At the end of 1968, after my final exams at school, I decided to write a novel. I spent many happy hours planning it and writing an outline for each chapter. Then I wrote Chapter One at the top of a fresh sheet of paper and started fleshing out the outline.
Writing the book wasn’t nearly as much fun as doing the outline.
Pride and obstinacy got me labouring along as far as the end of Chapter Two, and then I looked at the outline for Chapter Three: ‘Louise meets John at the beach—they’re reading the same book—they exchange phone numbers— Louise wonders if she’s in love—John doesn’t ring.’
A weariness came over me at the thought of fleshing this out. I closed the exercise book and put it away. I never wrote in it again.
A few years later I had another couple of goes at novels in the same tightly planned way. I even managed to write two of them. It was boring writing them and I knew it was boring reading them. In a half-hearted way I tried to find a publisher, but when no one wanted them I wasn’t surprised.
Then one day in my late twenties I lay on the bed of the shared house I was living in. I was reading The Letters of Jane Austen (possibly to find out if she wrote from chapter outlines) and listening to Mr Next-Door’s dog yapping through its hopeless afternoon. I came across the sentence, ‘In the night we invent a few hard names for the stars.’ Who knew what Jane Austen meant by it, but it set off a vivid image in my mind: that famous bag-lady, Bea Miles, who’d offered recitations from Shakespeare on the steps of the Mitchell Library and was famous for having once taken a taxi thousands of miles to the Nullarbor to pick wildflowers. For a time she’d lived in a stormwater drain in Rushcutter’s Bay Park. I imagined her in her drain, looking up at the stars and inventing hard names for them.
Without having any idea of where I was going, I wrote five or six pages by free association, using Austen’s words as a trigger. Reading them back, I realised I wanted to know more about Bea Miles. I knew the bare outline of her life, enough to have a question—what had happened to get her to the steps of the Mitchell Library offering recitations from Shakespeare? I realised that to write out of a question was as good as— perhaps better than—writing out of an answer.
To imagine a story for Bea Miles, I didn’t research and I didn’t do a chapter outline. I started work each day by glancing through some ‘interesting things’—more of those Jane Austen letters, bits of Shakespeare, the letters of Flaubert, old-fashioned household hints about how to keep the moths out of fur coats, photographs of schoolgirls from 1912 in big lace collars. I’d allow the bits to suggest something that might have happened to my bag-lady character—an event that involved putting furs away for the summer, a memory of herself in a big lace collar—and write without a plan, following thoughts and images into the unknown, until I ran out of steam. Then I’d plunge back into the ‘interesting bits’ until something else got me going.
The criterion was energy. If I felt energised in writing a fragment or a scene, I’d keep going. If it began to feel like a chore, I ruled a line under it in the exercise book and started again.
It had worked. I called the novel Lilian’s Story. It was satisfying to write, got published, and even won a prize.
From that experience I’d developed a few mantras about writing. Never have a blank page was one. Don’t wait for the mood: that was another, because you could always fix it up later.
In the years after Lilian’s Story was published, our children Tom and Alice were born, and I added another mantra: Don’t wait for time to write. I learned to work in whatever slivers of time the day might give me—one of my favourite scenes in Joan Makes History was written in the car waiting to pick up Tom from a birthday party, on the only paper I could find, the inside of a flattened Panadol packet. I had slivers of time, so I wrote in slivers of words: a page here, a paragraph there. Eventually the slivers would add up to something.
I wrote four more novels using that makeshift method. But I didn’t think it would work for The Wiseman Book, as I thought of this project, because it wouldn’t be a novel.
I wanted to tell the story of what I’d learned about the frontier, to explore that sad history of fear, misunderstanding and violence. It was a tale that drew its power from the fact that it was real. Interposing a layer of invention would defeat my aim: to tell the unvarnished story as truthfully as I could.
My workroom was the front room at home. It had too many things in it: two desks, two filing cabinets, two bookcases. A couch. A cello (in fact, until Alice grew that extra few inches, two cellos: a big one for me and a smaller one for her), music stool, music stand. Piles of books. The big sideboard thing that had been Grandma’s.
The window above my desk looked out onto the front yard, a constantly changing landscape of building materials and other objects brought home by Tom: a massive beam of wood, a stack of six brown shutters, several sheets of scavenged plywood, an antique pram with the word SWAN in curly letters along the side, a person-sized roll of silver bubble wrap and a prop from a university production of Snow White, a throne that doubled as a coffin.
Not long after that night in the bush on Darkinjung land I sat down with a brand new spiral bound exercise book and my favourite kind of rollerball pen.
I tried not to ask myself, what are you planning to do, exactly? because I didn’t know. Never have a blank page, I reminded myself, and started talking onto the page, thinking aloud: ‘Form—like The First Stone or Stravinsky’s Lunch—nonfiction, but a conversational style. Vignettes. Chapters like Moby Dick—for example a chapter called On Doing Family History. Some elements of memoir.’
Some elements of memoir. Who was I kidding with this pompous tone?
But seeing this made me realise that I was already looking for a shape for the book. The fact that there were precedents— Drusilla Modjeska’s book about women artists, Helen Garner’s about a case of sexual harassment—was reassuring. I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.
Suddenly I was all fired up. I stared past the front yard, past our crookedly clipped hedge, over the top of the house across the road, into the sky, empty except for a television aerial.
I could see this book, feel it, almost taste it as I stared up at that odd-shaped patch of blue framed by the neighbour’s roof and the edge of our upstairs porch. It would be a wonderful and subtle mix of memoir, history and speculation. I’d allow myself flights of fancy—elements of fiction, you might say— where I put flesh on the bones of what I’d found out. Modjeska and Garner had both done that, and it gave their books richness and life without compromising their factual basis.
I got the pen moving across the paper again: ‘Never had faith in a book before and never had this urge, craving to get to it. Always an effort before. Now—real excitement plus sense of doing something worth doing.’
And I didn’t have to start where I usually did: with the nothing out of which a novel must be drawn like a spider’s thread. I had all these notes.
They were heaped up in one of the bookcases: four high piles of bulging manila folders with titles scrawled on the spines. ‘London—Wiseman’s places.’ ‘Research—books— Aboriginal people.’ ‘Family history.’
There were forty-seven folders. The folders had labels, but they didn’t really tell you what was inside. I’d found that my idea about tidy card catalogues and colour-coded this, that and the other didn’t work when applied to the real world. Should information about the Old Bailey go in the folder called ‘London— Wiseman’s Places’, for example, or the one called ‘Convicts’?
Inside each folder was a muddle of scrawled notes, photocopied pages, pictures torn out of magazines, newspaper clippings. I opened a few. Each bit of paper was interesting, but nothing went with anything else.
Just keep writing, I told myself:
Need to make a list of where to go next. Can’t see how to organise what I’ve already got. Already a muddle. Overlap, the researcher’s problem—life isn’t in tidy boxes. My feeling of smug control, tidying history away into compartments starting to evaporate. Still the desire to control, limit, categorise. My feeling that the sad muddle of the past can be reduced to a succession of neat questions with or without answers—that I can stay outside it all, in charge. But it’s already a muddle.
Two birds landed on the TV aerial across the road—a big one and a very small one. They perched there facing the same way like two people on a bus.
I was slowing down. My rule of thumb was to cover at least five pages a day with writing. It didn’t have to be good writing or even useable writing. It just had to cover the pages. So I kept going.
In the same way that I’d skimmed through The Letters of Jane Austen all those years ago, I skimmed through the transcript of the Old Bailey trial. The drama of the moment leapt out at me again, as freshly as when I first read it, and got me writing:
For God’s sake Mr Rowey have mercy, you know the consequence. What was in his mind as he pinched those lumps of Brazil timber was that if he was caught he’d be killed by having a hard rope put around his neck and he’d be suspended from it, perhaps killed outright but more likely die a slow & excruciating death by suffocation, his hands tied behind his back, his feet kicking frantically at air, with a crowd watching, perhaps you’d hear them laughing and calling out as you flailed and twirled (find eye-witness account of a hanging) in a blind congested panic of airlessness.
Find out about the physiological realities of hanging & how they would have done it at Newgate in 1805.
Would Sol have seen a public hanging? When did it stop being public?
No man shall know the hour of his death & just as well. The whole of the time leading up to it would be spent in horror & grief & panic. Watching each minute, each second tick away. This is my second-last sunset, the last time I go to the toilet, the last time I will ever blow my nose. Apart from the physical pain & fright of execution the worst part of the punishment would be knowing for sure, exactly, to the minute, how long you had left. We all know death is a finite number of nose-blows away, but that knowledge isn’t really something we can live with.
Over the next six months, I wrote many pages like this, about Newgate, about Wiseman’s early life in London, about what it might have been like to be a lighterman on the Thames.
Then I started opening the other set of manila folders, the ones about Australia. I wrote about what things were like in Sydney in 1806, about the convict system, about the way convicts were assigned to free settlers as servants, about the ‘ticket of leave’ system. Now and then I’d write something that could be called ‘some elements of memoir’:
Wiseman would certainly have had reason to go to Government House at Parramatta, perhaps to receive his pardon.
The thing that strikes you about it today is how small it is, how humble it seems. It’s a plain square box of a building softened only by a graceful roofline, shutters along the windows, and a columned entranceway.
In front of Government House in 1806, the gently sloping ground down to the Parramatta River was the site of a convict camp. It’s grass now, with the odd gum tree. There’s a sign that tells me that if I look to my left I can see the ‘shadow’ of the road that serviced that convict encampment. Oh, come off it, what’s this shadow business, I think, but I glance to my left—and there, like a photograph rising up out of the blank paper in the developing dish, is indeed the shadow of a road, a different texture in the grass, a scar in the ground that’s still visible after nearly two hundred years.
I had some lunch down there near the river. There’s a man down there in the dirt-coloured suit of a derro, his face and hands dark with dirt. He gets in and out of a car so ancient and rusty, so planted to the spot that I realise it’s not so much a car as a dwelling-place. He’s watching me as if he’s waiting for me to go so he can get on with his life. I’ve invaded his front yard.
By July 2001, I had about a hundred pages of writing. Some bits were lively, but lots of it was dry and dead. Never mind. I could fix it up later.