![]() ![]() The transcripts of the Old Bailey trials came online. Yet as I began to write The Possum Who Kissed a Convict more information almost landed on my lap. I thought I knew every primary source that could be used. But my mother had read me Tench’s diaries from that time as bedtime stories. ![]() So much of what we think we know about those first years of the early colony is either myth or cliché. There was a convict housekeeper, too, who bore Surgeon White a child just before he left for England, maybe worth a page or three. ![]() ‘Native’ children back then were adopted as servants, and I’d found fewer than a dozen references to the boy. The Aboriginal boy Surgeon White adopted when he was orphaned in the smallpox epidemic would be part of the background. I thought I knew the story, from Surgeon White’s diaries and letters of the time. It was to be called The Possum Who Kissed a Convict. I wanted to write a short, mostly funny book, about Australia’s first doctor, so lonely that he tried to tame a possum. But that wasn’t the book I intended to write. The two brothers witness the struggles of the colonists to keep their precarious grip on a hostile wilderness, the black brother haunted by the memories of the Cadigal warriors who will one day claim him as one of their own. Once there were two brothers, one black, one white, in a colony at the end of the world. Every time I look at Nanberry: Black Brother White I think ’How on earth did this happen?’ ![]()
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