We were at Solomons Jewels, on the outskirts of the Walls of Jerusalem National Park in Tasmania, my father and I. I must have been in my late teens, and my father had become passionate about hiking in the island state’s remote mountains and forests. As a young man, before he met my mother, before they had a family, he’d worked for a time on the roads in south-west Tasmania. Now, decades later, he’d returned to the island state, his passion perhaps reignited by the fact that his two children, my brother and I, were old enough to join him on deep hikes into the forest and mountains as something approaching equals.

First he took my older brother to Frenchmans Cap, hiking through kilometres of mud – a trip which would become notorious within the folklore of our family. Then he took me along the Overland Track, then to Mount Anne: one of my favourite photos is of us both in our hiking gear – shorts and boots and gaiters and floppy hats and old khaki shirts; my bush aesthetic then, as now, closely modelled on his – unpacking lunch on the shoulder of Mount Anne with the dizzying heights and depths of Tasmania’s glacial landscape behind us. In the valley below us is Lake Pedder, which, in 1972, was infamously flooded to become a hydroelectric reservoir despite a passionate campaign to save it. In February every year or so, we’d travel from Canberra down to Tasmania for a week or more. Once on the island we’d drive or catch a bus – on one occasion we even took a light plane – to the start of our walk, and away we’d go.

Twice we went to the Walls of Jerusalem National Park. Tucked off to the side of the more famous Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park, through which the Overland Track runs, the Walls of Jerusalem is a small park – a natural amphitheatre surrounded by the distinctive columnar cliffs of Tasmania’s mountains. You hike in and then you hike out again, not staying long, entranced by the landscape which, even by Tasmanian standards, is stunningly beautiful. On our second visit to the Walls of Jerusalem, hiking through pine forest and alpine meadow in February, in the snow (not an unusual occurrence in that part of Tasmania at that time of year, but still disconcerting to a mainlander) I remember feeling as though I’d somehow stepped through a portal and ended up in Europe – until a Bennett’s wallaby hopped across our path. On our last night we camped at Solomons Jewels, a collection of alpine tarns scattered throughout the bush. We had pitched our tents on the rocky ground – and it was on that night that we were ambushed by the eastern quolls, those yapping creatures who came sniffing for our dinner.

Predatory marsupials, nocturnal and endemic to Australia – somewhat like cats but with long pointed snouts – eastern quolls are either a sandy colour, like the colour of the night sky above a large city, or else they’re midnight black, and covering their bodies from neck to haunches are large white spots, like spotlights searching the sky. I have a photo, somewhere – from the days when you’d take a photo and hope for the best not knowing how it’d turn out till you got the film developed – of one of the quolls roaming through our camp site, agile and light on its feet: the bright circles of its eyes in the camera’s flash echo the white spots on its flanks. The whole photo is almost washed out by the silver side of our tent reflecting the flash back at the camera – a photo taken hastily, such was my excitement at this nocturnal invasion. It was the first time I’d seen eastern quolls, and it’s still the only time I’ve ever seen them in the wild.

Another trip to Tasmania, another hike, another camp site: the first night on the South Coast Track, which we walked from west to east, and for which we’d had to catch that light plane from Hobart to the starting point at Melaleuca, far up a coastal valley. As we hiked down the valley to the coast, critically endangered orange-bellied parrots flitted overhead from time to time – Melaleuca is the only place in the world where they breed. With us was Dad’s old friend Geoff. It’s good to hike in a group: hiking alone for a long distance in a remote landscape with unpredictable weather is dangerous. Hiking in a group also creates camaraderie, and staves off boredom: it’s easy, during long, tiring hours of trudging through the bush, even in spectacularly beautiful country, to become lost in the monotony of it – another footstep, another raindrop. Often I’d have a song, or a fraction of a song, stuck in my head for days – I’d come to wonder at the start of each hike what that trip’s song would be – so having other people to point out something interesting, or something beautiful, or just to chat to, can be invaluable.

On our first night camping at Point Eric, halfway along Cox Bight, the South Coast Track’s first taste of sea, a spotted-tailed quoll – the largest of the six species of quoll (four in Australia and two in Papua New Guinea) – suddenly appeared from out of the coastal heath. It stole a fruitcake that Geoff had made, taking it back into the dense vegetation behind the camp site, aluminium foil wrapping and all, before any of us could do anything about it. It had ventured right into Geoff’s tent, following its nose. We’d each had only one slice of the cake, and it was delicious – and so we spent all the next week on the hike thinking about it.

Quolls were the first marsupial carnivores I ever became aware of, as a child fascinated by animals of all kinds. My father had a copy of the Australian Museum’s Complete Book of Australian Mammals, full of glossy photos and lengthy descriptions, and I’d pore over it: to this day I vividly recall a photo of a quoll feeding on a dead parrot. Looking at the photo again now as an adult, it’s still a striking image: the brown and white-spotted fur of the quoll contrasting with the bright green and deep red of the parrot’s feathers and blood. And I can still recall the effect it had on me as a child: though it seems obvious in hindsight, I hadn’t realised that Australia had carnivorous mammals. Carnivores were the charismatic stars of many of the wildlife documentaries I absorbed when I was growing up – lions, cheetahs, bears, and all the other meat-eating megafauna of Africa and the Americas – but until I saw that photo of the quoll, Australia’s mammals had seemed timid by comparison: all kangaroos and wallabies, koalas sleeping in trees, and wombats grazing on grass, fleeing at the first sign of danger. In hindsight, seeing that photo of the quoll – a western quoll, as it turns out – started to change how I saw the mammal fauna of this continent, its richness and diversity.

At the same time, my parents, and particularly my father, were fostering in my brother and me a love of nature and the outdoors, slowly, patiently. As a child I’d kick and scream and cry whenever they dragged me out of the house to go bushwalking in the forests around Canberra, and then as soon as we arrived where we were going and had set off on our day-walk, my brother and I, playing at being bushrangers, would race ahead and hide behind a tree around the next bend, leaping out and yelling ‘Ambush!’ as our parents passed – both of them pretending to be taken by surprise despite how many times they’d been through this exact same thing. Not quite slow and placid enjoyment of the bush, then – but over the years, my parents’ and particularly my father’s quiet insistence on slowing down, breathing in deep the smells of the forest, on noticing the fine details of the bush, and listening to its sounds, rubbed off on me.

One place, close to home, where Dad and I would go walking sometimes was Mulligans Flat. A nature reserve on the northern edge of Canberra, it’s a huge patch of remnant yellow-box woodland, and before Europeans arrived eastern quolls roamed there wild – as they did across the entire south-eastern corner of Australia, from south-east Queensland into New South Wales and south down through Victoria into Tasmania, and then west to the edge of South Australia, until they were declared extinct on mainland Australia in the middle of the 20th century. The ecological importance of Mulligans Flat has been recognised since at least 1992, when community groups first proposed the conservation of the area as a nature reserve – a proposal which was formally implemented by the Australian Capital Territory government two years later. In 2001 I spent several days camping there as part of a fieldwork unit during my undergraduate biology degree at the Australian National University (ANU), a degree I enrolled in with the hope that it might lead to a lifetime of studying animals.

We camped at the old shearing shed in the north-west of the reserve and spent our days and nights learning how to survey for wildlife: vegetation quadrants, bat detection, setting Elliott traps for small terrestrial mammals, spotlighting for sugar gliders. We got up at dawn every morning to survey for birds and went to bed in our tents late every night. Even today I remember it as the best sleep I ever had, exhausted from working all day and made drowsy by the constant fresh air and sunshine. During that field trip the fox-and-cat-proof fence – which today symbolises so much of the ongoing work at Mulligans Flat – was still several years away from being built, and the reserve was a very different place from what it is now. When I’ve walked there with my father, in the years since that fieldwork unit, we’ve always seen plenty of wildlife: an echidna right up on the northern edge of the reserve, at the boundary between the ACT and NSW; a shingleback lizard, of the uniformly dark colour morph for which the Canberra region is known; an eastern brown snake basking in the hot sunshine in the middle of one of the gravel roads through the reserve. That last one reared up and bared its fangs at us and stayed in place in the middle of the track until we were over the ridge and out of sight – the only time I’ve ever been, or felt, threatened by a snake.

I was in my twenties then, and, like so many people at that age, when I was away from my family I was concerned overwhelmingly with how I appeared to other people: I wanted to be appealing, and to be accepted, and so I did things that I thought might make me appealing and accepted, leaving behind things that were often marked as socially awkward or weird. There’s nothing remarkable about this. As I got older I realised that what I wanted much more was to be happy in myself, and so I returned to the things that I genuinely loved: birdwatching; obsessing about nature and wildlife in general; bushwalking; camping.

None of these things were cool when I was younger and I’m not really bothered about whether they’re cool now. But in recent years I’ve come to wonder, again not uniquely and not originally, the extent to which who I am – which, as in any other person, is a messy sum of what I love and value and enjoy – comes from my own will, and how much of it was instilled in me by my parents. I laugh now at the memory of my young self’s tantrums whenever my parents made me join them on a bushwalk: now, I can’t imagine anything better than leaving the house to go bushwalking all day long. If I’d been raised to love airshows, or sailing, or building things, or any of the other countless pursuits by which people mark their days, then those would be my passions instead – and yet the person who I would have become wouldn’t have been any less himself because of it.

And did I imagine, when I was a boy bushwalking with my parents, or a young man hiking with my father, that one day I might bring my own children hiking with me through that same landscape? I can’t remember. But I know that, for as long as I’ve been old enough to think far into the future, I’ve wanted to one day have a family. Now I can all-too-easily imagine myself – in my early forties as I write this, and my father the same age that my grandparents were when I was a boy – pointing out the same things to some hypothetical child that my father pointed out to me. That child has been hypothetical my whole life – now, I’m wondering: can you still call a child hypothetical if it will never exist?

In 1816 in Dublin, Farrell was sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Some sources state that Farrell was convicted of stealing plates for the purposes of counterfeiting, but my father proudly declares the crime as ‘sedition!’ when the subject of his ancestor comes up. After Farrell’s conviction he was chained on a prison hulk in Cork Harbour until, on 14 July 1816, he, along with dozens of other convicts, was sent to New South Wales. The voyage took seven months. The ship carrying them, the Surry (sometimes spelled ‘Surrey’ – coincidentally also the name of the English county where my mother was born and raised), arrived in Sydney on 20 December 1816. A roll call of the names of its convicts is unmistakeably Irish: Bourke; Boylan; Brennan; Byrne; Callaghan; Conlon; Corcoran; Farrell; Maher; Mclaughlin; Ryan.

The year after Farrell was born, the Irish Rebellion of 1798 broke out, with the aim of forcing British colonial rule out of Ireland. In Wexford the rebellion was particularly fierce – and sectarian. The very first years of Farrell’s life would have been lived against a backdrop of Wexford rebels being captured and transported to Australia. In 1801 the Act of Union saw Ireland officially become part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with no independent parliament of its own. Irish cereal crops were exported across the Irish Sea to Britain; in Ireland a large proportion of the population, particularly the rural poor, came to rely upon potatoes as their primary sustenance. Then potato blight arrived in the country. A million people died in the famine. Twice that many were forced to emigrate. By the time of Irish independence in 1921 the country’s population was half of what it had been prior to the famine.

Michael Farrell never saw the famine, though he would have seen Irish immigrants arrive in Australia, fleeing its effects. He would also have seen further convicts like himself arrive, and may have watched the ship that bore him sail into Sydney Harbour again and again: after the completion of his sentence, Farrell stayed in Australia, and the Surry continued to carry convicts on a dozen voyages to Australia between 1814 and 1842. The Surry had a crew of thirty-five, as well as a detachment of armed men whose job was to guard the convicts. On its first voyage, in 1814, an outbreak of typhus led to the ship being quarantined upon its arrival in Sydney. By contrast, when the voyage that carried Farrell arrived, the Sydney Gazette reported that: ‘[each of the] 150 prisoners … landed in perfect health; and all combine in one sentiment of thankful approbation of the humane and indulgent treatment they experienced on the passage from the Captain, the Surgeon, and every Officer on board’.

It took thousands of trees to build a single wooden ship such as the Surry. Britain sourced these trees not just from its own land but from other countries, too. The environmental impact of this industry has been much debated, but in 2012 Patrick Melby from Western Oregon University argued that over the course of the Royal Navy’s long period of wooden ship building, from 1200 to 1850:

Ships such as the Surry also carried black rats with them wherever they went. Black rats are a vector for many human diseases – including ones to which Indigenous people on the Australian continent and elsewhere had never before been exposed, and to which they had no immunity. Black rats are also regarded as one of the worst invasive species in the world, detrimentally affecting many other species including in Australia and being implicated in many extinctions.

When Michael Farrell first entered Sydney Harbour, chained in the Surry with no idea of what was ahead of him, he would have passed Vaucluse, where, until the 1960s, the last known colony of wild eastern quolls in New South Wales lived. Newspaper articles from before the 1960s speak of attempts by the animals – called ‘native cats’ in English until deep into the 20th century – to survive in the new world built around them. From 1953: