WHEN I WAS fifteen, my grandmother uttered a slightly panicked comment while we were sitting on the balcony of her home in Sydney’s North Shore during the mid-1980s.

“I’d better get out of sun, before my black blood comes out,” Nanna said, dashing through the French doors of the apartment she’d lived in since the end of World War II.

In the sudden shadows of that bright Sydney day, I realised my grandmother – Peggy to her loved ones – had spoken something important.

There were other hints. All year, she’d been talking up a book: Queenie by Michael Korda, a roman à clef about his aunt, Hollywood actress Merle Oberon (1911-1979).

This wasn’t unusual. Nanna had always been obsessed by movies and actresses to the point that she identified aspects of her own life in them. In many ways, with her regal air and enduring sense of style, Peggy Crawford embodied a movie star.

I was aware from a very young age that Blossoms in the Dust (1941) always brought her to tears, since she’d been born “illegitimate” at the beginning of the 20th century. Greer Garson’s turn as childrens’ rights campaigner Edna Gladney gave Nanna an emotional release she couldn’t find elsewhere.

My mother, Peggy’s only child and regular confidante through three decades of widowhood, filled me in on some details. When I was old enough, she quietly explained that Nanna was sent to a New Zealand convent school from a very young age, believing her mother and aunts were her sisters. The reason: Peggy’s mother wasn’t married when she was born.

My grandmother’s hidden heritage in another country felt so secret and sensitive it has taken four decades to start putting the pieces together. The creation of another story – this time one of my own – has fuelled the need.

White Lies

Forty years ago, I searched for answers in the popular culture that Nanna sought solace in. By 1987, Korda’s Merle Oberon epic had been adapted into a television miniseries. There was a version of her story laid bare: the fear and shame of her Indian heritage that led to falsifying her origins while she embarked on a screen acting career.

After Nanna moved from her apartment in 1986, and a suitcase full of family photographs came our way, the images it contained spoke volumes.

Decades before she’d joined the well-powdered blue-rinse set, Nanna had generous dark hair and the brown eyes inherited by my mother and older brother. Taken during her long tenure in a convent school in Auckland, the photographs showed my grandmother in a completely new light. No wonder she identified with Merle Oberon.

The rest of the documents in the case showed that ‘Peggy Winders’ had been born in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1904 and given a beautiful name: Margaret Hinemoa Windust.

The change of a German-sounding surname to something more English wasn’t uncommon in the lead up to World War I, but the complete removal of a common Māori name is the key to my grandmother’s shame that day on the balcony.

Her 1935 marriage certificate went on to hide the truth of name and age, listing her as younger than my grandfather when she was actually slightly older.

It was clear that Nanna’s white lies had become her identity. She’d left New Zealand behind in the mid-1930s and arrived in Sydney as Mrs Stanley Crawford, taken up the mantle of dutiful Navy wife and, eventually, mother.

Unfortunately, the obfuscation eventually made it onto my mother’s death certificate in 1992, a tragic situation that saw Nanna having to endure the death of her only child. It wasn’t until after her own death in 1997 that it felt safe to seek the truth, by which time my career as a writer was burgeoning.

Better or Worse

As a novelist I have a similar job to Michael Korda: weaving scraps of truth and story into fictional entertainment. What has changed for authors of my generation can be broadly defined as the arrival of the Own Voices movement, a contested term in which we’re encouraged to write from our own identities for the sake of authenticity, diversity and inclusion.

I embarked on historical fiction not long after Own Voices began to stir passions in the book trade in 2015, so I’ve adhered to the sensitivity required as I’ve shaped and researched a story set on Australia’s colonial frontier.

Across that time I’ve been on a journey to discover my ancestors in that era by tracing each of my great grandparents.

My English, Scottish, Irish and Cornish forebears were Burges, Gordons, Trounces and Martins who were proud of their Celtic roots and settled mainly in the New England and Central West regions of NSW. On the other side of the family were Crawfords (once Scots) and Shorts, who migrated from England and settled mainly in Sydney.

But Peggy’s family – the Windusts – existed only in scant stories about English and Irish settlers to New Zealand in the 1850s.

Having grown up on a farm that sits within view of the site of the Myall Creek Massacre of 1838, I’ve always known that ‘settling’ and ‘occupation’ are softened words that describe colonisation. But what about times when settlers and First Nations people loved instead of fought, as appears to have happened in my family?

Since it’s a theme I explore in my writing, realised it was time to start working out exactly who I think I am.

Jumping the Ditch

All I really had to go on were the names of the women that Nanna was brought up believing were her sisters but were in fact aunts: Pat, Ayah and the woman we suspected was her mother, known only as May.

My grandmother wasn’t the first Windust woman to go by a pet name. She avoided Hine (a shortening of Hinemoa, pronounced ‘Hinny’) for Peggy, but the internet very quickly led me to May’s real name.

Just 16 when she gave birth, no father was listed on her daughter’s birth certificate.

New Zealand’s digitised newspapers allowed me to corroborate most of Nanna’s family stories and unearth plenty of others. It appears that just about every one of the Windusts who ended up “crossing the ditch” to Australia by the 1930s was running from something: accusations of crime, the stigma of divorce and the mystery of exactly who my great grandfather was.

He’s the only one of my eight great grandparents who I cannot identify. Supplanted on his daughter’s marriage certificate by her grandfather, his identity, and whatever relationship he had with my great grandmother remain a complete mystery.

Was he of Māori heritage? Based on Peggy’s long lifetime of anxiety and secrets, it seems almost certain.

I could get a DNA test, although right now I feel strongly about believing my grandmother. The story she entrusted to me with that throwaway comment forty years ago might eventually coalesce with what the records can tell us. The journey has just started.

For all of us using literature to explore and understand centuries of colonisation in this part of the world, the telling of such stories feels essential.