Searching For The Secret River. Kate Grenville

      

      For Nance Isobel Russell, 1912–2002, who gave me this journey

      CONTENTS

      PART ONE

      1 Wiseman’s Ferry

      2 Walking for Reconciliation

      3 The Mitchell Library

      4 Centenary of Federation

      5 The Society of Genealogists

      6 The Public Record Office

      7 Three Cranes Wharf

      8 Lightermen

      9 The London Poor

      10 Wiseman’s Life

      11 Voices and Pictures

      12 The Ghost Room

      13 A Little Learning

      14 The News of the Day

      15 Historians

      16 Aboriginal Voices

      17 The Bush at Night

      PART TWO

      18 Starting to Write

      19 The Assembly

      20 The Fictional Quester

      21 The Land Speaking

      PART THREE

      22 What Have I Got?

      23 Finding the Characters

      24 The Aboriginal Characters

      25 Dialogue

      26 The First Readers

      27 Into the World

       Acknowledgments

       PART ONE

       1

       Wiseman’s Ferry

      In the puritan Australia of my childhood, you could only get a drink on a Sunday if you were a ‘bona fide traveller’. That meant you had to have travelled fifty miles or more. Around Sydney a ring of townships at exactly the fifty-mile mark filled with cheerful people every Sunday. One of them was a little place called Wiseman’s Ferry.

      It was called that because its cluster of houses and shops stood on the south bank of the Hawkesbury River, at a point too wide to be easily spanned by a bridge. For the last two hundred years, anyone wanting to cross had taken a ferry. The original ferryman was a man named Solomon Wiseman.

      He was my great-great-great grandfather.

      It was Mum’s idea to go and look at the place, one autumn day when I was about ten—it would have been around 1960—not because it was Sunday and she wanted a drink, but because of her feeling about family history. She’d heard a few stories about Solomon Wiseman from her mother, who’d got them from her mother, and so on back for five generations. Some families hand down christening mugs or silver teapots. We inherited stories.

      She was proud of them: not of the stories themselves so much as the fact of having them. She enjoyed knowing the exact ways she was connected to the past along the family tree, and being able to tell a few anecdotes about some of those forebears.

      All four generations had been rough country people—right up to her parents, who’d run a succession of pubs in country towns. There were several convicts in the family tree. She was proud of them. They’d shown a bit of spirit, she thought, in trying to get something for themselves and their families. They were survivors.

      Remarkably for her time and background—both her parents had left school at fourteen—Mum had scrambled into an education. She’d trained as a pharmacist and married our father, then a young solicitor with political leanings.

      Now we lived in a big old house with a glimpse of Sydney Harbour. The roof leaked, the bathroom was a lean-to out the back, and the house was earmarked for demolition by the Department of Main Roads, but it was built on a generous scale. Mum had a dressmaker who made her copies of stylish—even outlandish—clothes from pictures in French magazines (the green brocade evening-coat made in panels so it hung like a piece of sculpture, the organza cocktail dress with the oversized collar that stood up around the back of her head). But her thrifty country childhood was never far away. She kept every piece of string and rag, she darned the elbows of her jumpers and she scraped the last speck off the butter-paper, using it later to line the cake-tin. She was a vigorous, intelligent, original, plain-speaking woman with a clear sense of what mattered and what didn’t.

      One of the things that mattered was keeping those family stories alive.

      Solomon Wiseman had worked on the Thames, but ran foul of the law in some way and was transported to Australia. Once in Sydney, he quickly won his freedom and, the story went, took up land on the Hawkesbury River. He’d done well for himself and died a rich man.

      The best bit of the story, as far as I was concerned, was the part about his wife Jane. Wiseman was supposed to have killed her by throwing her down the stairs of the house he’d built on the Hawkesbury. Her ghost was rumoured to haunt it.

      So, when Mum suggested a day at Wiseman’s Ferry to see the land Solomon had settled on and the house he’d built, I was keen. I pictured something Gothic and spooky. Creaking doors. Faded bloodstains. Maybe even the ghost herself.

      I was short-sighted, but nobody knew. I was a teenager before anyone—myself included—realised that I badly needed glasses. Anything further away than a metre was a blur. As a result, my memory of the day at Wiseman’s Ferry is a series of close-ups and details. Nothing hangs together.

      I remember a long dull drive through fuzzy bush, Mum exclaiming at a view that I couldn’t see (I thought that being able to appreciate views was something that happened when you got old, like enjoying oysters and olives). An alarming series of hairpin bends zigzagged down the side of a valley, the river swimming greasily at the bottom. The little township—a dozen houses, a shop or two, and the pub—was terribly quiet, steaming under a sultry sun, and with that humming silence you get in the country.

      The house that Wiseman had built was now the pub, a sprawling two-storey stone place, with verandahs all around, top and bottom. From the bar I could hear a murmur of male voices and the races on the radio. Being so young, I wasn’t supposed to be in a pub, so it felt as if we were breaking the rules when Mum took me by the hand and led me inside.

      There were the stairs. They must be the ones down which Jane Wiseman had fallen. Mum pointed and marvelled, and I peered. To my short-sighted eyes the flight of steep and narrow steps seemed to stretch up forever into darkness. It was easy to imagine the argument, the angry shove, and the woman tumbling down step after step, head over heels, skirts tangling.

      Mum made a tsk tsk noise and shook her head, the way she did when she disapproved. ‘You can see how it happened, can’t you,’ she whispered. ‘Poor thing wouldn’t have had a chance.’

      I’d never been clear whether the story implied that Wiseman killed her accidentally or on purpose. Mum’s tsk tsk could have meant either. I remember squinting up at the stairs and choosing not to ask.

      I didn’t ask, partly