But then Michael said, ‘in the London scenes you’ve got an opportunity to complicate her later grumpiness, and I saw that this was an invitation to walk into the book and look around—not as a plumber come to fix the pipes, but as an architect seeing what else you might do with the space.

We turned through the pages together, and it was as if Michael’s comments were a map of the book I’d written: not suggestions, but a sketch of what was there: ‘Sal dislocated, cannot recognise home. Sal tough about Scabby Bill. Sal diminished.’ The architect was being given a plan of the place, with the windows drawn in and the height of the ceiling given.

He used the word ‘darken’ to suggest what might be done to Sal’s character in London. The word worked like the opening of a door: I could see the space beyond it, and suddenly couldn’t wait to enter it, see what was there, do things with it.

What an astonishing thing memory is. It must have been over forty years since I’d read Black Beauty by Anna Sewell—up in that treehouse, a piece of forbidden chocolate probably melting in my fingers, a glass of milk threatening to tip over as the branches heaved in the wind. I’d never thought about it since. Kids didn’t seem to read Black Beauty these days.

But feed the idea of ‘darkening Sal’ into the mysterious machinery of the unconscious, and out came that scene in Black Beauty where a man whips a horse that’s fallen down in the street.

I remembered the effect that scene had on me. I’d had a sheltered childhood, had never experienced that kind of cruelty. But the writing must have been vivid enough for me to believe that the world contained people like that man. I learned something about life, even though it was nothing more than made-up words on a page, and it stayed in my memory for all those years. I didn’t go back and read it now, but used my memory of it—whether accurate or not—as the trigger to free-associate about Sal:

Thank you, Anna Sewell.

Michael didn’t know about Sophia, still patiently waiting in the ‘Good Bits To Use Later’ folder. But standing in the space offered to me by the idea of ‘darkening’ Sal, I realised that I could adapt some of that material. Sophia had been an attractive character (hence painful to lose) because the sweetness of her nature always had a darker side. She had known the deaths of many brothers and sisters. Had nearly died from smallpox and was scarred by it. Understood something of fear and grief.

It felt as though Sophia was always meant to be the London Sal, but I hadn’t realised that until now. My pleasure in the complicated revenge plot, and my disappointment at it not working, had prevented me from understanding her real place in the book. Being invited to think about Sal afresh allowed me to see the way I’d tried to force the story into the shape I thought it should have. I’d got in its way.

Now I could make use of what earlier readers had said. One of them had pointed to a specific scene where I might ‘beef up’ Sal’s character—an episode in which Sal’s mother and father die and she and Thornhill are plunged into poverty. I planned to add a couple of paragraphs. Six pages later, it was starting to look as though this new, darker Sal was at least as strong as her husband. She might have even been stronger. Much more likely to become that fierce person in Australia.

But Michael had something else to say about that Australian Sal. He had gone cautiously, in case I got sensitive about being criticised. He put it like this: ‘Once Sal gets the glooms, there’s nowhere for her to go.’

Of course! That was why she was boring. She gets off the boat in Sydney a screeching harridan and she’s still screeching two hundred pages later. Having changed too radically between London and Sydney, she then doesn’t change at all.

That would be boring in life, and it was boring in a book too.

Sal needed what her husband had acquired—a sequence. A journey.

Again there was that feeling that I was being offered a space where I could go on exploring. There was still time to do much more than tinker with adverbs. I could get to know Sal, as I’d got to know Thornhill, by putting her in situations and watching what she did. The book wasn’t finished yet.

I went back to the scene of the Wisemans’ arrival in Sydney, when they’d been approached by an Aboriginal man:

I put the new Sal into the moment, started to write, and watched what she did.

This still wasn’t publishable, but it was better. This Sal was more consistent with the London Sal, and she was frightened rather than bullying. That gave her leeway to travel somewhere emotionally.

The big surprise was the way that Thornhill took over some of the old Sal’s lines. They suited him better than her. His character was shifting, too.

As I rewrote scene after scene, I realised that the ‘broadbrush’ conversation with Michael was allowing me to become once again a person who created writing rather than a person who analysed it. In writing the first draft, I’d been exploring, writing into the unknown, trusting the unconscious and using free association as the mechanism by which it could speak. Once that first draft was down, I’d shifted gear, trying to understand and refine what I’d done. Both processes were necessary. But Michael had relieved me of the job of analysis and criticism, and invited me instead to go back into the unconscious. Now, right at the end, my job was as it had been in the beginning: not primarily to understand what I was doing, but to travel forward into it.