Tanya Dalziel

I mean, I think that the novel is attentive to the limited opportunities to women at the time.

And, you know, they were owned by their husbands and all those kinds of issues that are subtly referenced in the text.

And, of course, in contrast to MacArthur, who's this really thoroughly dislikable person.

figure, Elizabeth offers a kind of contrast.

She's pictured as passionate and curious.

And I think really importantly, she's also pictured as coming to knowledge of the catastrophe of so-called settlement in Australia.

So she offers a very different idea than that which MacArthur is presented to represent.

Yeah, this really struck me when I was reading the novel and was thinking about this really closely.

And I guess in part, it comes back to how Dawes is represented in this text in the sense that he's really the foil to MacArthur.

So Dawes is, you know, this man of great patience and curiosity and good humour.

And it's he that makes the kind of bridge with Padigaran.

And

they're both learning each other's languages, for example.

And I think the exchange between Dawes and Pettigrew in this novel is kind of one of patient, good humour.

And I think it's also an example of what could have been or could be.

And that sets up a contrast between what MacArthur, I think, at one point in the novel kind of calls the superiority of our firearms, which very much are called upon in the Battle of Parramatta, which sees Pemulwe taken prisoner

prisoner and his people killed.

And I think there's also a related violence in that act because MacArthur himself presumes to tell the authorised version of the events, whereas Elizabeth is haunted by what she calls the kind of snuffing out of the lives that that battle involved and also the story that was told about it.

So

this is a very roundabout way of saying that I think the representation of the Gadigal people in this text is an effort to give space to their story without telling it.