Cassie McCullough

But eventually we find ourselves on board a ship, a boat called the Moonbird and heading towards the Furno Islands, which are a group of islands that are off the top end of Tasmania on the northeastern side.

And we're going and we're tracing and we're on a mission.

There's a sort of comment that he wouldn't be able to do it on land or even in the Sydney Cove, in Sydney Harbour, but as soon as he sets sail and he's heading towards Sydney Heads, the dress goes on and more and more dresses appear as the voyage goes on.

It's a wonderfully eccentric element to the book and nothing much is said about it until a little bit later on when more is revealed.

Well, there's these really quite lovely twins, the Connolly twins, Declan and Angus.

They had been separated.

They're convicts.

They had been separated when they were young.

And so one has a Scottish accent and one has an Irish accent.

And they're either fighting or laughing and having a riotous time together.

One of them's been injured and he's intellectually handicapped in some way.

I wasn't quite certain what it was, but they managed to rile each other up, but then always having their arms around each other.

And they have a great presence on the ship, even though they're at times annoying.

Then the enigmatic Dr Gideon, who is a man of science, who is on the trip because he wants to go to these islands and pick up specimens of aquatic and bird life.

and send it back to England.

Now, he's doing that because they're immensely valuable, but also because he seems to have this burning passion to understand the fish and fowl of the southern east coast of Australia.

So he's got all kinds of equipment.

And I was actually reminded initially of the beginning of Oscar and Lucinda and Oscar's father, who had a similar obsession prowling around on the rock platforms and looking at

shell life and the patterns and the intricacy and the sort of divine order that was visible to him in the sea life.

But she's also a little bit fascinated and at times perturbed by his, well, he just kills little creatures all the way.