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been often told, and yet I wonder if we give full weight to the trauma of those years. The fact that there is no Thanksgiving in Australian culture is no small thing.
    Many a guard, wrote Watkin Tench, have I seen mount in which the soldiers without shoes exceeded that which had yet preserved remnants of leather.
    Nor, he continued, was another part of our domestic economy less whimsical. If a lucky man who had knocked down a dinner with his gun, or caught a fish by angling from the rocks, invited a neighbour to dine with him, the invitation always ran, 'Bring your own bread.' Even at the governor's table this custom was constantly observed. Every man when he sat down pulled his bread out of his pocket and laid it by his plate.
    The insufficiency of our ration soon diminished our execution of labour. Both soldiers and convicts pleaded such a loss of strength as to find themselves unable to perform their accustomed tasks. The hours of public work were accordingly strengthened or, rather, every man was ordered to do as much as his strength would permit . . .
    While Tench fretted, the indigenous people ate possum and snake and feasted on bunya seeds and a huge variety of wild food which the invaders would not touch to save their very lives. They did not learn either. A century later the explorer Burke died of starvation in a landscape where healthy families of Aboriginals were going about their daily business.
    It is not romantic or wishful to say that the Aboriginal people made their religion from this earth and its conservation. Their stories grew from the land and were laced through the land and provided detailed instructions for the care of the land. Yet we know that, even when these stories are told to us, we are getting The Dummies' Guide. This is the condition of being a non-indigenous Australian; to know the land itself is like the index to a bible which we cannot read.
    This then puts those who can read the stories in the role of priests and that is unbearably sentimental to outsiders (and many insiders too) but may further illuminate Granta's opinion that Aboriginals provided 'an unpunishing version of Catholicism; the sacred suppliers of art, mystery, tourism, identity and guilt'.
    There is another complication in the imagined dialogue between Us and Them. White Australia still has a strongly underdog culture, one that grew directly out of the experiences of transportation, exile. So even if the convicts raped and murdered blacks (which they certainly did) they also left for succeeding white generations a keen nose for injustice.
    The peculiar history of Sydney has left us with two sets of underdogs in the cultural dynamic. Judging our ancestors' behaviour with our ancestors' values, we find their behaviour abhorrent.
    And if Jack and Sheridan and Kelvinator will, at every turn, consider where the Aboriginals walked, fished, burned, this is not simply romantic or even guilty talk, just white men finally learning about the country that they love.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    UNRULY KELVIN DRAGGED THE chart away from his friend Lester and carried it to the table by the pool. The map showed the east coast of Australia and Lester's extraordinarily neat recording of their yacht's progress through the murderous seas of the 1998 Sydney-Hobart race.
    We followed the rhumb line, said Kelvinator.
    No we bloody didn't, said Lester. The rhumb line, he explained to me, is the direct line from Sydney to Hobart, and that's where the flat-out racers go, in the shallow water by the coast. It's called rock-hopping.
    Kelvin peered belligerently at the chart. I thought we followed the rhumb line, he said. But he stood back now and allowed his friend to control the map.
    Jesus, Kelvin, where were you?
    On deck, Kelvin snorted, when I had to be. He uncorked a second bottle of Pinot Noir and filled our glasses.
    Lester had come straight from his office in a dark Italian suit. It was hard to imagine him on any deck, but now he retrieved his chart and