What the records don't show about the crossing

I run my own accounting practice in Perth and my knowledge of financial records is precise and extensive. I also know that records show what someone decided to write down, and the crossing from Portsmouth to Fremantle in 1844 was not well documented by the people on the ship. I have been researching convict-era Western Australia for six years because my great-great-grandmother arrived on the *William Jardine* in 1852 as a free settler who came with her convict husband and who left absolutely no personal record of what that journey was or what she expected when the ship entered the Sound. The historical romance I'm writing imagines her. It does not pretend to be history. I live in a suburb of Perth that didn't exist when she arrived, which is a fact I keep returning to. The city she arrived at and the city I live in share a coastline and almost nothing else. I write on weekends and on Tuesday evenings, which are the only parts of my week that don't belong to client work. I've been writing the same novel for four years and it is almost finished. My book group, five women who meet near Subiaco on the last Thursday of the month, have read draft chapters and told me I'm not allowed to give up.