Wanting (11 page)

And for a time, her laurels pleased the upper echelons of the island, for, though in various ways dependent in their prosperity and power on the dreary misery of the many, they had nevertheless acquired the habit of defending themselves by garlanding themselves with culture.

For the leaders of Van Diemen’s Land weren’t objectionable because they had dull poets, pompous naturalists and bad watercolourists, but because, having them, they couldn’t keep quiet about it. They recited grating verse, hung their walls with brutal brushwork, gloated about their learned societies and assured each
other their several amateur scientists were daily making extraordinary discoveries.

Above all else, they boasted of the couple who seemed to them to embody all that they saw as most splendid and special about themselves: the reputedly dashing new Governor and his wife. They were interesting people, celebrated people who were abreast of the latest fashions of thought, respected people who knew the right people in England, remarkable people who would make greatness of this colony, marvellous people who were exactly the right motley to throw over the mediocrity that really ran the island.

And so they flattered and feigned to the vice-regal couple, and only the women convicts at the Female Factory gave definite expression to what the unfree felt: as Lady Jane lectured them on morality as the basis of all life, they turned their backs and, as one, flicked up their skirts and waggled their dirty arses. Beyond the immediate halo of power, in the outer rings of society, most convicts and ticket-of-leave men paid them no heed. In their sly grog shops and knock-houses, life went on as it had, with their banned songs and wild grog sweetened with sugar; in the backblocks and the forests, in the kitchens and stables and workshops and pits, luck and fate as ever determined whether they lived or died, were raped or flogged or freed, whether they found enough to eat or starved.

But then a great depression swept Europe, the market for textiles collapsed, the mills faltered, the free settlers could no longer get the prices they once had for their wool,
and there was no longer gold flowing in abundance. The colony’s prosperity was halted and everyone in the colony understood the cause—His Bulkiness, Sir John, and his interfering wife, Lady Jane.

The Franklins were for a long time oblivious. Sir John began a Van Diemen’s Land navy with the construction of six gunboats, and was rather excited at the prospect of ordering new cannon with powder and shot. It gave him the illusion he was a man of action, which he felt might compensate for his failure to be a man of intrigue. On his arrival, he had been astonished by the prosperity of the colony. He was received with feasting, balls and every form of public rejoicing. On entering the northern capital of Launceston, he was escorted by three hundred horsemen and seventy carriages, the streets were thronged with well-wishers, all enthusiastic. The tyrant Arthur, his predecessor, was gone. It was as if he were a liberator. He never understood, then or later, Montague’s advice.

‘No government,’ warned his secretary, ‘faces such dangers as a despotism when it seeks to reform itself.’

And so, with the boom over, the island suffered and seethed and began planning its vengeance. The Franklins continued exploring, reporting and holding soirées. For Sir John and Lady Jane were keen observers of everything, save the people around them.

Visitors, old colonists and prospective new free settlers alike sailing into the island’s capital, Hobart Town,
were all momentarily buoyed by an initial enthusiasm, spirits raised by the journey up a splendid estuary full of picturesque wooded hills and romantic little bays that revealed nothing of the miserable lives of those who lived beneath the occasional wisps of chimney smoke rising from deep within the forests.

And how correspondingly large was their disappointment, how their spirits then sank, when they finally came upon the bedraggled town that not so much rose as staggered drunkenly up the cove to the foothills of the great mountain beyond. It seemed to combine the worlds of the army barrack and the prison yard into a town at best monotonous and at worst monstrous.

For the convicts, who were only then dragged up from the sour shitty holds of what had been slaving ships fitted for the far shorter run between Africa and the Americas, there was neither exhilaration nor disappointment. They had survived six months’ sailing from the Old World. It was enough to be alive. They took what measure they could of the strange, obscenely fresh air and the vivid, hard blue light, and determined only that they must go on.

It was a walk of but five minutes from the New Wharf to the somewhat ramshackle vice-regal mansion that sat on a bluff to the immediate south. What had begun as a cottage had been extended, then covered over, then added to and covered over again. Much as the colony had grown from a few hundred souls desperate for survival to a society of forty thousand, skin upon skin the cottage grew, until a great onion of a building had arisen. The island’s capacity
to transform everything into unreliable memory even before it happened, or in spite of it never happening, was already apparent in that crumbling edifice, which, though only thirty years old, was already a relic of magnificent decay.

But when Mathinna finally arrived there the spring following the Franklins’ visit to Wybalenna, after a journey that had taken far too long, her eyes did not see the rising damp, the peeling paper, the cracked and patched plaster, the pitching building that left door and window frames rising and falling like so many winking eyes. She saw instead a palace of the type she had heard the Protector describe. Even its musty smells of dead huntsman spiders and stale possum piss she understood as being what the Protector had told her so much about: the fragrance of God.

Mathinna Flinders—as she was entered in the ship’s log, for the captain, being only semi-literate, believed writing was above all an exercise in decoration and felt all his passengers needed a second name to balance their first—had taken ten days to sail from Flinders Island to Hobart Town at the southern end of Van Diemen’s Land, the ship’s progress consistently frustrated by bad weather and contrary winds blowing up from the southwest.

‘Who is Jesus Christ?’ the captain, who was a keen Methodist, would ask Mathinna, as their sloop bobbed up and down with the remnants of the great swells that churned the seas beyond this or that safe harbour to wild white hells.

‘The child of God, sir.’

‘What was Jesus Christ for us?’ the captain continued, determined the child would have the basic catechism mastered by the time she reached her destination.

‘Our righteousness. Sir.’

She stumbled over the long word, such that it sounded like ‘rage-in-us’. But the captain was satisfied and continued.

‘What is the Devil?’

‘The enemy of our souls, sir.’

‘How does he wage war on our souls?’

‘By making us give in to sinful desires.’

‘What was Jesus made to do for us?’

‘Take on our sins for us, sir. Why—’

‘Who crucified Jesus Christ?’

‘The Jews, sir. But why, sir, why Jesus, he good fella, why he have to sin if we no sin?’

‘Who are the Jews?’

‘The people of God, sir.’

If Mathinna wondered what sinful desires might be, or why the people of God might wish to kill the child of God, or if she saw it as obvious, having grown up ruled by the children of God, it was impossible to know, for having completed her task to the captain’s satisfaction, she burst into chatter.

‘And sir, sir, Napoleon he good fella, he teach me count to seven, teach me good, he know that first fella and all and the fella who made mountain and tree and stars. Yes, sir, he know. Jesus he bleed like a blackfella.’

‘Who taught you Shakespeare?’ asked the captain, suddenly suspicious.

‘Napoleon,’ said the child, who knew nothing of anything called Shakespeare.

Mathinna did not arrive in Hobart Town as she had intended to leave Flinders Island: her slight body clad in the skin of a white kangaroo hunted by her father. When the child burst into tears at the prospect of leaving her people, the Protector told her it was impossible to arrive at Government House dressed as a savage, but he relented on the matter of her favourite companion, a ringtailed albino possum she had tamed. It ran round her shoulders, nuzzled inside her grubby shift, and frequently dropped round turds like lead balls from a shot tower.

He let her keep the animal not out of sentimentality, but for fear that she might do something untoward if she were denied at least one small comfort. Of the children of Ham that had not perished, she was the brightest: high-spirited, admittedly, but the most advanced and, recalling her composure in the wake of her father’s death, perhaps the one with the greatest possibility of redemption.

But he took several months agreeing to the Franklins’ request, citing weather and the child’s health, and even advancing contrived pedagogical arguments. The real reason for the delay was that the child went missing every time she was about to be shipped out. And deep inside, Robinson grew oddly troubled, and it somehow made him feel a little better about himself when she was not able to be found. For there was about Sir John something that Robinson, ever a keen student and petitioner of power, could not quite put into words. He turned to prayer and
Scripture, in which he found not answers but the evasion of transcendence.

At the point his own prevarications ran too thin to be sustained, Mathinna intensified her own campaign to stay by absconding with two native women to a sealers’ colony on Gun Carriage Island. If the Protector was loath to part with that for which the Franklins asked, if he was failing to find Mathinna, he was nevertheless succeeding in persuading himself that he would hardly be abandoning the child to the scum of the penal colony. Rather, he told himself, it was to the very finest flowers of England, disciplined in habit, religious in thought, scientific in outlook—a woman who seemed to be the worthy consort of a man celebrated as one of the greatest names in the annals of heroic endurance, and that man himself. And their selfless goal? To raise the savage child to the level of a civilised Englishwoman. How could he deny anyone such opportunity?

Finally he had locked Mathinna in a room in his own house for a week, confiscated her possum and refused to give it back until she was embarked on a small sealing sloop, the
Cormorant
. He gave her some ship’s biscuits as a parting gift, but he had not stayed to farewell her, instead returning to his house to read Scripture until dusk fell and the boat was lost to sight.

The
Cormorant
had fallen so far behind schedule that the captain offloaded his cargo for Hobart at a small inlet at the head of the Derwent estuary. There he came to an arrangement with a silver-haired old sawyer carting
firewood. At first, the sawyer hadn’t wanted anything to do with the black child. His brother, a convict shepherd, had been speared to death by blacks in a raid on his outstation during the Black War. But in exchange for some sealskins—the captain wished to hurry back to the islands to collect more—the sawyer finally agreed to take Mathinna through to Hobart Town.

The sawyer looked down at the small child and resolved she would be no more to him than a bag of chaff to be delivered. Though only a blue tattoo of her name remained on his shoulder, he had once had a daughter. He noticed a lump in the girl’s smock, and dangling out below a button at waist level was a tail. He leant down, tugged the tail as he might a door pull, and was surprised when two large and sleepy pink eyes and a damp nose poked out.

With hands that were at once very large and very gentle, that seemed like a sea eagle’s nest made of gnarled eucalypt branches, the sawyer picked up Mathinna. Holding the small weight and trust of the child in his grasp, he began to fear that hate was beyond him.

She looked up at the sawyer’s face. One of his eyes was dead and milky, and his hair reminded her of a mat of bleached she-oak needles. As he slowly swung her through the air, she felt safe with the old man. He sat her down on the seat board of his cart, and then, in spite of his promise to himself, he found a dirty rug in the tray and spread it over her knees.

‘Garney,’ he said.

He noticed her bare feet poking out from the rug’s
ragged bottom and, reaching down, he tweaked her big toe. He smiled.

‘Garney Walch.’

The child had seen nothing like the town, a vast confusion of white men in many colours, and large buildings and mud and shit and horses—so many horses! And the whole effect, as she rode by the new warehouses and the older grog shops and slum cottages, as they drove past pigs and cows roaming free in the streets, men in yellow and black clothes chained like oxen, men in red clothes leaning on muskets, and finally up a hill to Government House, was one of overwhelming excitement.

A few people here and there stopped and pointed at her, shaking their heads as though they had seen a ghost.

‘Why, Gunna?’ she asked the sawyer, unable to pronounce his name.

‘Well,’ said Garney Walch, who didn’t have an answer he wanted to tell the child, ‘because…because you’re going to be their new princess, that’s why.’

When they arrived at her new home, they were directed around the back to a bustling series of outbuildings that served as kitchen, abattoir, laundry, stables, piggery and servants’ quarters to the large house.

‘Don’t leave me,’ she said, as he picked her up off the seat board.

‘These are good people,’ he said. But when he went to put her down, she dug her hands and feet into him and the
possum ran round the back of his neck. ‘The best people,’ he said.

He didn’t believe it. Nor did she. She clung to him ever harder.

‘Don’t go,’ she said. Her bony frame was that of a terrified bird, pushing in and out against his old body. And though he wanted to hold and soothe what had nothing to do with him, he had to tear her and the possum off him and give them both to a small woman with a birthmark over fully half her face, soft and strange as an overripe apricot.

Garney Walch left quickly, cursing himself for feeling as bad as he did, his soul painfully open to a wound he thought long ago healed.