My second pregnancy came with uncontrollable morning sickness. I'd had some nausea with my first, but this time it was revolting and it went on for the full first trimester. I was teaching a heavy load in two different undergraduate subjects, in two different disciplines, and my schedule left no room for morning sickness. I often had to hurriedly devise group work, so I could dash to the nearest bathroom. My life consisted of teaching, marking, caring for a demanding toddler who had a tendency to climb every piece of furniture he could find and generally put his life in danger, and stressing about my unfinished novel. My husband worked insane hours to make the mortgage payments (my casual teaching barely scraped minimum wage, despite the long hours) and I barely saw him. I was prone to lying awake in the depths of the night, worrying about money, worrying about my career, and worrying about the damn book.

Art Spiegelman was my companion on many of those sleepless nights. Artie, the mouse-masked narrator of Maus, articulated the fears I had about my research. He made me feel less alone in the long night.

Art Spiegelman's Maus

If there was an answer to my novel's problems, I figured Spiegelman might well have it.

In late 2011 I was approached about turning the exegesis from my Creative Writing PhD into a book. I was flattered, but also apprehensive about returning to the Holocaust material after three years away from it. What excited me was the idea of embodying the experience of a creative PhD. Over the course of my PhD I'd lived multiple lives, switching between the roles of researcher, academic, teacher, daughter, partner, wife and mother. This isn't unusual: we all lead multiple existences, slipping in and out of roles on a daily basis. But with my work, which consisted of a novel about a Holocaust-obsessed waitress named Molly (End of the Night Girl, published by Wakefield Press in 2011) and an essay called ‘Navigating the Kingdom of Night’, I knew that each and every one of those selves had contributed to the work. They were all part of the creative process. I wanted to try and capture how those different ‘me's’ had been part of my thinking and writing.

Easier said than done. In the first draft of this book I separated out the two main voices, ‘Everyday Amy’ and ‘Academic Amy’, because that was how my thinking had worked throughout my PhD; there were always two modes of operating and two voices in my head. After two degrees and a year of Honours, the critical mode came naturally to me.

Why? That was the first question anyone asked me when I said I was writing a novel about the Holocaust. It's a question I've struggled to answer. Who am I to write about the Shoah? I'm not Jewish, I'm not German; I don't have any familial connection; I have no direct sense of guilt or responsibility. I'm an Australian woman (of mongrel heritage, with no sense of belonging to any nation other than Australia), born in the late twentieth century, distanced from the Holocaust by time, nationality, geography, culture, language and experience. Like many of my generation my first exposure to the Holocaust was reading The Diary of Anne Frank, seeing fragments of documentaries on weekend TV, and meeting the Nazis as cartoonish villains in the movies, as they dabbled in the supernatural and were frustrated by Indiana Jones.

I have one strong memory from childhood. It was the mid-1980s (I want to say 1986, but who can be sure?) and I was around ten years old. I was watching Sunday afternoon television with my grandmother. Grandma Matthews was a powerful presence in my life; calm, quiet, white-haired and sweet, she was a cliché of a grandmother. Everyone in the family loved her. I was the first grandchild and I've always been curious (okay, maybe nosy is a better word). I loved asking questions about the way things used to be, way back when.

A brief outline of the debate about fictionalising the Holocaust

Here's the thing about reading: it shows you what you don't know. It took me less than half a day in the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide to realise the enormity of my hubris. By the end of the day not only had I doubled my doubts about the project, I'd also gained a nemesis called Adorno. For most of the next decade I half-imagined he followed me around, grunting disapprovingly at my reading material, and glaring over my shoulder as I tried to write.

The critic Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (‘Cultural Criticism’ 34). Out of context it seems blunt and accusatory; absolute. There's no room for discussion. But it's also bewildering. What exactly does he mean? How is it barbaric? The first few times I encountered Adorno's dictate, it was out of context, embedded in someone else's critical argument. What was confusing was how it was wielded in different ways. It seemed there was some difference of opinion about his exact meaning. Critics have interpreted his words in a multitude of ways: Susan Gubar believes his statement was ‘sometimes taken to be an admonition (beware of writing poetry), sometimes a directive (poetry ought not be written), sometimes simply a diagnosis (poetry cannot be written)’ (4). Which was it? I felt more desperate the more I read, because each of these interpretations has a different implication for writers.

It's better than sex. Ok, I said it. I admit I said it. My writing friends have made fun of me for years over that comment. I have a tendency to exaggerate, but I wasn't far off the mark. Being in flow is a kind of heightened arousal, not unlike falling in love (or lust). All of your senses are sharper and there's kind of a manic edge to your thought processes. Everything connects to your work, everything feeds into your writing: every gesture other people make, every comment, every book you read, every TV show you see. Your synapses snap and your blood sings and it's just a wonderful thing.

But it's rare. With some projects you have to swim a long way out before you can catch that current (and sometimes you never do). Most writing is hard graft. But then there are those sublime times when you're in flow. And while maybe it's not better than sex, it's as least as good as sex. And not standard missionary position sex; I'm talking life-changing, fireworks exploding, blow-your-mind sex.

When Molly finally showed up, she dragged me into flow. I sat down to write those 20 pages for Nick Jose, and there she was. She came spilling out and just took over. Why hadn't she come earlier? Truthfully, I think I was blocking her. Real World Amy's life was too close to Molly's and when I tried to write all I got was my own life.

When we pick up a book, I suggest, we have expectations. We may not even be aware of them, and we don't spend much time analysing how those expectations are formed and how they're influencing our experience of the book, but they do exist, as we discover every time there's a great literary scandal surrounding ‘fraudulent’ writers who have ‘misrepresented’ themselves and their work. Think of James Frey, Norma Khouri, Mudrooroo, and, in the case of Holocaust literature, Benjamin Wilkomirski, Jerzy Kosinski and Helen Demidenko.

The relationship between reader/author/text is a complex one. There is an invisible, unspoken contract: the reader expects the author and text to hold true to this contract, even though the terms can be shifting, misunderstood, manipulated and even unacknowledged. The questions of author intent and ‘what the book is’ (what it claims to be, what it is marketed as, what the cover and blurb say it is trying to be, what the author says about it in interviews) are of heightened importance when it comes to Holocaust literature, because of the ‘moral perils’. The success of Eliach's, Foer's and Boyne's narratives rely on clear contracts with the reader. Young's concerns about whether Eliach is credited as ‘editor’ or ‘author’ are concerns about the clarity of the reader/author contract. Editing is one thing, authoring another — in Young's opinion it is important that the reader know and understand which is which in the case of the text. Because they assume different modes of reading.

One of the most precious items in the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is a delicate, double-shafted feather. Placed on a cushion, overlaid with plastic and locked in a glass case, it is considered too valuable to be put on public display. This is the only confirmed feather in Australia of Dromaius ater, the dwarf emu of King Island, Bass Strait, extinct in the wild since 1805.

The feather was a gift from the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. The original owner of the feather was captured during Nicolas Baudin's 1800-1804 voyage of discovery to the southern lands. The owner of the original owner of the feather was at one time Madame Bonaparte, soon to be Empress Josephine. Baudin expedition naturalist François Péron documented the only detailed description of the emu's life history, and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur's illustrations are the only visual record of a living individual. This bird was at one time so valued that he and another dwarf emu appear in the medallion on the frontispiece of the Atlas accompanying the only State-sanctioned account of the expedition, Péron's Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes (Figure 6.1).

When Nicolas Baudin returned to France in June 1798 following his successful expedition to the West Indies, the Director of the Paris Museum, Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, was moved to write to the Minister of Marine and the Colonies recommending that another scientific mission be entrusted to this “excellent mariner” so that the nation might benefit further from his talents. In his enthusiasm, Jussieu declared that “the experience of the past and the knowledge of his former achievements make us believe that he follows worthily in the steps of Bougainville, La Pérouse and d'Entrecasteaux, and that he will be more fortunate than the last two.” Just under two years later, Jussieu would be granted his wish: in April 1800, the First Consul, Bonaparte, signed off on a proposal for a new voyage of discovery to the Southern Lands, under the command of Nicolas Baudin. The fates—or as one member of Baudin's team would have it, Clio, the Muse of History in person—seemed to have smiled upon the newly commissioned captain.

Despite Jussieu's firm belief, however, the captain was not to enjoy a happier fate than La Pérouse or d'Entrecasteaux, nor did Clio's patronage extend to the voyage itself. For Baudin had enemies, and they were so successful in blackening his reputation that they managed to cast a shadow over the entire undertaking.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean became the distant stage on which various European powers played out their struggle for dominion. The Spanish had been masters of this region of the globe since Ferdinand Magellan's memorable crossing at the beginning of the sixteenth century. A succession of Spanish ships followed in Magellan's wake, discovering in the process a number of the Pacific Ocean's island groups and, most importantly for Spain, paving the way for what would prove to be an enduring and lucrative trade route between Mexico in the east and the Philippines in the west. The renowned Manila galleons that plied this route provided Spain with considerable economic benefits. They also gave a degree of substance to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas and the 1529 Agreement of Saragossa that had granted Spain putative sovereignty over the Pacific. For well over two hundred years, then, and notwithstanding the occasional foray into this region by privateers or state-sponsored vessels of other nations, the Pacific Ocean remained essentially the preserve of the Spanish.

As far as the rest of Europe was concerned, this great ocean, representing roughly one third of the earth's surface, was afforded little more than peripheral status during this extended period. That situation changed dramatically over the course of the eighteenth century, as other European nations, spurred on by a variety of often intertwined motives (commercial, strategic, scientific…), began to venture into the Pacific.

Divergence and Convergence in World History

Divergence and convergence—these are the two great tidal movements which have shaped human history. From the remote origins of humankind in Africa, the history of humankind was largely characterised by divergence, with the history of the great Polynesian diaspora into the uncharted seas of the Pacific forming the last major chapter of this great scattering of humanity. This great outward wave of human settlement found its furthest shore with the settling of New Zealand around the period 1000–1200 AD. But this was also the period when the tide of human outward settlement began to recede, drawing together an increasing number of peoples and cultures which had once existed in relative isolation. As Northrup, to whose 2005 article I am indebted for this way of looking at world history (along with the recent works by the McNeills and Fernandez-Armesto), argues, from 1000 onwards we are increasingly in an age of convergence as different societies were more and more linked together in what eventually became a global network. In Europe, for example, from the time of the First Crusade of 1096–1099, Europe was in increasing, if belligerent, contact with its Islamic neighbours and its contact with a still wider world grew as the rapid expansion of the Mogul Empire in the thirteenth century drew together chains of connection that stretched to the Far East.