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‘My last orders put me in charge of this old lady,’ the shipmaster said, nodding at the ship by the pier. A young koala ambling past started and stared at the three of them—Hilda, her father and him, Mr Woulfe, as they stood under the leichhardt tree by the wharf. ‘She’s beautiful in her own way.’ The shipmaster turned so the barbed shadows of tree branches moved over his face. ‘A two-masted brig come sailing straight out of history, eh, with that square-rigged foremast and a gaff-rigged main. See how well she sits in the water?’

Hilda pressed her lips together as she looked at the ship. It had been floated into the town of Mackay to pick up stores from its anchorage at the mouth of the river, for the harbour waters were too shallow to risk its keel on anything but a high tide. A vessel such as that was no object of beauty to Hilda. She saw only a tall ship such as buccaneers once loved, an 80-foot instrument of crime, with a high poop deck, painted slate-grey and stained with iron, the name Liberty in flaking red letters on the stern.

Liberty… what a name for a kidnapper’s ship! Hilda thought. And that black streak running fore and aft just beneath the covering board; everyone in the town of Mackay knew the regulations forced blackbirders to paint their vessels in that manner—a most degrading mark. And, as her papa had explained, sometime on their voyage, when the ‘recruiting’ of islanders began, a black ball announcing that shameful intention must be hoisted to the mainmast.

Hilda turned back to the shipmaster to find him grinning broken-toothed at her. He enjoyed being a slubberdegullion, with that battered felt hat pushed back and his shirt hanging out at one end. He stood like an oversized black bulldog listening with head cocked to the warbling and carolling of magpies in the leichhardt tree above. He’s every bit the cruel boy catcher of little black birds implied by that horrid name for slave-traders, she thought. A blackbirder!

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