Ellie tossed a log on the campfire. Sparks shot into the darkness, flames flared.She scanned the circle of faces lit by the glow, six friends she’d known forever. Yes, it was good to be together again. Almost like old times. So why did this fury and restlessness linger?

She shivered, held out her hands to the heat. The night was chilly after the rain, so they all sat huddled in jumpers. The guys had caught a jewfish in the surf and they’d pan-fried it over the fire, baked potatoes and chunks of corn in the embers. You burnt and blackened your fingers that way, but it made you feel wild and free like pioneers, not a bunch of young professionals from the Sydney suburbs.

Around midnight they drank hot chocolate and toasted marshmallows. While the others joked about their plans for the year ahead — buy a batik business in Bali, back the winner in the Melbourne Cup, get a boob job — Ellie laughed with them, dodging the doubts. No, she’d made the right decision, leaving Brad. She was an independent woman now.

‘What’s your New Year’s wish?’ Cindy Chang asked her.

‘A better job, worthy of my brilliance.’

The others laughed with her but Nic bridled. 

‘Lots of history graduates would kill to work in that museum.’

‘It’s like being buried alive. I want to be out in the real world, not stuck down in the archives.’

They all fell silent.

A greenish light glowed through the canvas when she woke and for the first time in ages happiness woke with her. She pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, unzipped the flap and crawled out to the fresh morning air. The tents were pitched among the trees. A half-charred log lay like a twisted arm on last night’s campfire. Towels and wetsuits hung on a fence by the bush, bikes and surfboards leaned against it.

Butch lay in a hammock strung between two trunks. He reached out a sleepy arm but it was only a game. The blokes knew how things stood.

‘Hey, Ellie. Up early. How you going?’

‘I’m good, off for a jog on the beach.’

‘My head’s spinning like a sledgehammer hit it. Think I had one beer too many.’

‘That fish was wicked, though.’

In the clear morning light she made her way past the cabins and up a track through the bush. She kicked off her thongs, felt the sand cool under her feet, just like snow must be. Dad said it was soft and powdery when it first fell. Here, though, it never snowed. The undergrowth was vibrant, thick with ferns and coarse grasses. Pale patches scarred the tree trunks where the bark had peeled. Some were black from a recent fire.

Her foot pressed on something sharp and she bent to look. A tiny starfish. She cupped it in her palm, a sunburst with five golden rays, the underside a mass of fibres mottled cream and fawn, then slipped it into her pocket and moved on towards the distant boom of the surf. The sound lifted something inside her, restlessness, uncertainty, life’s vastness and complexity. Freedom, exhilaration, the yearning to know more.

And Brad had the nerve to call her repressed.

‘She’s stubborn,’ Mum always said but Dad defended her.

‘No, she’s not. Ellie finds her own way. She knows what’s right for her and gets on with it, that’s all.’

She smiled at the memory as she came over the ridge and saw the sky strewn with wisps of clouds that barely moved. The bay curved in a long, lazy sweep, edged with hills that faded into the distance. Way out from the horizon, waves rolled in, set after set, lifted, peaked and curled with a lace of foam that fizzed on the sand.

She stood, drank in the sheer vastness and isolation of this place. Nothing but the open ocean for thousands of miles halfway round the globe.

The sun came out from behind a cloud, the water brightened to a brilliant turquoise and she glimpsed a school of dolphins, their black backs cutting the surface. She watched until they disappeared then started to jog, the sand giving beneath her feet. When her mobile rang she checked it still running. A shaft of surprise made her stop. Mum never called when she was away.

‘Hi, Mum. You okay?’

‘Yes, I’m good but . . .’ Her voice trailed off, hesitant, anxious.

‘Is Karen all right? And baby Will?’ 

‘Yes, they’re here with me now. Listen, Ellie, there’s no easy way to say this . . .’

‘And Dad?’ A chill trickled through her.

‘It’s not good news, honey.’

She gripped the phone so tight it hurt her fingers.

‘He felt a bit odd before he went to bed, indigestion, he said, a discomfort in his chest. So he took some tablets and went to sleep and then . . .’

‘What?’

‘In the middle of the night he cried out and . . . ’

She stared at the ocean. The relentless waves. A cormorant perched on a rock.

‘He didn’t feel anything, darling. He didn’t suffer.’

‘I’ll come back,’ she said. ‘Right away.’

She swung round towards the camp and began to run, her voice bouncing with the impact of her body.

‘If I leave now, I’ll be with you by two, three at the latest.’

‘Don’t go too fast, sweetie. You know how dangerous the highway is. I’m okay, Karen will stay with me. Just take care. Love you.’

‘You should have done something!’ Ellie cried but Mum had already ended the call. Anger and impotence surged inside her, fought with the boom of the surf, the pounding of her feet, the thud of her heart.

Smoke rose from the campfire as she drew near. Carl was cooking breakfast. The others stood around chatting. Gabriella’s belly bulged under her maternity smock.

Death, new life.

She stared at Nic perched on Steve’s knee, his hand on her thigh. She wanted to scream, rip things apart.

First Brad, now Dad.

Cockatoos screeched. Cicadas drummed their deafening racket as the sun crept over the hill. She focused on the bush, the tangled vines, the ferns, the spindly paper-bark trees with fine pointed leaves.

‘You’re a koala,’ Dad used to say. He was the only person in the world who had ever understood her. ‘Koalas hide in gum trees and peep through the branches. Or you’re a mollusc. They live in shells that snap shut when anyone threatens them.’

He can’t die, not when I still need him.

The wind lifted and swayed the branches. She caught the scent of eucalyptus oil rising like incense as the leaves stirred. Someone passed her a mug of tea, strong and sweet. They made her eat bacon, pancakes with syrup. Her mouth was so sticky she could barely chew. Each attempt to swallow threatened to choke her. She forced the food down, not sure how long it would stay there, and scrambled to her feet.

Steve shifted Nic from his lap and put Ellie’s bags in the boot of the Subaru.

‘Sure you’re all right? Want me to drive you?’

‘I’ll be okay.’ She was strong, she had to be, this wasn’t happening.

‘Take care,’ they all said, and hugged.

Cindy wanted to go with her. ‘Ellie, you’ve had a shock. You shouldn’t be alone.’

‘No, I need to be. Honest.’

She started the engine and backed out the Subaru, fighting to find an answer. People couldn’t die, not like that, without telling you first. No, that was insane. People died all the time, but not Dad. Maybe Mum had got it wrong, he was in a coma, if they tried hard enough they’d get his heart to beat. She stamped on the brake as a cloud of fury blurred her vision. Mum was a nurse, she should have known what to do. Why couldn’t she have saved him?

No, it must be a mistake. If Dad had died, she’d feel pain not numbness. Life wouldn’t go on as if nothing had happened, families outside their tents eating breakfast, campers coming back from the store, kids throwing balls. No, when she reached home, he’d be there the same as always.

He used to say anything was possible if you held onto it hard enough.The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the immigrants’ dream.

‘I made it, you see. I’m the living proof.’

Ulladulla. Mollymook. Falls Creek. The names of the places she passed had lost their meaning. The Princes Highway curved on and up, swept round and down, the drone of traffic incessant. Near the Nowra State Forest her throat tightened and she let out a shout of pain, a wail of disbelief.

Lake Illawarra passed in a blur and Kanahooka and Wollongong. She came to where planes lifted off from the airport, their bellies huge above the highway. On and on she went, north into the underpass where lights snaked through the darkness, out into daylight till the Harbour Bridge skimmed beneath her and the Spit Bridge lay ahead.

This road was so familiar she could have driven it blindfold. Almost too soon she turned into the driveway alongside the lagoon where Dad’s car was parked. Only it wasn’t his car anymore because he was dead, and the terrible, agonising truth was that she’d never really known him.

She switched off the engine, gripped the steering wheel and stared at the weatherboard bungalow he’d built with his own hands. She’d thought he would be here forever. All the questions she should have asked him, about his family, about England, his childhood, why he’d come here, and now it was too late. If only she’d spent more time with him, instead of distancing herself because of Brad.

‘They’re so cute,’ Brad said when he first met her parents, ‘living in their little time warp. It must be hard for you, Ellie, moving on to the twenty-first century.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Please don’t be angry. You see, my parents split when I was seven. What yours have, monogamy, commitment, it’s so unusual these days. People are different now. Relationships have opened up, shifted, expanded, don’t you think?’

‘What are you getting at?’

His hand rested on hers. ‘You know I’m crazy about you just as you are. I wouldn’t change a thing.’

At the time, she’d felt pacified. She’d hooked a big fish, reeled him in, planned to keep him there. Older, been around a bit, knew what he wanted and meant to have it.

‘The point is, Ellie, can you take me the way I am?’

Of course she should have asked what he meant by that, but back then she didn’t want to know. Not while they played their little game of setting up home together, the perfect couple.

‘Have you heard? Brad Steele? Looks like he’s settling down,’ his friends whispered, eyeing Ellie with awe.

She found out soon enough. Slowly, so that she barely noticed until it was too late.

With a rush of sick fury, she grabbed the keys from the ignition. The screen door opened with a squeak and Mum appeared, her face pale but determined. Karen followed with baby Will in her arms.

Ellie ran to them, they hugged, and the tears she’d been fighting flowed until she sobbed and sobbed as if the pain would never stop.

When the funeral was over and Dad’s belongings sorted and sent to the op shop, emptiness took hold. Nothing in the house had changed but everything was different. She woke in the morning to the strange familiarity of her old room with her childhood books on the shelf and her charcoal drawing of Dad on the wall. As she lay there, her mind turned over memories. They were all she had of him now, a few scraps, scattered like clues that might lead to an understanding of the father she’d loved but barely known.

At eleven o’clock she joined her mother on the veranda for morning tea. Shadows from the jasmine quivered over them. Mum cradled her mug and sighed.

‘I should answer all those condolence cards.’

There were dozens of them, from friends, colleagues, neighbours. Ben Wright from the Canberra, the ship Dad had boarded for the long, slow journey from England.

‘What a time we had of it, bands playing in every port, more food than we could eat. Blighty and post-war austerity seemed a distant nightmare.’

Michael from the migrants’ hostel, Gerry Coombes who’d worked with Dad on a building site, Andy from the chess club, Phil who’d gone through accountancy training with him.

She’d had no idea that so many people knew him, or cared enough to write kind words about how he had touched their lives.

‘I’ll help with the replies if you like, Mum.’

‘Will you have time? What about work?’

‘I’m not due back for a week or so. How about you?’

Mum twisted a spray of blossom that had come loose from the trellis. Her shoulders lifted and dropped.

‘I could take more compassionate leave, but I’d rather get back on the ward and keep busy.’

Her face was set with the determination that Ellie knew so well.

‘Why don’t you go up to Uncle Charlie’s?’

Mum’s childhood home with its acres of sugar cane and mangoes. The hot earthy smell of the red dirt.

Mum lifted her chin.

‘My life is here now, Ellie. I’ll be fine, don’t you worry. It’s a shock but not a surprise. When you marry a much older man you have an inkling that one day you’ll lose him.’

Ellie knew better than to argue. It was survival not hardness. Mum didn’t come of pioneer stock for nothing.

If I could be as strong as her, I’d survive, too.

She gazed at the frangipane tree, its creamy petals tinged with yellow, and a realisation began to crystallise as if the network of branches, leaves and blossoms had given it shape.

‘You know what? I’m sick of the museum. I want to do something with relevance to me, to us, to where we come from, our place in the world.’

‘We all have to work, Ellie.’

‘Poring over documents is so dry.’

‘Didn’t I say it was wrong for you? But of course you wouldn’t listen.’

Give me patience,muttered Ellie and picked up the photos they’d found in Dad’s desk, small monochrome snaps of the childhood he’d never talked about. His father, Ellie’s grandfather, was an Anglican minister, but Dad claimed he’d had enough of religion to last him the rest of his life, so he’d never inflicted it on his children.

Which was just as well, because from what she’d heard, most churches were riddled with intolerance. And all of Australia knew about the scandal of the British orphans who’d been sent to seminaries and treated like slaves.

In the photo, though, Grandad Jack and Grandma Lillian looked like sweet, gentle people. A little harassed, maybe, as they stood with their four children in descending order of age. First was big sister Dorothy, her back straight, her head held high. Next came Dad, in a suit with short trousers and thick knee socks. Beside him was a smaller boy with a scowl, his stomach pushed out. Then baby Frances, the little sister Dad had barely known. She was only a child when he left on the ten pound passage.

‘Have you heard from Aunty Frances?’ Ellie asked.

‘I phoned Dorothy, and she promised to tell her. She did warn us her sister’s hard to track down.’

‘What was his brother called, the one who died?’

‘Bobby.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Some sort of accident, I think. That’s all Dad ever said.’

‘How could he shut away the past like it never existed?’

‘You know how your father was. He always said that things had been difficult and it was best to forget. Anyhow, by the time I met him he’d already been here for twenty years, so he thought of Australia as home.’

Mum gave Ellie one of her looks.

‘It’s no good being sentimental. Migrants have to leave the past behind or they can’t move on. He did a bit of family research after his parents died, and that was enough for him.’

‘But surely he could have gone for a visit? Or they could have come here.’

‘It wasn’t as easy back then, Ellie. The journey took a month by sea and cost a year’s wages. Most people who emigrated never saw their families again.’

‘Mother, I am a history graduate. I know all the facts. But it’s why Dad never talked about them that puzzles me.’

‘You could have asked him. He told you his story often enough.’

Ellie gasped. ‘So that’s it,’ she said.

‘What is?’

‘The reason I’m bored in the museum. Whenever Dad told me about coming out here, he brought his story to life, made it exciting, funny, sad. That’s what inspired me to study history, but all I do now is catalogue dead documents. Take them out of boxes, put them back again.’

‘Well, there you go, Ellie. That’s real life for you. Dreams don’t always turn out the way we want.’

Mum picked up the empty mugs and turned towards the screen door that led to the kitchen.

‘Dad’s did, though, didn’t it?’ Ellie called after her. ‘It brought him here to you, to Karen and me. That’s what he always said. And don’t forget I was only a kid at the time. What he told me was a fairy tale, a fable full of wonder. It never occurred to me to ask if he was upset about leaving his family behind. At least, I don’t think it did . . .’

She stared at the lagoon as her mind travelled back over the years. In her memory, they’re here on the verandah. How old is she? Four? Five? She’s not sure. Dad’s reading the newspaper and she pulls at his sleeve.

‘Tell me your story, Daddy.’

‘What, again?’

He folds up the paper and she climbs on his lap. Over his shoulder, the sky is white with cloud, the lagoon is silver, trembling. Feathery trees stir in the breeze, their roots in the shallow, sandy banks.

Karen isn’t there. Maybe she’s at school or out with her friends. Mum potters around, ties back the jasmine, prunes her roses. As long as she doesn’t butt in, that’s okay. This is Ellie’s special time, just her and Dad.

‘Go on, Daddy’ she says and he opens his eyes wide as if what he’s about to say is the most amazing truth in all the world.

‘I was A Ten Pound Pom.’

He tells her about the war and how the planes came from Japan to bomb Australia. Everyone was terrified, he says, far away from the rest of the world, so the government hatched a plan to bring out more people to help defend the country if it was ever attacked again.

She’s pretty sure they never talk about why he left his family. Maybe because she, Mum and Karen are his family now, and that’s all that matters.

What she does remember is the way he turns all the facts into a game. Like when he tells her how every migrant had to meet three conditions. That’s something she’s never forgotten, because he counts them on her fingers.

‘One, you had to be white, two, you had be healthy, three, you had to speak English.’

‘Like you, Daddy.’

He pulls a funny face, says the trouble was it didn’t work out as they expected. Lots of Aussies resented the Brits for pinching their jobs and as special buses took them to their hostels, locals shook their fists and yelled at them to go home. They even called them rude names. That’s when she whispers the words, so that Mum can’t hear.

‘Pommy bastards.’

Dad chuckles, cuddles her closer and paints more pictures that she can see even now. How they slept eight to a room in old army huts left over from the war, and it was so hot they had to spray water on the tin roofs to cool them. Lots of men were homesick. They’d been conned into thinking Australia was a paradise, but instead there were flies, spiders and poisonous snakes. And it was so dry and dusty that they longed for green fields, sometimes even rain. But they couldn’t go home, because it would mean paying the full fare themselves.

So Dad worked in the docks, saved money and bought a plot of land down by the lagoon in Narrabeen. She knows this bit by heart. How he went to evening classes, learned to be an accountant, made lots more money and built a little weatherboard bungalow the Australian way, on stilts with a tin roof and a dunny in the backyard. This always gives her a warm feeling, because that’s her home, where she lives with him now. So when he says he used to be happy living alone, she asks why he married Mum, even though she knows the answer.

‘Because a snake bit me.’

If Mum hears him, she laughs like it’s a huge joke, but Dad says it’s true — he was rushed to hospital and woke to see this lovely young nurse all dressed in white, with hair the colour of ripe corn and eyes like the sea, and he thought he’d died and gone to heaven.

‘So I got down on my knees, asked her to marry me and took her home to my little wooden shack.’

‘And then you had Karen and then you had me.’

‘Double the trouble.’

‘And twice as nice.’

When the story is all wrapped up, she rests her head on his chest while Mum has her say.

‘You spoil that child, Jimmy. You’re much too soft with her.’

‘No, I don’t, do I, Ellie Belly?’ He buries his mouth on her tummy, blows hot and hard and loud until she laughs so much she has to beg him to stop.

That’s all she remembers. The bits that matter. The rest of his life — England, his family, the people he left behind — is no more than a blur of names on birthday cards, strange stamps, ghosts from another world. Reality has always been here, in Narrabeen, the lagoon, the weatherboard house.

Until now.

Because now she can see that she knew only a part of him. The part he allowed her to see. Oh yes, she knew him, but not what shaped him, before he came here.

Maybe that was enough while he was with her, but now that he’s gone she needs more than memories and a few old photos. She yearns to find what lay under the surface — his motivations, experiences, hopes and fears. Because, both as a daughter and a historian, she knows that what lies hidden is probably the most significant of all.

The following weekend, when Ellie went to search for a screwdriver to mend a broken rowlock on the dinghy, she came across a box of Dad’s bits and pieces. It was under a pile of junk in the garage where he kept his tools and tackle, the only place they hadn’t got round to clearing.

At the bottom of the box, under coils of wire, was a foolscap envelope with her name scrawled in pencil. She opened it and out slid a book, faded and spotted with age. The dust cover was grey, with a yellow lozenge behind the title.

Surprised by Joy — The Shape of My Early Life.

Apart from its historical value, the book meant nothing to Ellie, so why was her name on the envelope? Maybe Dad had recycled an old one. She flicked through the pages. The text seemed to be about atheism. Dad must have read it as a young man and brought it with him when he emigrated, because the date of publication was 1955, which was several years before he left.

The epigraph was a quotation from the Wordsworth poem that had given the book its title.

Tucked in the back of the book, she found a postcard and a photo. The card was a faded shot of The Three Sisters, the famous rock towers in the Blue Mountains, where they’d often spent family holidays. She could remember Dad telling her and Karen about the legend.

‘The three sisters were turned into stone because they’d fallen in love with men from the wrong tribe. And they’re still waiting, three huge rocks that tower up from the forest, for someone to come along and break the spell.’

‘Ellie,’ came Mum’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Your coffee’s getting cold.’

‘Won’t be a minute.’

The other side of the postcard was blank. Maybe he’d just used it as a bookmark. She glanced at the photo. A child in an old-fashioned cozzie was squinting against the sun and licking an ice-cream. Her hair was gold and wavy like Karen’s, but the style and muted colour of the swimsuit were from an earlier era.

‘Who’s this?’ Ellie asked Mum when she joined her in the kitchen.

Mum agreed it wasn’t Karen. Maybe one of Dad’s sisters, she said, probably Dorothy, because Frances looked darker in all the photos they’d seen.

Ellie didn’t mention the book, but after coffee she took it to her room and opened it again. On a blank page just inside the cover was a handwritten dedication: To my dear son, Jimmy, from Daddy, September 1958. Jimmy, Ellie’s Dad, would have been eighteen or nineteen at the time. But September wasn’t the month of his birthday, and the date was a couple of years before he emigrated. So what was the reason for the gift?

As she mulled over the possibilities, it struck her that a book about atheism was a strange choice for a minister to give his non-believing son. She scanned down the resume inside the dust cover. It summarised the author’s search for joy as a spiritual journey that saw him move from the Christianity of his childhood to atheism and then, through theism, to Christianity again.

So that was it. Grandad Jack must have hoped to persuade Dad that he was wrong, and win him back to the fold. Ellie couldn’t help smiling. If that was his plan, then poor old Grandad had failed completely. But why had Dad brought the book to Australia? The only reason Ellie could think of, the only plausible explanation, was that he’d treasured it as a gift from the father he was leaving behind. The content wasn’t what mattered to him, it was the inscription. That must be why he’d written Ellie’s name on the envelope. Dad, too, had intended it as a gift, an heirloom for her, his much-loved child.

Then what was the significance of the photo? She checked it against snaps of Aunt Dorothy. Yes, she could see a resemblance, but this child’s hair was curlier, her face thinner. The eyes were difficult to make out because they were screwed up against the sun. As for the style of the hair and the cozzie, Ellie’s instinct as a historian nudged her towards a date in the fifties or sixties, which was too late for Dorothy and too early for Karen.

She looked again at the postcard, the only item that was familiar to her. Was it there by chance or had Dad intended it as some kind of clue? He’d written her name on the envelope. Was he trying to tell her something? She was well aware that he loved nothing more than a puzzle. Crosswords, treasure trails and secret codes were the games of her childhood. Had he left these items as some sort of cryptic gift?

The sun that shone into her bedroom faded, as if a shadow had passed over the fly screen. An unthinkable possibility gripped her. Did she and Karen have another sister, one born before Dad came out here?

She peered more closely at the photo. There was definitely a family likeness, not to Ellie because she was dark like Dad, but to Karen and Aunt Dorothy. The era seemed right, too, around the time that Dad had emigrated.

What was more, he’d put the photo inside a British book, with an Australian postcard, which also suggested a link.

But if he did have another child, and wanted Ellie to know about her, why not tell Karen, too? And why go about it in such an obscure way, leaving the envelope in the garage on the off-chance that she’d find it?

It took a surprisingly long time for the answer to click into place. The light from the window brightened and fell in a wedge of sunshine. Somewhere in the distance a voice called, and another replied.

Because he didn’t know he was going to die yet, you idiot. And because you’re a historian, and research is what you do.

‘Karen builds,’ Dad said when his elder daughter began to train as an architect. ‘You dig, Ellie, and put pieces together.’