What did happen to sixteen people on that night in February nearly two hundred years ago?
There are many stories of people lost in the bush. Children who strayed, travellers who disappeared, explorers who never returned to their camps.

But when sixteen individuals leave the realm of the living without a single trace and when the one person who witnessed all that happened chose to go to the grave in silence … then there is a mystery indeed.

A dark and mysterious novel set in the early 1800s. Molly McPhee and her daughter, Alice, visit Major Walden in his isolated country home. When Walden is called away on duty, he leaves his convict manservant, Halls, in charge. When he returns, Mollie is dead and Halls and Alice have gone. The indigenous Dharawal – the Water People – offer their explanation of what happened before Alice was swallowed up by the earth.

A nineteenth century mystery set on the shores of Botany Bay, Sydney.

The Water People is the second of Angela Badger’s historical novels from the early convict period. It is based on news reports and anecdotes from the period, which recount how a search party was lost during violent storms on the shores of Botany Bay. They had been searching for a convict who was believed to have abducted a woman after murdering her mother. Only the convict came out of the bush – manacled, exhausted and silent. He died under the lash and his secret died with him.

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