Illustration by Sir John Tenniel in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. "See this boy. His uncle wrote Alice's Adventures in Wonderland … and he can't even spell." Miss Robinson had my family tree wrong. The author of the Alice stories was my paternal great-grandfather's first cousin. My great-grandfather and his famous cousin shared the same name: Charles Dodgson. My great-grandfather was a London barrister, well-known as defender to his friend Oscar Wilde. The cousin, an Oxford mathematician, was better known by the pen name he used for writing children's books: Lewis Carroll. At school in Sydney, the playground taunts from my fellow pupils stung: "Charlie's a mad hatter, Charlie's lost down his rabbit hole." It would be another four years until I learnt to place letters together with any coherence. By that time, I had grown to hate the Alice association. I felt judged by it.

Charles Dodgson AKA Lewis Carroll. I did not appreciate my famous ancestor until I was in my 20s, visiting my father in the Tanami Desert, outside Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory, where he was providing medical care to the Warlpiri people. Under a luminous desert sky, as we reclined in canvas chairs and sipped port, my father explained why he had named me Charles Dodgson. "You were a surprise," my father said. "Your arrival rekindled our wonder with the world." My father, then in his late 60s, was a tall, silver-haired Englishman with round-vowel Public School enunciation. He had also studied maths at Oxford, before switching to medicine. That night in the desert, he told me his war stories, which I had never heard before. Writer Charles Dodgson as a child in the yard of the Kensington home where he still lives. Credit:James Alcock "I was blown up during the Blitz, on the roof of London's St Thomas Hospital," he said. "There were four of us, medical registrars on fire-spotting duty. We were standing together when a bomb exploded."

My father was the only one who survived, though he lost 90 per cent of his hearing. Six months later, he was shipped out to Africa, then on to Burma as an army surgeon. "War is terrible," he told me. "War reduces everyone, every day, to making polar decisions … There is no grey, only black and white. And this diminishes everyone. Because nothing in this world is ever quite as it seems." I was born after my parents emerged from this horrific time. They named me for the author, said my father, because "he described childhood innocence better than anyone". "We were making a statement against the horrors we had seen." I asked if they had considered the burden the name might bring, the expectations it could create. "We considered it," replied my father, "and we decided you would make your own choices."

My choice has been to explore some of the notions that fascinated my famous ancestor: questions of reality and perception. As a historian, my investigations have led me to the great Indian, Tibetan and Chinese narratives, which I am retelling in a new book, describing their relevance to modern Asia. Not so different, I feel, from my namesake. While he is best known as the author of the Alice stories, he was primarily a scientist at a time of great revolution in scientific theory. He was interested developing ways to measure alternate realities – Wonderlands of algebra, matrices, sets and series. This interest extended to the new technology of photography. It was his passion for photography that has made him the subject of scuttlebutt and slander. Some have cast unproven aspersions on the motives behind his portraits of young girls, scurrilous allegations that in some quarters are getting yet another airing this year, as the 150th anniversary of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland approaches. Through this lifetime as an educator, there was no suggestion my ancestor was anything but a prim and proper gentleman. Indeed, there is a mountain of evidence that suggests he was something of a prude. Interpretations of his motives, years after his death, can never be proven, so speculation is simply salacious. When I hear my name associated with these rumours, my thoughts return to the Tanami, to a war-broken man trying to rekindle his Wonderland; I return to my favourite Alice lines:

"Cheshire Puss," she began, rather timidly ... "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "... I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat, "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."