Acknowledgments

This story was inspired by the migrations of my grandparents. I would like to thank them for their willingness to talk about their lives and share their stories with me. Thank you also to my ­mother, Rosemary Bishop, for sharing her memories. Although the book is fiction, and this story is not the same as that lived out by my grandparents, I have drawn on these oral histories and used them for my own imaginative purposes.

In the course of writing this book I have consulted a great many texts and have used these similarly. I am especially indebted to the following: A. J. Hammerton and Alistair Thomson’s Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester University Press, 2005), Reg Appleyard’s The Ten Pound Immigrants (Boxtree, 1988), Thomas Jenkins’s We Came to Australia (Constable, 1969), Elizabeth and Derek Tribe’s Postmark Australia: The Land and Its People Through English Eyes (Cheshire, 1963), Nonja Peters’s Milk and Honey—But No Gold: Postwar Migration to Western Australia, 1945–1964 (University of Western Australia Press, 2001), Margaret Hill’s Corrugated Castles: A Migrant Family’s Story (Seaview Press, 2005), Marie M. de Lepervanche’s Indians in a White Australia (­Allen & Unwin, 1984), Coralie Younger’s Anglo Indians: ­Neglected Children of the Raj (BR Publishing Corporation, 1987), Blair R. Williams’s Anglo Indians: Vanishing Remnants of a Bygone Era (Calcutta Tilljallah Relief, 2002), Gloria Jean Moore’s The Anglo Indian Vision (Australasian Educa Press, 1986), Lionel Caplan’s Children of Colonialism: Anglo-Indians in a Postcolonial World (Berg Publishers, 2001), and Joyce Westrip and Peggy Holroyde’s Colonial Cousins: A Surprising History of Connections Between India and Australia (Wakefield Press, 2010).

I would like to thank the staff at the Cambridge University Library and the State Library of Western Australia. I would also like to thank the Australia Council for the Arts for a New Work Grant; and Asialink, the Department of Culture and the Arts, Western Australia, and the Australia-India Council for an Asialink Fellowship. Thank you to Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla and to my host Pankaj K. Singh. Some of Henry’s island musings rightly belong to Elizabeth MacMahon and her work on the island imaginary. Thank you, Liz, for lending them.

I am indebted to a great many people who have encouraged and supported this work over many years. Thank you to Alice Nelson—without your friendship and wise eye the book would never have made it. Thank you to D. S. for talking to me about portraits. Thank you, Sylvia Karastathi, for those early conversations on women, fiction, and painting and for pondering characters in galleries: that moment is yours. Thank you, Diana, for good company and cake. Thank you to Catherine Therese for pointing me in the right direction. Thank you to my wonderful editor Elizabeth Cowell. A great many thanks to Sarah Branham and the team at Atria. Thank you to my agent Emma Paterson at Rogers, Coleridge and White.

The greatest thanks are to my family: to Milla for your companionship and your beautiful questions, and to Dashiell for joining us in the last stages and making us all laugh. Above all, thank you, Boyd—for your fortitude, love, and care. This is for you.