Read a sneak peek from Daughters of the Tide

Weaving historical fiction with folklore and Tasmanian gothic, this is a gorgeously atmospheric debut that explores memory and self, the resilience of women and a dangerous longing for the sea.

The Findlay family history has long been steeped in secrets, tragedy and dark rumours of madness. Generations of its women have been haunted by a dangerous luring melody and an insatiable longing for the sea.

It's 1923 and Isla Findlay lives with her parents on the edge of the ocean in Tasmania, in a rambling mansion full of whispers of this cursed legacy. When Isla discovers her estranged aunt is finally coming home, long-repressed memories of the selkie stories of her childhood start to resurface, along with disturbing dreams of seals and an eerie song that Isla starts to hear even in her waking hours.

As the line between what's real and imagined starts to blur, Isla and her aunt and mother must reckon with long-held secrets and ghosts who have not been properly laid to rest. The closer they get to the truths of the past, the louder they hear the seductive call of the ocean. Does it sing of freedom, or only more tragedy?

A tale of madness and miracles, secrets and sins, myth and reality, and the tenacity and resilience of women in the face of impossible choices.

---

PROLOGUE

The air is sharp tonight. Each breath coats your throat in an aching, icy sheath. The moon rises as you tread along Fossil Cove and she casts the ocean in silver while the stars drift between the clouds like glitter. Then a tenderness dilutes the chill. It is the softness that comes with a tune familiar to the singer and sung beautifully. The melody is haunting and lyrical and sustaining. It gathers in the wind and you walk towards it. There is a woman standing on the precipice of Yesnaby cliff. She is far above you, and yet her song sounds as clear as if she were performing for you alone. She holds herself with conviction and an old, deep knowledge born of solitude and listening. Her hair is long and dark and straight, and it wraps around her like a cape. For one glorious second she is frozen in this moment, as if your eyes are holding her steady. You blink. She tilts, over the edge, arms reaching towards the sky before she finds her tipping point and dives, and you watch as she falls, softly, like a star into the sea.

ETTIE

Hobart, 1885

‘Tell us a story,’ her youngest granddaughter says. It’s a cold night. The windows were like ice when Clara and her sister Adelaide traced each other’s hands against the glass, before Ettie closed the curtains against the dark and pushed them into bed.

‘It’s the perfect night for it,’ Clara pipes up again. ‘Windy and wintry, like in a fairytale. Isn’t it, Adelaide?’ Clara, at seven, is firm in her opinions and, despite being the younger of the two, is always telling Adelaide how things should be. Ettie’s large, elegant hands are brisk as she tucks them in, packing her granddaughters as tightly as if they were sardines in a tin. Neither Clara nor Adelaide dare to loosen the covers. Not yet. Ettie smooths her fingers across the coverlet before moving towards the oil lamp on the dresser.

‘Please,’ Clara says in a small voice. Ettie pauses. Her shoulders, held so stiff against her body, relax. After witnessing their grandfather’s rage manifest in the ugliest of ways today, her granddaughters yearn to lose themselves in a tale. One where the possibilities of happily-ever-after don’t feel likely to slip away if you loosen your grip. An old one, with familiar cadences.

‘Alright.’ Ettie blinks, forcing herself into the present. The sisters close their eyes and settle against the pillows. Ettie allows her voice to become deep and resonant.

‘Once upon a time there lived a selkie named Orlena. The youngest and wildest of her sisters, the one who dared to hope for more, she loved nothing better than feeling the currents stream across her sealskin as she raced with her clan. Orlena would hold her breath and dive to collect the tiny crustaceans on the bottom of the sea floor. The stars above were a source of endless fascination, and she loved the land as much as the ocean.

‘On nights when the moon was waxing full and the currents warm, Orlena and her sisters would dance on the shore. From their first steps onto sand their sealskins slipped from them to reveal the women hidden inside. Dancing until she was giddy, Orlena would collapse onto the cool sand, crush the gritty earth between her fingers and look up at the glittering night sky. And she would wonder what it would be like to know the stars the way she knew the coral kingdoms or the kelp forests.

‘When the first pink glimpse of dawn rose over the water, she would return to the ocean, always with an ache for what she was leaving behind, for this selkie’s heart yearned for something more, and couldn’t decide where it belonged.’

‘And then what happened?’ Adelaide’s expression is desperate with the need only a good story can summon.

‘That’s enough for now,’ Ettie says, fixing her granddaughters with a steely look. Her girls know better than to argue. Ettie squeezes their feet under the covers.

‘Goodnight, girls,’ she says. Her tone is gentler than before.

The shutters rattle as she walks across the room. The storm she watched brew all day is finally coming to a head. Ettie hopes the morning will dawn calm and clear.

You shouldn’t have said anything, Ettie hears Clara whisper as she closes the door. She smiles to herself, though her sadness peaks – a sadness that’s been spreading from her toes to her heart ever since Clara asked for a tale, ever since Alistair started watching her granddaughters too closely. Ettie rubs at the sharp ache piercing her breast.

ISLA

September 1923

The Findlay house sits on one hundred acres of eucalypt forest, and if you venture deep enough and know the shapes and twists of the trees, you will find a hidden path winding down to the sea. Isla Findlay treads this familiar track now, crushing bracken underfoot and pushing aside sprigs of overgrown tea tree. She can smell the ocean, sharp and tantalisingly close and mingling with the scents of the bush after rain.

For the third time this month, Isla has chosen this place over church. She doesn’t see the point of sitting on a cramped bench breathing in the stink of mothballs, listening to a preacher who does his best to warn women away from living lest their ‘susceptibility to the devil’s charms’ ruin them forever. Isla smirks at the memory, but her smile fades when she thinks of her mother sitting on the hard pew, hands folded in her lap, face lifted towards piety. Isla pushes the ache the image brings down deep into her belly and presses on. At the end of the track is a length of rope tied to the stump of an ancient peppermint gum. It’s been there so long the rope looks as if it’s growing into the bark. Isla clasps it tight and launches herself forward, grateful for her new walking pants. They’re waterproof, made of waxed cotton dyed a dapper burgundy, and she’s added four extra pockets for her collecting. Gone are the days of traipsing home with torn frocks and muddy hems. Isla’s hair is auburn and wavy like her aunt’s, though her eyes are blue rather than green. At twenty-one, she is tall and lean, but her hands are small like her mother’s.

Fossil Cove is a calm grey to match the sky. It stormed last night, and as always, the beach the morning after is still and cold, as if biding its time before another battering. She’s surrounded by rocks of all sizes, each embossed with a fossil or several, from creatures who breathed tens of thousands of years ago. Very few people aside from the Findlays know of this cove. Isla has been careful never to mention it to any of her peers. She sits on the pebbled shore and catches her breath, feeling the chill of the damp stones below her. Far to her left she can just make out the dark mounds of the seal colony.

Isla has begun to dream of them again, like she used to as a child after her aunt left. But in those dreams of childhood, it was always her watching the seals from afar. Occasionally Isla would try to follow them, but as soon as her feet hit the water, the animals would disappear.

Her visions are different now. In these dreams, she makes it to the water. In these dreams, the seals do not flee from her.

Isla takes the navy sketchbook out of her largest pocket and draws a small piece of sandstone with the image of a trilobite. She has never picked up a stone here without an ancient impression of some long-departed creature embedded into the rock. Mostly she finds the skeletons of fish, arthropods and seaweed, but she’s always hopeful she’ll discover something rarer, a bird perhaps. The fragile hollowness of avian bones, however, means they’re unlikely to survive as fossils. To find a new set of wings cast forever in limestone would certainly secure respect at Oxford University. Isla longs to study paleobiology, to unpack the secrets of ancient worlds under the keen eye of a microscope. She thinks of the application she sent in now that they’re accepting young women, feels her heart constrict at the possibility they may never reply – and grow even tighter at what her mother would say if she knew about her secret dream.

Isla turns back to her sketch and fiddles with the creature’s legs. They’re difficult to perfect. Frustrated, she snaps a photo of the fossil with her box brownie camera. She’ll try again later. Adelaide bought her the camera, before she went away. Isla uses it almost constantly. It’s one of the few possessions with a connection to her aunt that doesn’t trigger painful memories.

Isla stands and heads towards the sea arch, her steps sturdy and practised over the uneven rocks. The tide is low and she’s able to walk rather than wade. Isla pauses below the archway and looks up at the shadowed ledge, slick with moisture. Clumps of Neptune’s necklace are wedged into deep fissures, reaching down like ghostly fingers. Her breath ricochets off the walls, and she thinks of how the hollow sound used to terrify her. Adelaide had told her it was the voices of the sea spirits, and that they would always protect her. She hadn’t been comforted at the time, but listening to the rumbling echo of her breathing and feeling the resonance of this place deep in her chest, Isla understands. This is her special place, where she comes to plan and dream, and only about a twenty-minute walk from the house. She remembers (though it aches) the first time Adelaide showed it to her when she was six years old.

A Saturday afternoon, just after dinner, and Adelaide had come into the nursery, eyes bright with the wicked promise of fun. Her aunt had sat beside her on the floor where Isla was rearranging the dollhouse, and told her there was a secret to be shared. She’d bundled Isla into her coat and piggy-backed her to the door, tilting and twisting so that she had to grip her aunt’s shoulders tight. Clara must have heard the squeals, because she intercepted them.

‘You two are making enough noise to alert the constabulary,’ Clara had said, but Isla remembers the expression that came with her mother’s words, a concoction of barely contained amusement and something like hope. Isla wonders where it went.

‘There’s no fun in treading silently through life, is there, Clara?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To a secret place!’ Isla had blurted.

‘You can’t take her there at this hour; you won’t be back before dark.’ Clara had grabbed for Isla but Adelaide had spun out of reach.

‘Don’t be such a child, Adelaide.’

‘Come with us.’ Her aunt’s voice had a siren quality to it that afternoon, and Isla had watched her mother hesitate.

‘Only so you don’t do something reckless. Only for an hour.’

They had stayed for three. Isla had never seen her mother so released. As soon as they’d set foot on the beach she’d freed Isla’s hand from her anxious grip and unlaced their boots. They’d all paddled and splashed each other and balanced for as long as they could along the miniature sand cliffs left behind by the tides before the delicate shelves collapsed under their weight. But then a seal had surfaced in the shallows just off the rocks. Adelaide wanted to join it.

‘Don’t be foolish,’ Clara had said. ‘It’s getting late, and where there are seals there are sharks.’

‘There’s still plenty of light,’ Adelaide had replied as she stepped out of her skirt. Isla remembers watching her aunt’s clothes pile on top of each other in a jumbled tower, and before Clara could utter another protest, Adelaide had run into the sea. Isla and Clara watched her dive and disappear, resurface further out. When she dived a third time, she stayed below. Clara had sunk to her knees, pulling Isla down with her. It was the first time Isla had seen her mother cry. She didn’t know what to do. It felt wrong. She remembers stroking Clara’s hair and humming the lullaby Adelaide always sang to her – a song with strange words that came from far across the sea – and wishing till she almost burst that Adelaide would come back.

And she had, some thirty minutes later. Clara’s face was whiter than the moon and that much colder.

‘The seal and I …’

‘Don’t.’ Clara cut her sister off. ‘How dare you disappear like that then pretend we hadn’t thought you’d perished?’

‘Clara, you know I’m a strong swimmer, I …’

‘No!’ Clara’s yell was shrill. Adelaide had reached for Isla but Clara blocked her.

‘I’m taking my daughter home.’

‘But you don’t know the path, Mother.’

‘Yes, she does,’ Adelaide had said, as if all her joy was sinking into the sand beneath her feet. ‘All Findlay women do, Isla.’

‘But it does not mean you should follow it.’

Isla has never forgotten her mother’s words that night.

In the clear daylight, Isla continues onto the smooth, non-pebbled sand on the other side of the arch. Isla doesn’t need to understand her draw to the ocean. It’s always been a part of her just as it was for her Scottish ancestors. She is still frightened by the sea, though not enough today to be deterred. She takes off her boots and socks, rolls up her trouser legs and lets her toes sink into the wet sand by the tideline, waiting for the waves to wash over them. She watches a cormorant as it dives for fish, surfaces, dives again, and the corner of her heart she knows will always belong to the water wants to dive in with it, never resurface. She shivers at her wanting and backs away up the beach, where she finds a large boulder to perch on. The waves creep further up the sand, licking at the pipi shells and weed, at her, like a hungry animal, and she can’t stop herself. She takes off her jacket and her walking pants, laughs into the wind at the impropriety, at all the things her mother would say, and runs into the sea.

Isla hears the bells as she leaves the trees and comes up the hill. Her mother will be livid. She wonders what excuse Clara gave to her friends for the wayward daughter’s absence. As Isla walks she thinks about a plausible reason as to what could have kept her away, but her brain refuses to cooperate, and she resigns herself to an afternoon of reproach. She looks up at the house with a sigh.

Built in 1857, the Findlay home was impossible to miss if you were coming from Hobart on your way further south to the smaller hamlets of Cygnet and Woodbridge, and about an hour’s drive from central Hobart. Some swore it was haunted, and the rambling mansion certainly had that look about it, with its medieval-style turret, but there were no malign spirits there, just sad ones. Great-grandmother Ettie’s ghost seemed to prefer the attic. Isla had never felt her in any other room.

Sometimes, though, Isla has felt something more than Ettie lingering in the corridors, something darker. Sometimes she wakes with a weight pressing against her chest. She’s never wanted to linger on or overly acknowledge these thoughts, as if by doing so she’ll make whatever presence she’d felt come to life.

Reaching the gate by the road that leads to the long driveway, Isla notices a dozen men dressed in faded uniforms, epaulets on display. One of them nods at her as they pass, and Isla smiles back. It’s not uncommon to see groups of returned soldiers parading through the town. It’s as if they’re frightened people will forget what they did, but Isla knows that’s impossible.

No-one in her family had fought. Her father’s heart troubles prevented him from enlisting, and she’d been too young to join the nursing corps. One of her mother’s friends had lost her boy, and in her grief, whether she meant to or not, had implied that Clara was somehow less of a woman for not providing a son to the war effort. It makes Isla sick to remember it.

Agatha Rosedale, the Findlays’ housekeeper, smiles at Isla’s approach. She’s sweeping the steps in front of the large mahogany door with its leadlight windows depicting swans in flight. Agatha has been serving the family for decades, and often eats with them at the dining table. She’s always busy, brewing tinctures and tisanes in the kitchen, gathering ingredients in the garden or mending all manner of broken things. Isla can’t imagine this place without her. She’s small and wiry, wrinkled; the skin at the base of her neck gathers in layers like a necklace of flesh. She has silver, dead straight hair and fierce, ice-blue eyes.

‘You’d better dry your locks before your mother sees,’ she says as Isla joins her.

‘I suppose she’s in a state about me missing church again?’

‘She’s up in arms about a lot of things this morning.’

‘Why can’t she relax?’

‘It’s never been in her nature.’

Isla sighs and reaches for the door handle.

‘Wait.’ Agatha puts a hand on Isla’s arm, peering at her.

‘What is it?’ The old woman raises her hand to Isla’s forehead and catches a curl between her fingers, studying the strands.

‘Agatha?’

The housekeeper blinks and her eyes clear. She smiles and shakes her head. ‘Never mind, Isla, best go inside now.’

And though Agatha doesn’t say, Isla knows deep in her belly that Agatha was looking at her and remembering Adelaide.

The hallway is dim, save for streams of light from the three diamond-shaped windows below the ceiling on either side of the wall. The sunbeams pierce the gloom in thin shafts that illuminate the motes and swinging cobwebs hiding in the air, making them twinkle. The house is beginning to show its age. The floorboards creak and some of the stairs dip in the middle. Isla knows her mother has a list of all the things that need fixing, but so far no plans for renovations have been put in place. Constructed with convict brick and sandstone, the manor is large without being palatial, and has four floors (not including the attic). Isla loves its wrap-around verandah with iron lacework trimming and the crown glass windows in the bathroom that warp the light into dozens of tiny suns. But her favourite thing about the house is the view from her bedroom window where she can watch the ever-changing sea. And she’s always been glad about her home’s separation from Hobart, a good hour’s drive away, meaning she was unlikely to run into anyone she knew when she wanted to walk alone (which was often).

Isla goes to the library; oh how she wishes it were hers. The fire is always lit in the library, even on rare sunny days, and Isla likes it this way. Books and fire. The smell of words and flames seem to go together. Wall-to-wall mahogany bookcases take up the majority of the space, and in between each stands a tall leadlight electric lamp depicting a different floral motif and providing ample light for reading.

In his study that is adjacent to the library, Mr Harold Andrews is leaning back in his emerald-green leather armchair and squinting at a stack of papers. Harold has dark brown hair that is trimmed short and matches his chestnut-coloured eyes. In his youth he was tall and lean, fit and energetic in the days before his heart stopped working as it should and he began to have what he called his ‘woozy spells’, where he could not climb to the top floor without puffing. Age has made him soft. Now his belly eagerly encroaches over the waistline of his trousers, and his broad shoulders have a stooped appearance.

When Clara married she kept her maiden name, as her mother had done before her, thanks to the extraordinarily unconventional legal document drawn up by her great-grandmother, Ettie Findlay. Despite this, people persist in calling Clara Mrs Andrews. She’s stopped correcting them, though Isla has no qualms doing so. She’s proud to be a Findlay. Isla sits in the smaller chair opposite her father and waits for him to notice her. Harold is the sort of man who likes to adhere to time-honoured values, but would also never call himself a conservative. While he believes in order and the importance of established institutions and traditions, he also tries to keep up with the fast-changing views of the era, to read widely before forming an opinion. Harold takes pride in providing for his family, in managing a successful boat building factory. He wants to leave a legacy. He wants to be remembered.

Harold was often an absent father, particularly in Isla’s early childhood. Not unusual, she knows, but oh how she’d resented him for it in the days after Adelaide left, with her mother trying to be close to her in every way Isla didn’t want. But Isla knows Harold loves her. Certainly he’s proud of how clever she is. Isla owes Harold much of her connection to the latest scholarship in her field. One of her father’s closest friends, Mr Richard Ferguson, is a doctor of biology. The two met at Oxford in their twenties, and are still in touch. Richard has subscribed his old friend to a number of scholarly articles and scientific journals over the years, such that the Findlay library now has an impressive collection of the latest research in the natural sciences.

Books were the one thing that brought father and daughter closer and the library is the place they can talk with any degree of intimacy.

‘Have the Edith Whartons arrived, Father?’ Isla pulls the string to switch on the desk lamp, a reclining woman cast in bronze and cradling a mother-of-pearl lampshade.

‘Not yet.’ Harold looks up from his papers and then places them in a neat pile on the desk. ‘But hopefully in the next week or so. When was it that we ordered them? January? They can’t be far off.’

Isla nods, thinking of something else to say that will keep her here with him. Her letter to Oxford comes to mind. Oxford has been admitting women since 1920, and Isla means to join them. She longs to meet other like-minded young women passionate about books and learning in a place where curiosity is not frowned upon but rewarded, to smell the rich, leathery scent of the thousands of tomes in the Bodleian library and learn to row along the Thames. All this and the possibility of more makes Isla’s heart pound like she’s about to dive off a cliff.

‘Father?’

‘Mmmm?’

‘I would love it if, one day soon, I could …’ Isla imagines what her father would say to her mother, what Clara would reply – her disapproval, her list of reasons why their daughter leaving the security of home and family to pursue a degree was the definition of insanity. Isla cringes.

‘One day you could?’ Harold rests his dark brown gaze on Isla.

‘Go to Stanley? I’d like to see the nut.’

The nut was an ancient volcanic plug that looked like a great green rectangular table. If you climbed to the top you could enjoy three hundred and sixty degree views of the picturesque fishing village of Stanley. Harold smiles and looks back down and Isla wishes for the millionth time that she were braver.

‘Of course. I’m sure your mother would love to go with you.’

Clara is, predictably, in the drawing room. The space is large and light-filled. The walls are painted lilac to match the rugs in shades of purple that cover the wooden floorboards. Arranged carefully on the mantelpiece and across side tables are many of the pretty things her mother has collected over the years. A silver candle snuffer, a collection of tiny trinket boxes, the ornamental teapot painted with wild roses and edged in gold. Isla’s favourite though is the pair of ceramic figures that serve as bookends for her Bible collection. Perched at opposite ends, the couple glance at one another over their delicate shoulders. As a child Isla always had the urge to sit them side by side.

Isla looks at her mother, at the way her head tilts just so over her work. Clara is much shorter than both Isla and Adelaide. When she was younger, her figure was the perfect, fashionable hourglass and the envy of many. Where Adelaide and Isla are dark and olive skinned, Clara has golden hair, a peaches-and-cream complexion that turns ruddy with embarrassment, much to her irritation, and forget-me-not blue eyes. Today she’s wearing her rope of pearls, looped twice around her neck.

Clara is knitting a pair of socks for the Hobart RSL. The cream wool is splayed across her lap like jellyfish tentacles yet still strangely neat. Perhaps it is her mother’s hands, small and deft and purposefully clacking, that makes it seem so. Clara is never idle. Isla can’t remember a time when her mother was not making or planning or writing a list. If only she didn’t expect the same level of diligence from everyone else.

‘We missed you at church this morning,’ she says, looking closely at her daughter without dropping a stitch. ‘Pastor Williams asked after you.’

‘He asks after everyone, Mother.’

‘Did you bathe late? Your hair is still damp.’ This is Clara’s way, to weed out the truth with stupid questions, daring Isla to lie, so she never has to ask directly. Isla touches her plait and inwardly curses.

‘No, I went for a swim. It was invigorating.’

Clara nods slowly, her face more sad than angry now. ‘It’s dangerous, Isla. How many times must I say it?’

‘It was a calm morning, and I’m a strong swimmer.’

‘It doesn’t matter how strong you are if a current takes you. Think about what happened to your great-grandmother Ettie, and to my own mother too. Swept away before she had time to scream.’

Ettie and her daughter Eliza had both drowned twenty years apart. Neither body was ever found. Eliza had gone first. According to the story Isla has been told from the cradle, it had been a wild night. The weather had turned quickly, and she must have lost control of the dinghy they’d found shattered on the shore. A tragedy, an accident. Eliza left behind two children, now orphans, their father having died of typhoid the previous year. Adelaide was just three, Clara six months. And so they were raised by Ettie and her husband Alistair, until both their grandparents fell prey to what Isla secretly calls the Findlay curse.

But Isla also knew about the rumours, the whisperings of strange obsessions, of suicide. And Isla knows herself too. This is what scares her the most, what keeps her awake into the witching hours. She loves the ocean. It’s in her veins just as surely as her lifeblood, and sometimes its pull is stronger than a magnet, almost impossible to resist.

‘Mother, I always …’

‘Enough. If you miss another service I will give your collection of Keats to the poor.’

Isla is ninety-five per cent certain that Clara never would, but the threat makes her jaw clench.

‘Today is the third week in a row you’ve been absent. Do you know what I told the pastor?’

‘That I have renounced our lord and saviour in favour of natural science and literature?’

‘That you were ill.’

Isla tries to stop her snort but it’s too late and instead she produces a strangled kind of whistle that makes Clara’s skin turn blotchy.

‘Do you want to invite gossip about this household? Do you want people to stare and whisper when you go into town?’

Isla studies her mother, at the way she clutches at her knitting like it will save her from all evil. She looks at Clara’s hair, luscious and thick yet bound in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She aches to tell her mother exactly what she wants, to confide every single one of her dreams, just as she wants to reach over and yank the pins out of that damned bun and let those beautiful locks fall free. Instead, Isla sits in the chair opposite, takes the skein of wool from Clara’s lap and winds it around her fingers.

‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ Isla says. ‘Let me help you.’

‘If you had come to church like you were supposed to, you would have been there when Mrs Peters agreed to attend the Veterans’ tea I’m organising.’ There’s a trace of a hurt child in Clara’s tone. ‘Her presence will do wonders for attendance. It might even get a mention in the local newsletter.’

Mrs Rosalie Peters was the wife of Edmund Peters, one of Hobart’s most prominent magistrates. Clara has always admired her fashion sense and charm, and has been trying to ingratiate herself into their circle for years.

‘I was hoping you might like to help me with the tea?’ Clara says.

Isla’s heart sinks. Deciding on table settings and decorations is the last thing she would enjoy, especially when she’s so preoccupied with planning for Oxford, and exactly how she’s going to tell her parents. But then, maybe all the excitement will make her mother that much more likely to see things from her point of view, or at least provide enough of a distraction to soften the blow.

‘I’d be happy to,’ Isla says. She looks at the portrait on the wall above the fireplace. Ettie and Alistair Findlay, her great-grandparents, who emigrated to Tasmania from Scotland in the 1850s and set down roots with the immense wealth and widespread respect generated by Alistair’s invention: the Findlay Sixerns, small, efficient vessels that could be lowered from large ships in order to sail greater areas and catch a wider variety of fish. At the height of the sixern era, the Findlay Company had employed over a thousand people, and had warehouses in Edinburgh, London and Sydney as well as Hobart. Isla’s family clung to the legacy of the once unstoppable industry, before it was overtaken by the natural course of progress – bigger boats, more bounty. There was still some demand for the boats however, and Isla’s father now managed the company.

In the typical manner, Ettie is seated with Alistair standing behind her, one large hand resting on her shoulder. A handsome pair. The portrait was painted shortly after they arrived. They’re in their thirties. Ettie’s hair is still auburn. She’s wearing a peacock-coloured shawl that sets off her bright, grey-blue eyes. Isla has always wondered about her great-grandmother’s expression, which looks more like she’s just experienced the flash of a camera for the first time rather than having sat for an artist for hours.

Alistair looks serene, dressed in an emerald-green overcoat that brings out his eyes.

What had they thought of Tasmania when they arrived? Isla supposes there was some comfort in the similarities to Scotland. The bracing winds and the hills at the foot of the mountain that in certain lights, when the eucalypts release their purple, hazy mist, resemble the glens of their homeland. But they must have missed their families. Letters, even today, take a long time to arrive from the United Kingdom, and sometimes they get lost. Ettie left her sisters and her mother behind, knowing she would no doubt become a mother herself without their support. She must have loved Alistair, to follow him, literally to the ends of the earth. Isla can’t imagine ever loving a man to that degree.

‘What was Ettie like?’

‘Stoic, sometimes aloof. She wasn’t the most affectionate of folk,’ Clara says.

‘You must have other memories.’

‘Yes …’ The clacking of the needles pauses, and the space feels large with the sudden silence. ‘Ettie was remarkable, with a broad set of skills most women of her time, and even now, can hardly dream of acquiring.’

‘What kind of skills?’

‘Fishing, for one. Ettie could coax anything into her nets. And dancing. She was an extraordinary dancer, yet she hated balls. I think she disliked the structure of them, more than anything. Her dancing was fluid, never a step the same. Her mind was fierce and her will fiercer still. I was always a little bit frightened of her. She never behaved like the grandmothers in story books. She was not soft or gentle or even kind, but she was wise. She would tell Adelaide and I never to let anyone decide our fate for us. It always sounded like a warning.’

‘I wish I could have known her.’

Clara nods. ‘You know Adelaide and I came to live here when our mother died,’ Clara says. ‘I was just a baby. This is the only home I’ve ever known.’

‘It must have been hard for you both,’ Isla says.

‘We had Agatha.’

Isla wants more but she can see her mother beginning to close this window of her heart. Clara picks up her knitting.

‘I’d like you to accompany me to the children’s home tomorrow morning,’ she says. ‘Mabel was just telling me how rewarding it is reading to the little ones. It’s time we did our bit.’

Thought it was time we kept up with the Joneses, more likely, Isla thinks.