“She probably would be.” The matron sighed. Peering at the ledger, she ran a line through Evangeline’s name.

When the prisoners were discharged, the guards led the shuffling procession down the stairs, moving slowly so they wouldn’t tumble like dominoes. As she stood outside the tall black gates, Evangeline felt like a bear emerging from a cave, blinking into the early morning light.

The sky overhead was the warm white of fresh muslin, the leaves of the elms lining the street lily-pad green. A spray of birds rose, confetti-like, from a tree. It was an ordinary day in the city: a flower monger setting up his stall, horses and buggies clattering down Bailey Street, men in black waistcoats and top hats striding along the sidewalk, a boy calling in a high, thin voice, “Pork pies! Hot cross buns!”

Two ladies were strolling arm in arm, one in walnut brocaded satin, the other in a watery blue silk, both tightly corseted, with puffed upper sleeves that tapered fashionably to the wrist. Their parasols were ornamental, their bonnets tied with velvet bows. The one in blue caught sight of the manacled female prisoners and stopped in her tracks. Lifting a gloved hand to her mouth, she whispered in the other lady’s ear. The two of them turned abruptly in the opposite direction.

Evangeline looked down at her heavy chains and burlap apron. She must seem a specter to them, she realized—barely human.

As she stood with the guards and the other prisoners near the street, a carriage with boarded-up windows, drawn by two black horses, clip-clopped to a stop in front of them. Half shoving, half lifting each woman, one of the guards managed to load them inside, where they sat across from each other, two by two, on rough wooden planks. When the guard closed the door and locked it, the interior was pitch dark. Springs wheezed as he took his place beside the driver. Evangeline strained to hear their voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

The crack of a whip, the whinny of a horse. The carriage jolted forward.

It was stuffy inside the carriage. As the wheels creaked along the cobblestones, Olive bumping against her at every turn, Evangeline felt a bead of perspiration slide from her forehead to the tip of her nose. In an absentminded gesture that had become a habit, she found the edge of Cecil’s handkerchief under her dress with her fingertips. Sitting on the hard plank in the dark, she listened for clues. Finally, the caw-caws of seagulls, men yelling in the distance, the air sharp with brine: they must be near the water. The slaving ship. Her heart began to thump.

Mathinna

We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. The Government must remove the natives—if not, they will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!

—The Colonial Times (Tasmania), December 1, 1826

Flinders Island, Australia, 1840

The early morning air was cool, with a steady rain. Under a weeping pine, Mathinna pulled the wallaby skin around her shoulders and gazed out at the hairy brown ferns and the cloud gardens of moss hanging above, listening to the shirring rain and the chirping crickets. Fingering the delicate shells on the necklace looped twice around her neck, she thought about her predicament. She wasn’t frightened of being alone in the forest, despite the tiger snakes that hid under logs and the venomous black spiders in their invisible webs. She feared more what awaited her back at the settlement.

Before Mathinna was born, Wanganip had told her, Mathinna’s sister, Teanic, had been yanked out of her father’s arms by British settlers attempting to capture him. Teanic was sent to the Queen’s Orphan School near Hobart Town and they never saw her again. It was rumored that she died of influenza at the age of eight, but the Palawa had never been told that directly.

Mathinna did not want to be kidnapped like her sister.

After Wanganip died, Mathinna’s stepfather, Palle, had done his best to comfort her. With one arm around her as they sat near the crackling campfire, he told her stories about the Palawa gods, so different from the one they were now forced to worship. The two main deities were brothers descended from the sun and the moon. Moinee made the land and rivers. Droemerdene lived in the sky, having taken the form of a star. He crafted the first human from a kangaroo, fashioning knee joints so the man could rest and removing the cumbersome tail.

Since the first Palawa was created, Palle told her, they had walked many miles a day. Lean and fit and small of stature, they roamed from the bush to the sea and to the top of the mountains, carrying their food and tools and eating utensils in bags woven from grass. Smeared with a layer of seal grease to protect them from the wind and cold, they hunted kangaroo and wallaby and other beasts with spears honed with stone knives and with wooden clubs called waddies. From campsite to campsite they carried water in kelp vessels and smoldering coals in baskets made of bark. They ate abalone and oysters and used the sharp edges of leftover shells to cut meat.

Long ago, their country had extended across what were now the waters of the Bass Strait, but one day the rising sea sliced the island from the continent. Ever since, the Palawa had lived on Lutruwita in splendid isolation. There was usually enough to eat; the water was fresh and wildlife plentiful. They built domed huts out of tree bark and twisted wide strands of bark into canoes. They crafted long necklaces, like those Mathinna’s mother made, from vivid green Mariner shells the size of baby teeth and wore ceremonial red ochre in their hair. Many tribesmen wore raised scars shaped like suns and moons on their shoulders and arms and torsos, carved into their skin and filled with powdered charcoal. Their stories, spoken and sung, were passed from one generation to the next.

Unlike the British, Palle said, spitting on the ground with contempt, the Palawa did not need brick structures or constricting costumes or muskets to feel content. They coveted nothing and stole nothing. There were twelve nations, each containing half a dozen clans, each with a different language, and there was no word for property in any of them. The land was simply part of who they were.

Or perhaps more accurately, he said, they were part of the land.

It had been two hundred years since the first white men came to their shores—strange-looking creatures with freakishly pale skin, like white worms or ghosts out of legends. They appeared as soft as oysters, but the spears they carried roared with fire. For many years the only white people hardy enough to remain through the winter were the whalers and sealers, many of whom were so crude and vicious they seemed to the Palawa half man, half beast. Even so, over time, a bartering system developed. The Palawa traded crawfish and muttonbirds and kangaroo skins for white sugar, tea, tobacco, and rum—vile substances that took root in their brains and stomachs, Palle told Mathinna, fueling cravings and dependence.

Since the day the invaders arrived on—and named—Van Diemen’s Land, they were as relentless as a rising tide. They seized the land and pushed the Palawa farther and farther into the mountains. The grasslands and open bush, their kangaroo and wallaby hunting grounds, became grazing pastures for sheep, penned in by fences. The Palawa loathed these stupid bleating animals that clogged their routes and pathways. They refused to eat their stinking meat and burned the fences that impeded their movements. Fearing the shepherds who had no qualms about killing them when they came near, they fought back the only way they could, with ambush and subterfuge.

A decade before Mathinna was born, the so-called Black War decimated the tribes. The white men, the Palawa realized too late, were devoid of morality. They lied while smiling at you and thought nothing of luring you into traps. The Palawa fought in vain with rocks and spears and waddies against roving parties of convicts and settlers who had been officially authorized by the British government to capture or kill any natives on sight. These men roamed the island with kangaroo dogs, hunting the Palawa for sport. As the Palawa continued to elude them, their tactics became more cunning. They camouflaged steel traps with eucalyptus leaves. They bound the men to trees and used them for target practice. They raped and enslaved Palawa women, infecting them with diseases that left them barren. They burned them with brands and dashed the brains of their children on the rocks.