EXTRACTS

“Sydney's Mitchell Library stands just up the hill from where the convicts - including my ancestor - were put ashore. It was built in an age when ancient Greece was the pinnacle of civilisation and Ionic columns announced Culture. Its main Reading Room is a vast lighted box, radiance pouring down from the ceiling.

The Mitchell Library contains many of the documents relating to early settlement in New South Wales. If there were any information about Solomon Wiseman that might start to satisfy the curiosity that had planted itself in me, that's where I'd find it.

My mother's story about Wiseman was full of gaps, and I assumed that finding out more would involve expert delving into arcane catalogues and long-forgotten documents. So I went to the area within the library where original material was accessed, a silent place behind its own set of glass doors, sealed off from the main part of the library.

The librarian heard me out politely, then pointed to some shelves behind me lined with small white boxes of microfilm. `See over there? Old Bailey Session papers. The transcripts. Just start at 1806 and work backwards.'

There they were, on the open shelves. You didn't even have to fill out a Request Slip.

I realised that, like Lord Nelson, the family story had been holding the telescope up to its blind eye. It pretended it didn't know why Solomon Wiseman was sent to Australia. But it made sure that it contained the two details that made it easy to find out: the date of his arrival and the name of the ship he came on. If it was so easy to discover, why had no one tried before?

I skimmed the index. I wasn't really expecting to find Solomon. Something about these tidy boxes, these alphabetical lists, sat awkwardly with the family story.

There was something else, too. I wasn't sure I wanted to find him. My hand on the creaking handle of the microfilm reader, the soft sounds of the library about me, I realised that my comfortable ignorance was about to be undone. If I found Wiseman's trial, I could never tell my children that `for some offence that we don't know of, he was transported to Sydney.' What if his crime had been something really vile?

And what else might there be for me to know? What about that other question, the one about Wiseman's dealings with the Aboriginal people? When you were a white Australian, investigating your own history could lead yo into some murky territory. No wonder my hand was turning more and more slowly.

When `Wiseman, Solomon' leapt out of the index at me, I felt a pulse of fright. Relief, too, as I read: `Crime:stealing on board a Ship or Barge on the navigable River Thames.'

Like everyone else, Wiseman got his moment to speak in his own defence. `After I brought that lighter up, I left her, I did not see her afterwards; I left her when I heard there was such a piece of work about her, I was afraid to come back.'

My great-great-great grandfather's voice, speaking directly across two centuries! The actual phrases he said! And all those witnesses - they crowded around me, their voices singing out clearly into my ear, indignant or strident or pleading. It was as if I'd opened the bronze doors under the classical pediment and released a crowd of people into the demure Mitchell Library, shouting and sweating, galloping along the floors, insisting on having their say.”

“Somewhere or other I'd heard an ancient recording of the nineteenth-century poet Robert Browning. He was at some kind of celebration, it sounded like, and someone had brought along this new-fangled thing with a wax cylinder, and they wanted him to recite one of his poems into the horn. `I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he; I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.' His voice was excited, light, uncertain, of full of laughter. He sounded so astonishingly like us. He stumbled, stopped. `I'm incredibly sorry,' he called out, `but I can't remember.' He laughed, and that was it.

So you could hear - sort of - what Robert Browning sounded like. But who would have brought along a wax cylinder to some hovel in Sough London and got an illiterate boatman to speak into it? Even if the wax cylinder had been invented?

I wanted to create convincing dialogue. But trying to think how people would have spoken in Bermondsey in the late eighteenth century, all that came to mind were a few novels in which working people made brief appearances: books by Defoe, Fielding, Sterne. Dickens did the lower orders, although he was a good half-century later.

I could guess the limitations of these sources. The language they put into their characters' mouths was their version of how working people spoke. They'd have cleaned it up, perhaps unconsciously, to make it fit for their genteel, educated readership. They might refer to `foul oaths', but they never wrote down the actual rude words.

Writing those first drafts, and thinking of how to convey the harsh, uneducated quality of the characters, I'd made every second word of their dialogue `fucken'. It had done the job - it got that first draft written. But, even as I was writing, I knew I hadn't got it right. It had made the dialogue sound coarse, yes, but too modern and too monotonous.

I went back to the Reading Room at the Mitchell and went through more of the transcripts of the Old Bailey trials. I thought they were the closest we were ever going to get to the wax cylinder of Robert Browning. I made lists of phrases as they'd fallen from the lips of the criminal class two hundred years before.

Having gathered all this colourful language, of course I had to use it. Early drafts bristled with obsolete turns of phrase. Characters were forever threatening to give each other `a souse across the chops', or `have a bellyful' of something.

By the end of 2003 I was weeding out the most self-consciously picturesque idioms. Each one had to pass two tests: did it scream research? and was the meaning clear to a modern reader?

I also had to decide whether to spell words phonetically (`Gawdelpus', `nufink'). When I tried this it seemed to make the speaker into a member of some quaint, alien group whose language had laboriously to be spelled out. You couldn't really identify with a character or share their feelings if you had to mouth out some oddly-spelled version of how they were talking.

Around November 2003 I read all the dialogue aloud. If anything hit a false note it was obvious: this one, for example:

`that bit of land, he said. Remember I told you. We'll lose it if we don't move soon.'

`That bit of land, he said. Remember I telled you. We'll miss out if we don't grab it.'

I deleted yards and yards of dialogue, sometimes finding it necessary to sacrifice gems. I promised myself I could use them some other time.

At last I decided that my job as a novelist wasn't to reconstruct the authentic sound of eighteenth-century vernacular. My job was to produce something that sounded authentic. No Thames waterman was going to rise up from between the lines and accuse me of getting it wrong.

As a kid I'd had some decided ideas about how books should be written. I thought, for example, that they should have toilets in them. People in real life went to the toilet, so how come people in books never did? I also thought that when people talked in books it shouldn't be on a new line, indented, between double quote marks. Real life didn't stop dead while people talked, so why should it in books?

Sometime in 2004, in an attempt to integrate it into the flow of the narrative, all the dialogue in The Secret River went into italics. It solved some problems, but it created others. More than a line or two of italics is hard to read, so my dialogue had to stay short. I couldn't use italics for anything else. And I was also running the risk of irritating readers used to conventional punctuation.

After having wrestled with the voices of my characters for several years, another truth about writing was being added to the others I'd come to. Not only should you never have a blank page, and not only could you promise yourself that you could always fix it all up later. You also had to accept that the solution to every problem creates another.”