As a novice biographer, I got obsessed with trying to unearth the lost years of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s father, Tom Prichard, in Levuka, Fiji. Like many other young men, he left the Victorian goldfields in about 1868 as part of the ‘Great Fiji Rush’. I found a ‘Tom Pritchard’ who went on trial for ‘blackbirding’ (which is to say, slavery) in Fiji and thought I’d found an incredible revelation. It wasn’t him though. Our Tom eventually became editor of the Fiji Times, the job he held when he returned to Melbourne to marry Katharine’s mother, Edith, in 1883. In December of that year, Katharine was born in Levuka.