Foreword

It was while walking over Sydney Harbour Bridge that Kate Grenville experienced the epiphany which led to the writing of her novel The Secret River. She took part in the great procession for reconciliation on Sunday, 28 May 2000. She caught the eye ofa young Aboriginal woman who was watching the marchers file past. They exchanged smiles. At the time Kate was thinking about her ancestor, Solomon Wiseman, about whom there was a living tradition of oral history and which took her family's historical memory back to the first generation of European settlement. She wondered if Wiseman had ever known the ancestors of the Aboriginal woman. What seemed even more significant was that the fleeting encounter took place directly above the likely location of Wiseman's disembarkation from the convict transport in 1806.