The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  Governor Grey has a wilting kind of presence, an appropriate emblem for the times. The crops everywhere were a disaster when he arrived, and he promptly announced that stern discipline over expenditure was absolutely required. There can be no doubt about that, although it is not a popular measure. He is like a fierce headmaster, and we miscreant pupils, if not truants, must learn our lines and do as we are told. So much for sunny South Australia. The banners all waving to greet him were announcements for auctions, and forced sales, and shops to let. And he has appeared to encourage the general exodus.

  Mr Hailes thinks this was a strategy to force self-sufficiency on the settlement at large. That might be a good thing, but it is harsh. It was undoubtedly a good thing for Mr Hailes, who has never been so busy, encouraging the bidders, those who have any reserves to do so, and then knocking down the sale—which is a curious phrase to use, in the circumstances. He gets quite excited in all this, and keeps up a lively patter from his rostrum while he searches among the assembly to catch the eye of an uncertain prospect. But he is also given to more general reflections. He says we have achieved what the French Revolution could not—we have achieved equality. We are all equally without money. We have the freedom to enjoy this novel state of affairs, and we are a common fraternity in our mutual inglorious prospects.

  He is not the only auctioneer in town. By no means, no. It is one of the visibly productive vocations. There are auctioneers everywhere at this unhappy time, and they have not surrendered their gavels yet. Some of them concentrate on selling off clothes and such other signs of the straitened circumstances of people here, on a Saturday evening; Mr Hailes, whose main activity is in selling villas and allotments on site, opens his mart for a medley sale on Wednesday mornings.

  Those evening sales, being as it were more intimate, more personal in what is up for display, are lively fun, a kind of entertainment in themselves, with the crowd ridiculing the auctioneer’s inflated talk, and the auctioneer giving back as good as he gets. Some are rather more distressing. Not just furniture, but watches and wedding rings, books and belongings, anything that is not absolutely essential to the survival of families who have come down with the crash, all of those items bespeaking an irreparable loss, a sundering of old ties. I have regretted the books I left behind me, another kind of old friends I am separated from.

  Other auctions are associated with livestock. The sale yards for these are usually just behind a hotel; or perhaps the hotel has positioned itself in front of the sale yards. Either way, each is beneficial to the other. The sales themselves can be thirsty work, and when they are concluded there are convivial celebrations by those who have made a good sale, and by those who have made a good purchase, and of course the auctioneer attends both groups. As do those who are regular observers of local practices. It is all a heady business.

  Captain Grey has been an explorer, and has made a feature of recording the vocabularies of the native peoples he comes across. I wonder how he knows what they are saying to him, or about him. He made much of the return of Mr Eyre, who walked along the coastline all the way back to where Captain Grey had first met his wife, at Albany. I doubt that Mrs Grey thought much of this romantic reversal. When he was rescued, Mr Eyre had walked his clothes off, he was starving, and more than a little dishevelled. The picture that conjures up in my mind is not at all heroic. Though undoubtedly it was a most remarkable feat of endurance. But, it has to be asked, to what end? Mr Eyre’s dogged perseverance has added no more knowledge of the country he traversed than could be established from the comparable comfort, and certainly the security, of ships. The wonder then, as I think I recall Dr Johnson said of a dog’s walking on its hind legs, is not that it was done so well, as that it was done at all.

  The colony at large celebrated the safe return of this most durable gentleman with a public dinner. Mr Eyre, that is, not Dr Johnson. Everybody who was anybody was there. Even I was there. As is the case in such large gatherings, the conversation tends to circulate around and about those all seated in close proximity to each other. Speeches, not particularly audible in the din, were made, toasts were proposed, bumpers were drunk. As the evening wore on, some of the participants became increasingly involved in the rising crescendo of good will, others suggested to their neighbours that a little less enthusiasm would be more seemly.

  At least, that was how it was in my immediate vicinity, and I imagine it was much the same nearby, where old O.G., notorious for his irritability, began to have a difference of opinion with the manager of the Bank of South Australia, both of them respectable gentlemen. I doubt whether it was over a disagreement about the benefit of Mr Eyre’s recent expedition. In fact, by Mr Gilles’s reputation, it would not have mattered very much what the issue was. Old O.G. was easily started, and difficult to pacify. He didn’t want to be pacified. He should have been Irish.

  He was up out of his seat, in a trice he had fought one arm free of his coat and his fists were up. His opponent, a taller man—but then, compared with O.G. most were—declined to back away, and so they locked horns, the one pushing and shoving, the other lunging and swinging, if the image of horns can be abandoned. Their ruckus was remote enough from the official table to avoid an official embarrassment. But for us it was a capital entertainment, both of them red in the face and snorting heavily, chairs scraping or tipping over, the waiters trying (but not trying too hard) to confine the two, we lesser mortals cheering them on and applauding most irresponsibly. I don’t believe Mr Eyre was witness to any of this very interesting tête-à-tête. Still recovering from his recent ordeal, he was too intent on pouring himself one glass of water after another, as though his long thirst was never to be quenched.

  Later in the evening I managed to inform my friend Mr Hailes of my little budget of news. He clapped his hands with glee. For among his many other activities he also published an amusingly satirical newspaper, the Adelaide Independent. He was delighted with the possibility of including a sketch of the scuffle, and of collars coming awry; and that is exactly what he did. How to resolve a difference of opinion. The outcome however was not quite so entertaining, for O.G. took exception to this notice of his unbecoming display, just as he took exception to much else. He mounted a case for libel and fought it so hard that Mr Hailes was forced to close his newspaper. It was I suppose yet another scrap.

  Nothing daunted himself, Mr Hailes launched an alternative paper, the Adelaide Free Press, which likewise carried pen-and-ink sketches. He wrote most of the copy himself over the thinnest disguise as ‘Timothy Short’. Much as the sketches amused me, and much as I welcomed Mr Hailes’s irreverence towards the self-important, I thought that kind of activity much too dangerous to become directly involved with it. Besides, the new paper did not last for long. Mr Hailes has thought it best to take a government billet in Port Lincoln; and all copies of the Adelaide Free Press have disappeared. I wonder how much that cost Mr Gilles. And, in a different sense, what that has cost Mr Hailes? Ah me, such friendships as we thought to make shift and flicker like the shadows thrown by the dancing flame.

  My melancholy is not well assisted by the persistent and plaintive call of an owl somewhere near—I have heard a traveller from Van Diemen’s Land call it a mopoke. An apt if unfortunate name. Darkie does not care for it, the solemn depressing call I mean, and presses his muzzle against my leg, and whistles through his nose. By English expectations, there is not much of variety in this country, as the monotony of the mopoke affirms. We are not to hope for nightingales ceasing upon the midnight here. From one point of view, this is a land which has already done its dash; now all that is left is the slow working-out of its exhausting destiny.

  Yet from another perspective—my continuing interest is in finding more exactly what that is—one could say that the scale of everything is too vast. Everything is big here, or rather is extensive. I never saw such vistas in England. And being always the same, and lacking in variety, is only a disadvantage if change is required. There is little of the
sublime, at least in what I have so far encountered. But there is a grandeur in all this amplitude, and a reassurance in what might more kindly be called the reliability of the landscape and its endless seasons. For if we set aside the familiar pattern of the seasons on the other side of the world, and attend to what we can detect here, instead of the pattern of contradiction and antithesis that is written about in all the letters back home and recounted in the English papers, we find another pattern has been here all along, just waiting for us to see it.

  Or so I think. I have been testing these reflections in some of my sketches. We have just had a productive harvest. I don’t think this represents a massive change in the seasons. It is just that so little acreage had been put to the plough, and only the colony’s recent difficulties have enforced rapid exertion by all who could find a patch of ground. The land about the settled areas is quite capable of producing more than enough to support us. All that has been wanting is the application of our own industry. And that is rather different from the gloomy reports that have been finding their way back to England. The truth is less than flattering to us but in fact much more reassuring. So many of our settlers were content to accept the governor’s largesse, or whatever a small version of that might be. They became in effect a colony of pensioners, and now from the dire necessity either to grow or starve, they are finding the sweetness of steady labour. But I begin to sound the moralist.

  It is reassuring that the new life being organised in the southern colony carries on with the same unwavering pattern of the seasons. We plant our vegetables, we gather in our harvest, we sow again, and then we have a period for our leisure. The settlers are fortunate that the countryside is not thickly treed; the earth is ready for the plough. As I sketch in the agricultural activities of the year, two things have struck me very strongly. One is that with this open countryside, it is more fitting that my picture is not carried out to the edge of the paper, for this landscape is so large and in its own gentle way so very generous as to defy edges.

  And in a whimsical contradiction to that, I cannot avoid noticing the efforts of the settlers, the pioneers as perhaps I should think them, to mark out their property lines and construct fences, very often picket fences, though sometimes post and rail if the intention is to make a paddock. That is all they do, they make the shape of it. They make an edge. They don’t keep anything out; kangaroos can easily find their way to the new crop, aborigines drift through the valleys and make their little camps along the water ways. They watch the men washing and then shearing the sheep without much surprise; indeed, you cannot help feeling that their lack of response to any of our new activities is in itself a silent criticism. Especially, I imagine, the work in cutting the wheat, and gathering it in stooks, and thrashing it with flails. They can see that it would be far easier to pluck a cob of corn.

  That is not to say that they fail to observe. Indeed, they notice everything. And I have observed in the streets about Adelaide and out in the park lands, how sometimes they slyly mimic, to the vast amusement of the children. They do not distort in their imitation, but on the contrary are markedly accurate. The joke lies in picking out a mannerism which becomes absurd just by being singled out. One could learn from that. In a more serious mode, I think they may be an inductive people, reasoning not to achieve knowledge in our sense of it but to satisfy themselves of a sufficient explanation, and then to shrug and turn away to some other object of contemplation.

  Wherever one looks are signs of the settlers’ industry, and even some of the rewards of it—well-constructed sheds, thatched cottages with flower gardens, increasing numbers of stock. The stump of the felled tree is still surrounded by native wildflowers, and for all the activity there are signs aplenty of the great peacefulness of our growing way of life, if I may except the hunting calls, the yelping of the beagles and the thudding of the horses in pursuit of game in the winter months. Sometimes a recently imported fox is released, and that will attract a great gathering of riders, perhaps the recently formed Hunt Club, all in their top hats and hunting pinks, all keen to be in on the kill and seize the prized tail. It could well have passed for England, except for the grass trees and eucalypts. Other than with episodes like that, the rural life is delightfully placid. Again, one might think, like England.

  One sees differences of accomplishment of course. Cottages with slate roofs and established gardens, with prized English roses outside the door, and grapevines climbing on stakes. By way of contrast, in other instances there might be a tree stump by the door, still used for chopping billets of wood for the fire, and a keg with the ends knocked out sitting on top of the chimney, not as a trophy from a particularly thoroughgoing celebration but to increase the draught—it is a device commonly seen on the more elementary dwellings. One way or another, the people are settling down into this country, making it their own, without turning their back on where they have come from.

  My fire is burning low, the little blue and orange flames flickering with lilac points along the glowing log. Time to rake out my damper from among the ashes, and break off a bit for Darkie, who has been pointing his muzzle and signalling with his eyebrows for some time now that he is prepared to venture upon it. Gyp is off foraging for whatever he can find in amongst the bushes, for the wildlife here tends to be nocturnal. What an odd name damper is for our daily bread, though it suits my current mood. On these brief forays into the bush, I always travel with either a piece of damper in my saddle bag, or the makings if I think I might camp out overnight. It is enough to content me.

  I am a long way from breaking bread in my father’s house.

  And that is not only tea in my pannikin, I admit.

  We make something of a picture in the glimmer, Darkie and I, seated by a low fire, with just occasionally a pop, a hiss, a crackle to punctuate the silence, and the pony shifting and cropping grass nearby. A portrait: myself, by myself. Overhead, beyond the stark canopy of the trees, great glittering clouds of stars—heavens above, as my mother was wont to exclaim, bless her. All about us the vast silence of the bush, a kind of chill something felt behind us, or perhaps the weight of the nothing we know. At remote places in all the darkness must be similar tiny sparks of light, and similar solitary figures hugging themselves close to their fires, ruminating on their distance from the life they have left behind them, and in some cases reflecting on the life they have turned against, though I am not sure that I take any joy in the thought that I may still be in some sense a mirror image from my own past. In my view, it is not at all important for me to be a part of whatever I sketch, though I am content to be a witness not only of it but, if it so happens, in it. I feel myself to be something of a bystander, a watcher—I do not ask to be a main protagonist. I had more than enough of that just before I left Portsmouth.

  By whatever capricious path, my thoughts have now veered around once more, like the smoke of my campfire, back in the direction of Adelaide, and to the friendly group that regularly meets at the Exchange Hotel, a venue chosen because its name encourages the kind of gossip that circulates in its big ample rooms, the chit-chat in which we review the colony’s doings, and refine our critique of those more personal affairs not generally published, or such as were only hinted at in Mr Hailes’s paper. And of course I always carry my sketchbook with me, whenever I sit down to my nobbler at a table near the bar. I am sure to see an interesting drover or settler, or witness an event to savour.

  Our hostess, Mrs Fanny Ware, with her massive arms folded under her capacious chest, her big chin tucked in and her mouth turned down, presents a formidable and unassailable front; and that ensures an orderly house. You would never dare to be presumptuous. When she lowers her eyebrows and snorts, and gives her look, it is the better part of discretion to decamp, or to go and see about your dog. Urgent, when she starts tapping her foot. She would have none of that there nonsense here, thank you very much. But one or other of the barmaids will tip you a wink, and might whisper that their sister was waiting outside, and would
welcome the company … and if not, well it is all too likely that on a stroll down Hindley Street you will chance upon an encouraging acquaintance. For Hindley Street is lively in the evenings, with all the auction houses and public houses and bawdy houses. It is no slouch of a promenade in the daytime too—the girls can be very colourful, and very bold.

  Or I could always tidy myself up a bit and visit the neighbours, for the pleasure of their company; or, just possibly, a dalliance such as Brand used to commemorate in his more decorous though still salty songs.

  Sketch 5

  In which I begin to show my colours

  I HAVE OF COURSE to earn the crusts I carry in my pouch. I take whatever commissions come my way, painting views of newly fenced fields, or the first few head of livestock, or a picture of the just-built cottage to send back to anxious relatives. It is our small vanity to assume they are anxious. My paintings for the rising men of property are completed as quickly as I decently can; yet it is true that sometimes these interest me in unexpected ways, when for example I find a native plant in flower, or when the light does something subtle. I make careful studies of landscapes and street scenes, and display these as and where I can. You can never tell what these might lead to. And I have begun to compile sets of sketches, of curiosities to catch the attention of those who have an interest in this out-of-the-way place, this irretrievably opposite side of the world. I have not bothered to place another advertisement in the press; that was a crest-felling experience.