Cassie McCullough

Exuberant lives as well as really tough ones as well.

Yeah, it was wonderful for me having just read Cassandra Pibus's Truganini because she evokes some of this time, these places, these people and even some of the individuals and what they were doing because this part of it is actually based in reality and I would recommend if you haven't had a look at that, that's something you might do some further reading on if you are taken with this world.

And Jock Sorong also recommends Lyndall Ryan's The Tasmanian Aborigines in his

acknowledgements at the back.

So, you know, you drenched in history and in a part of Australian history that perhaps I didn't know enough about before, you know, the last few years or so.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're hunting this guy, Fig.

They think he's still alive and they think he's caused another shipwreck and they want to get to the bottom of it.

So, you know, it does have this forward motion.

But it is, for me, the description that's the most, the part I enjoyed the most.

And here's, shall I read you something that I actually stopped?

Oh, please.

I just read this out to someone because I just thought, I mean, it doesn't really tell you much about the story, but just a description of a dog as they arrive on an island.

I think it's on Preservation Island, actually.

the dog was brindle as tall as my waist and of no breed or perhaps of them all and this is eliza speaking it was beside itself with rage at our incursion pacing back to the far end of its rope and then hurtling forward to the near end nearly whipping itself off its feet

The ferocious barking turned to a brief yelp of pain and Munro picked a stick from the sand.

He waved it threateningly at the animal so it cowered and slunk back along the slack rope.

So that's the dog that greets them on the beach.

And then a page or two later, they get up to a hut.

And they find, lo and behold, more dogs about the doorway, about half a dozen or more mongrels, large, stout, thin, mangy, a miscellany of God's forgotten beasts.