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“Ae,” Wiremu's father sighed and smiled.

The next day Wiremu's great-grandfather laid her down on reed matting in a cool shelter. She turned up her chin to him and he gripped it in his hard carver's hands. She was sweating. He gave her narcotic seeds to chew and told her to leave the pulp under her tongue so the juices would spread to the back of her mouth. It made her saliva rise and she was soon light-headed.

He stirred the liquid in the bowl beside him, the ash of burnt shit and fish oil, water. He laid out the contents of his tool bag: a handle of manuka and blades made from the wings of albatrosses, some with serrated edges and some flat and sharp. He wound the handle to the blade with string. Then he began to carve her, tapping the bone blade against her face with a small wooden mallet.

He carved for most of the day, rubbing his black concoction into her wounds, wiping away her spills of blood with a softened flax cloth. At first the pain was unbearable but her flesh was soon numb with the drug and the hammering. The sound of the chisel thudded against her skull, eased by his voice as he told her stories of his ancestors.

One of the kuia, her grandmother, helped her to her feet and they left the shelter. She could not open her mouth for three days. She felt unable to breathe. She could not eat. Her belly an empty hut. Her grandmother had moko. Now very old, she sat with blankets around her shoulders and knees. When she spoke, she pointed out the girl with lips long ago blackened by the ink of burned caterpillars and tree resin, and it was like an accusation
when she told her she was under the spell of the tohunga tā kaue. She liked to smoke a pipe, though she told her granddaughter never to do this. She also instructed her not to eat fatty foods or embrace a man until her moko was healed. If she did these things, the black lines would bleed and disappear and she would be forever shamed as a woman who had disrespected her moko.

She stayed in the hut, hiding her swollen face. On the fourth day she emerged to see the tattooist being chased from his hut by an angry woman wielding a stick. After the kui had given her leaves to protect her lips, she went to see her father. He told her off for taking moko without asking his permission but she was ready for womanhood and quietly he was pleased, she knew. She asked him about the tohunga tā kaue.

They married, the girl with the orca tooth necklace and the carver of wood and flesh. Together they travelled around the island. He tattooed many other people. His tattoos always depicted the sea, the waves and the spirals of the spirits that eddied in the shallows. Everyone who saw Wiremu Heke's great-grandfather's moko recognised his work.

Wiremu's father talked all day. He gave him all of his stories the day before Wiremu sailed out of Otakau with tender, freshly tattooed buttocks, to cross the sea to Van Diemen's Land.

“Go west. Go west!” The man who leaned into Wiremu's face had piano-peg teeth. “Boss Davidson doesn't mind playing his chances. We'll make a good lay from the sealskin and be out of the way of the Governor and King. Not a white man to be seen in the west.” Seal were getting fished out of the Strait, he said. Seal were getting scarce and the Islanders controlled their patch with firearms. A good time to go west.

It was a tavern at the Hobart docks, where men heaved and swayed like the sea inside the sandstone walls. Samuel Bailey gave Wiremu another mug of wine and spoke to the red-faced man who was his boss. “His name is Billhook. Easier to say than his real name. Billhook will do. He's a real good blackfella. Take him on, eh?”

All the sweat, the people so close, the wine and then Boss Davidson's offer; it was as confusing as it was intoxicating. Wiremu, christened Billhook by his crewmates, stood on the docks the next day and watched the
Governor Brisbane
shifting against the pylons.

Not north to New South Wales for Billhook. He shipped out of Hobart Town three days later bound for the west country. Men crawled amongst the rigging like possums in trees. It took them another three days along the Derwent and through Storm Bay to get to the sea. They were becalmed in the mornings, drifting under hills made smoky blue by the mist, and then away as the midday wind worked up the water writhing black
with the shining spines of humpback whales.

During the three days, Billhook began to know the crew. It was said that Samuel Bailey was a swell's son run out. He was wind-burned, with deep cracks around his mouth. A white man. Billhook quickly realised he would never know the weather coming with Bailey. His eyes clouded all the storms in his heart until the moment he lashed out. He got wild alright but Bailey getting wild made him steady as a snake.

Pigeon was a black man, a Sydney native, who quickly got on side with Boss Davidson with his clever wit, and his great strength which belied his lanky frame. A boy called Neddy, born on Kangaroo Island to a black woman and a sealer there. The brothers Jack and Tommy Blunt were the first white men Billhook had met who were born in this country. Two black men: Black Simon towered over Billhook, his back ribbed with scars of the lash, he spoke with a strange accent; and Hamilton, a small, very dark man with an easy smile who could speak many languages. Jimmy was the crew's boatsteerer. The men called him Jimmy the Nail because he had once driven a pike through a rival's hand and nailed him to the starboard gunwale of his whaleboat. He was a short, sandy man with a ready humour and a scar down the side of his nose. Pigeon told Billhook that Jimmy the Nail had shot black men at their fires to get women. Pigeon knew this because he'd helped him find their camps at night.

At Robbins Island on the western fringes of the Strait, they weighed anchor and went ashore to gather more crew and supplies for the journey west. Boss Davidson and Jimmy the Nail haggled for pork, sealskins and women with a bluff sealer, who introduced himself as the Strait's Policeman.

The first time Billhook saw Vandiemonian women, they were returning to the hut from muttonbirding, long sharp
sticks slung across their shoulders, threaded with fluffy grey chicks. Seven women. One child. Twenty dogs. Big dogs they were, some as high as the women's waists. Long-legged hunting curs, all lolling tongues and ears askew and whiskery grins.

The women walked over the bald hill towards the hut, spread out in a line, the sun behind them, so that their dark shapes with the sticks looked like the white man's martyr. Some of the impaled birds flapped wearily in the wind as though still alive. The wind tossed the island grass like an ocean about their legs. If the dogs hadn't been moving, their shaggy brindle pelts would have made them near invisible against the grass.

Billhook watched the women walk towards them.

Bailey muttered, “Which one do you want?”

“We got plenty pork,” said Billhook and realised his mistake when Bailey laughed and pointed to the woman on the far right.

“That one.”

She was short and strong and wore a frock of skins with the fur on the inside and a red knit cap. She was laughing but she stopped when she saw Bailey point her out. The clanswomen walked wide of the two men and cast down their eyes. They looked angry or shamed and not as strong as they did on the hill. Billhook's mother had made his sisters smear their faces with stinking dirt and messed their glossy hair with manure, when the white whalers first came to Aramoana. His sisters were only little girls then but his mother knew to keep them safe.

Bailey stood looking at the woman, chewing tobacco and spitting. His mouth moved around his screw jaw as if it hurt to speak. He took off his cap. He was not an old man but his hair ran away from his head, thin, soft wisps over pink skin.

From the highest point of the island Billhook could see a
conical hill on the coast of Van Diemen's Land. In the evening, a single line of smoke bloomed from the top.

“See that smoke?” he asked the Policeman. “On top of the mountain over there.”

“It's the blackfellas,” said the Policeman. “The fellas. That's why the Worthies light a fire up here too.” He gestured behind him to the dark shapes of the women laying swathes of green branches over a frugal flame. A quick burst of smoke floated into the sky. “They're saying hello back to their fellas. Hello. Goodnight. Whatever they say.”

“Worthies?”

“Titters. Tyreelore. Island Wives. Worth their weight, Billhook. We'd starve without 'em, hear me.”

The women worked hard in the sea and on the land, the Policeman said. Scraping skins, collecting salt, hunting tammar and giving succour to men who smelt like muttonbird and seal. He talked of muttonbirding. The women went out to the muttonbird grounds with their dogs, spent the day putting their arms down burrows until their faces touched the ground. They showed the Straitsmen how to do this when they were first taken to the islands. Crouch down and thrust your arm into the hole after the parent birds had gone out hunting for fish. Crouch down until the grass and stones scratched your cheek. Feel the wriggle, the bleating heart of the fluffy chick, its feeble pecking at your hand, haul it out, break its neck over a stick, leave it on the ground for one of the other women to thread onto a stick before the dogs got to it. The worst job was draining the oil from the muttonbirds after they were plucked, and squeezing out the gurry. And the black snakes in the muttonbird burrows. Snakes everywhere. Lurking in the bushes they called barking barillas. Full of snakes after baby chicks and eggs. But no one ever seemed to get bitten by the snakes. Sometimes they felt
the dry slither of a tail but if snake felt you coming they left you alone.

“You hunt and clean muttonbirds too?”

“Nah,” said the Policeman. “That's the Worthies' job. That woman Mary,” the Policeman pointed to one of the women. “She's the wallaby woman. She's got six dogs. Between all the women there be twenty-eight dogs so they're a job to feed. Fine dogs they are. Quick and quiet. Like the lurchers from the old country. Their husbands steal them from the shepherds over on the mainland, or trade them and breed them up. Good hunters they are. Never rush a mob of kangaroo without knowing which one they want. Twenty roo in one day once and the Worthies had their skins pegged out by dinnertime. She's good with dogs, that Mary, but she's gettin' difficult. I reckon she'll be aboard with you lot.”

The Policeman sold Boss Davidson two women, Dancer and Mary, to take west aboard the
Governor Brisbane
. The strong one, the woman Bailey had pointed out to Billhook, the Policeman wanted to keep her. He was attached to her, he said. He fingered the hard edges of the sealskins that Jimmy had traded him for Dancer. Behind him, a girl child of about eight peered around the doorway and spoke to Mary in her native language. The Policeman turned and spat, “Git!” and she snapped her head out of sight.

In the morning Boss sent his crew in to the island. On the shore, Dancer and Mary waited until the pigs were dumped in the bottom of the dinghy and then climbed aboard and sat on the warm carcasses. Mary turned her face away from the island and from her dogs, which milled about the shoreline, crying for her.

The
Governor Brisbane
shipped out midmorning. Billhook looked down from his spar in alarm as Dancer began to wail
loudly. She and Mary sat huddled on the foredeck, Dancer's face greying as the swell rose. She cried out in her language and threw up. Boss Davidson, standing at the wheel, grinned at her and shook his head.

“You must have a padlock on yer arse, Dancer, shitting through yer teeth like that.”

“The water makes her sick,” said Mary and stroked Dancer's short cap of hair. She took her amulet pouch and sprinkled something powdery and red into Dancer's outstretched palm. Then she held the pouch against Dancer's belly and spoke in swift, watery language. “And there's Devil in this sea 'ere,” she called to Boss Davidson, and Boss nodded like he knew what she was saying.

Mary was right. Currents sucked away from sandbars and surged into strange whirlpools. Westerly winds crashed into the easterly swell, complicating the backwash from the rocky cliffs. It was a glad feeling to be away from the islands and into the open sea, away from those uncanny surges, to see the islands sink away and become a mere smudge on the horizon, the sea glittering with an aslant sun and deep blue, rising up to meet the schooner. Dancer quit her crying and vomiting when the islands were out of sight.

They butchered the two pigs on the first afternoon and salted the pork into barrels. They used most of the salt aboard as Boss had plans to get more at Kangaroo Island.

“There's a few tars there too, who'll want a lay,” he said that evening.

Kangaroo Island came up on the horizon on the morning of the fourth day. The island rose out of the sea like a beast in the heat's magic haze. They sailed through the Backstairs Passage, where Jimmy the Nail, who'd lived there, told Billhook that a woman had escaped her island captors by swimming seventeen
miles back to the mainland. “With a baby strapped to her back.” They sailed past the cliffs of the cape and into Newland Bay. Billhook, Bailey and Jimmy the Nail rowed the dinghy towards a white shore, the boat swishing over seagrass beds, the water flattened by the lee of the island. It began to rain softly.

Three men and a woman ran down the rocky hill to where the boat rocked in the shallows. Dogs yapped around their legs. Two more black women dressed in wallaby smocks and knit caps dragged sacks of salt along the beach. One of the women smoked a pipe as she worked.

“See those tars?” Jimmy the Nail pointed to the men gathered on the beach to watch them wade ashore. “See their uniforms? Those ones still wearin' slops. By the time they been here five years they'll be in skins like the blackfellas and will have some say in matters. Now see that bloke. That's Jim Kirby. He bin here a while.”

Kirby was red-faced with hair once orange and now faded to a bright yellow. His long beard was red and white. He was dressed in skins which he couldn't have cured too well for they smelled bad and rotted off his body, falling into tatters about his knees.