I had a story, sort of. But who were these people? Why were they doing the things they did?
Solomon Wiseman was the biggest problem. If he wasn’t a character, nothing else in the book would work. If I could get him right, perhaps I could fudge it a bit with some of the others.
Who was he? He was out of focus, the way he had been in all those letters and petitions he’d produced: sometimes reasonable, other times flying off the handle. And he was real. I was beginning to see that the powerful reality of Solomon Wiseman was part of the energy of this book, but it was also part of the problem. I was trying to incorporate everything that I’d found.
It felt a little disloyal to step back from my personal relationship with him, as if I was turning my back on a family member I’d only just discovered. I came to it in stages.
My relationship with him shifted the first time I found myself thinking of him not as ‘Solomon Wiseman’ but as ‘the Wiseman character’. Using that form of words in my mind, and as it were avoiding his eye, I looked again at the scenes on the Hawkesbury, where his responses were so contradictory. Silently apologising to him, I came to see that there was a way of reconciling the contradictions. He begins with one way of thinking about the Aboriginal people, goes through several shifts of attitude, and ends up prepared to join an attack against them. By rearranging and reshaping the scenes, I could create a sequence.
This wasn’t quite how it was in the documents, but making a sequence out of these scenes wouldn’t distort what had ‘really happened’ in any significant way. It would, though, turn them into a story.
Now I could ask myself cold-bloodedly, ‘What is the function of the Wiseman character in this story?’ To answer that question I had to know what the central drama of the novel was, and now I could see it more clearly. It was the drama of watching a character make choices. The choices were to do with how to ‘be’ in the country he’d come to. That included his relationship with the place itself, as well as with the original inhabitants. The story was about the journey he takes in making his choices.
I’d written a number of scenes that I now saw had nothing to do with that central drama. They’d only ever been there because they ‘really happened’. A lot of unconvincing stuff about his business affairs was one of the main things that went.
I didn’t even bother with the ‘Good Bits To Use Later’ folder, just hit the delete button.
The suburb where we lived was nineteenth-century working-class turned gentrified. A few characters still hung on there, people born and bred when it was a school-of-hard-knocks shipbuilding suburb. We had one over our back fence: Old Mr Barnes. I had occasional conversations with him through the plumbago.
‘How old d’you reckon I’d be?’ he’d asked me several times.
I always pretended. ‘Oh, seventy? Seventy-five?’
‘Ninety-eight!’ he crowed. ‘Ninety-nine come June!’
After every shower of rain, Old Mr Barnes climbed up a ladder onto the roof of his kitchen—a corrugated iron lean-to on the back of his small house—with a paintbrush and a pot of black stuff. We’d offered to go up for him, but it was a matter of pride with him that he could still get up the ladder, still put another blob of stuff on the bit where the roof leaked.
He was up on his roof today, holding the paintbrush, looking as if he was enjoying the sun. When he caught sight of me getting the washing on the line he called out straight away, ‘Bet you don’t know how I got me nickname!’
‘What nickname?’
It was when he was at school, he told me.
I tried to do the sums and work out what decade it would have been—even which century.
‘There was this bigshot inspector come,’ Mr Barnes called out. ‘Wanted to know how you spelled island, well I told him. I-S-L-A-N-D. Dad worked at Garden Island, see.’
He dabbed the brush at the rusty bit of roof.
‘So he says, “well done son, very sagacious of you.”’ Mr Barnes laughed so hard that I glimpsed his false teeth slip. ‘We all think he’s having a lend of me, but he says, sagacious means wise, son.’
With knobbed old hands he carefully squeezed the lid back on the tin of black stuff. ‘So that’s where it come from. Sagitty. Well, nice talking to you, Um.’
He turned himself around, very slowly, and explored with one foot for the rung of the ladder. I watched him, ready to leap through the plumbago, but he made it down all right. His foot had barely touched the ground when I was in the kitchen writing it down. ‘Sagacious = Sagitty. Change all the names. Find nicknames.’
I knew just where to go for authentic late eighteenth-century names: the convict registers.
‘Anty’, a coal-heaver
John Blackwood
‘Bully’ Dawson
Thomas ‘Hazzles’ Herring
William Nettleship
John Ogle
‘Birdy’ Pidgeon
John Quick
William Thornhill
James Twist
William Underwood
‘Scrummy’ Williams
From ‘the Wiseman character’ it was a short step to William Thompson, then William Blackwood, then William Thornhill.
Changing his name changed my relationship to the character. My great-great-great grandfather had stepped out of the book now, taking his name with him. He had a story, the one I’d found in the archives, but it wasn’t the one I was telling. He watched—sardonically, I felt—as I went on writing in another direction, further and further away from him.
I left Thornhill with Wiseman’s quick temper, his tendency towards violence, and a certain cold-blooded determination. I gave him Wiseman’s consciousness of humiliation by the gentry. I also gave him Wiseman’s rough-and-ready sense of justice and even charity.
But in building a picture of Thornhill the family man, I went far beyond what I could guess about Wiseman. Thornhill’s deep love for his wife, his softness with her, his love for his children—none of that came from the Wiseman I’d met in the archives.
Once that softer part of his personality was drawn in, the violence he might inflict on the Aboriginal people took on a different quality.
A man who wasn’t altogether bad, but who did bad things, might feel something like remorse. That suggested a way the book might end—with Thornhill suspended between what he was, and what he’d done. He didn’t have the insight to bring the two together, he was even hardly able to think about them, but he knew that something wasn’t right.
Thornhill might have accepted that black people were not-quite-human ‘savages’. On the other hand, being regarded as inferior within his own class system might have made him consider other kinds of ‘inferiors’ more sympathetically. His lack of education would have spared him knowledge of the pseudo-science that justified racism. And, as someone who spent a lot of time around the docks, he’d probably met and worked alongside foreign sailors of all colours and cultures. More than many of his educated contemporaries, he might have realised that difference doesn’t mean inferiority.
When a man like that came into contact with the Aboriginal people in New South Wales, his response might have been pretty complex. I was starting to see that his attitude wouldn’t be a fixed thing arrived at by education or thought, but more fluid, driven by day-to-day events.
It might be something quite personal that would tip the balance and make him decide to act in one way rather than another: something to do with his family, or his love for his wife. Not a considered attitude to Aboriginal people, just a pragmatic response to a problem.
And what about that wife? She’d always been a vaguer figure in my mind than Solomon. Partly this was because there’d been so little about Jane in the records. I’d tried to find out about her, but if the life of men on the frontier was hard to see at this distance of time, the life of women—especially of working-class women—was almost invisible.
As I’d written her so far, Jane was a permanently unhappy creature, wistful and sulky. That picture of her had drawn on the three things I knew about Jane Wiseman: the frequency of her pregnancies, her ‘actual state of invalidity’, and her ‘lingering illness’.
Thinking about her now as ‘the wife character’ and giving her another name—Sal—once again freed me from the straitjacket of ‘what really happened’. Her health improved miraculously but her temper grew worse. She hated the flies, the trees, the sun. She hankered for England. That was always ‘Home’. Australia was one long punishment. Her husband bore the brunt of her outrage at what life had dumped on her.
The minor characters—the neighbours and the children— were so shallowly drawn that I considered getting rid of them altogether. Imagining the book without them showed me why I needed them. Settlement wasn’t a matter of individual men and women acting simply out of their own personalities. It was about an entire world transplanted to the new place, bringing with it all the pressures and rewards it had always brought to bear on its members.
I saw—with a sinking heart, how can I do this?—that I would have to create a whole society on the riverside. Different individuals responded differently to the choices they had. Social pressures from those around him—loyalty, fear of exclusion, shame—as well as temperament would make Thornhill act in the way he did.
Smasher Farrell and Sagitty Birtles were already present, based on the barbarous settlers I’d read about. Blackwood—a defender of Aboriginal people—was there from the beginning, too. He’d emerged out of that mysterious place where characters sometimes come from, fully formed and complete. One day he even showed me what he looked like when I found a photo of Jack Mundey, the union leader, addressing a public meeting—a big solid man with a magnificent nose and a face full of powerful character. Blackwood! I thought. So that’s what you look like!
I was shameless in rifling through research for anything I could use, wrenching it out of its place and adapting it for my own purposes: the man with a lump on the back of his neck from carrying bags of wheat; the gentleman down on his luck, proud of washing his own shirt; the man whose house was robbed by men who took everything, even the dinner on the fire—chicken, pot and all. But I was trying to be faithful to the shape of the historical record, and the meaning of all those events that historians had written about. What I was writing wasn’t real, but it was as true as I could make it.