The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  And they also fix candles here and there on projecting rocks and ledges, wedged into fissures or stuck in a wad of clay, to cast a flickering light on their work. These throw strange silhouettes on to the walls of the caverns, the shadows dancing fantastically on the uneven surfaces, jumping and looming and nodding and retreating in an eerie ungainly fashion, all enticing to a hidden wealth. If you step towards a shadow it flees before you to hide in the darkest recesses. To an imaginative mind it could all too easily suggest the grotesque otherworld of children’s stories, or of old legends. Here, underground, the earth creaks and speaks, the great timber braces groan, and sounds of distant splashing tell of unvisited depths further on. Strange currents of air waft about. Sound is muffled here, the steady thud of pickaxes more felt than listened to, the calls of the miners, the far distant rumble of explosives, the closer sifting fall of rubble.

  In this underworld a lively mind could frighten itself. I found the presence of the stolid miners reassuring, even though they were not much more than flickering shadows themselves, and I hunched over my own work, seated on a lump of rock and sketched by the uneven light of my own candle. From time to time a large bucket called a kibble—for the miners have their own arcane and all but unintelligible language, just as seamen do—would be hauled clanking up to the gloomy light far above. That way, one thought, lay providence.

  The rewards of this labour are astonishing. The Mining Company has been returning dividends of two hundred per cent three times a year. It is little wonder that the Directors, having settled on earthly rewards, wish to commemorate themselves. As it is also little wonder that the working men resent the Secretary squeezing down their earnings, by as much as one-third. He is a hard man. He wants to keep the profits exclusive; he has little thought for general prosperity. If the men do not like his terms, he is confident of being able to recruit new chums recently arrived in Adelaide.

  I have found out for myself just how hard he can be. When I had worked up my sketches into large paintings fit for the Board Room, the Directors were pleased to receive them; and had very great pleasure in presenting me with a bank draft to the amount of two guineas for each painting. This was not niggardly but nor was it generous. And it was not as though I would benefit by the connection with the Company as my paintings were unlikely to be viewed by the public at large from inside that inner sanctum, even though the public has been informed of their acceptance by a notice in the press.

  There was, however, a little additional reward for my work, as several of the worthy gentlemen ordered sets of copies, and that kept me hard at work for a little longer, in my studio in Adelaide. While I was about it, I made an extra set of paintings for display at an exhibition planned for the following year. And that led me to think of ways to make copies without the labour of an entirely new set of paintings at each request; though I am able to make small improvements each time I begin each copy.

  The chief benefit is, undoubtedly, the interest shown in my work by the foremost of the shareholders, Mr Graham, a respectable gentleman now who has made so much profit from his investment that he has promptly arranged for a grand house to be built just north of Adelaide township, more or less at the beginning of the route up towards the copper mines. And he is in search of appropriate signs of his cultural attainments, no doubt to erase the collective memory of his earlier career as a bottle washer. He would be pleased to commission from me some portraits of his mansion, Prospect House, sitting in the middle of its carefully landscaped gardens. Severely landscaped, if I may say so.

  I learned back in Portsmouth days, at the silhouette studio, not to comment upon a client’s taste, let alone attempt to correct it. Besides, Prospect House is such a confirmed horror there is little that can be done for it. The gardens are extensive but unkind. Formal walks lead off in every direction, all uninviting, all designed with a protractor. Avenues without trees, nothing in any advanced stage of growth. The view within the garden is just up and down straight lines, with nothing to look at except the far end of the path, and a few hessian shade houses in ungainly geometrical shapes. The new garden beds are edged with bluestone from the Burra Burra mines, a somewhat obvious and vulgar touch I think. And the house itself! It sticks out in that exposed and desolate plain like a box on top of a larger box.

  Perhaps once the garden establishes itself all will look a little more welcoming. But as matters stand, what can I do? It is not picturesque, so how should I turn it into a picture? The view from the house is simultaneously extensive and invisible. There is no view in the sense that there is nothing to be viewed. The Tiers are too distant for them to register, and while there is sufficient of an elevation to look over the plains towards the sea, that too is a vista of extraordinary equanimity, a landscape in which the light leaches out all the colour. The view, such as it is, has all to be in the future. It might suit my patron to show how he has made everything new, but this is not new, it is raw.

  To suit my client’s evident taste, I have made the harsh angles of the garden walks the centre of attention. I suspect that he designed them himself. Right in the middle foreground I have positioned a garden seat, where no one would want to sit, and I show my folio leaning against one end of it, and my faithful Darkie guarding it. The point being that I have removed myself from the scene. I had thought to leave the scene entirely empty, but relented, and now show a figure under a parasol walking away. The paintwork on the main building, and the garden seats, and various ornamental pots, is a stronger version of the blue copper ore, a none too coy reference bringing the whole composition to a common foundation. In a second view I have drawn the gardener standing in the shade of the one solitary remaining original tree. Everything else has been brought from England; as have we. Even the bluestone borders are out of their proper place. This time I allowed Gyp into the frame, likewise at his ease in the shade, exactly where you’d expect to find him. If you were able to find him.

  So that has all been quite enough to keep me busy in my studio and, as I hope, a little more gainfully employed. And when the light fails me, or my eyes tire, or my thirst prompts me to lay down my pens and brushes, I rejoin my old companions at the hotel. Which, under new management, is now known as the Auction Mart Tavern. And a very congenial host we have too, a droll fellow who also treads the stage from time to time, though his greater interest is in managing the theatre. He is none other than the celebrated actor Mr Coppin. He delivers himself of all sorts of witticisms concealed in a morose voice and a common accent, common as muck as he might say, and with an expressionless face; and then he winks and has us all rolling about and holding our sides in laughter. This is in his very vulgar, very popular stage character Billy Barlow. Just look at ’im, he might say of a passer-by, ’e’s got a face like a slapped bottom. Yet at other times he is very much the thespian, fussy about enunciation and well-modulated sentences.

  There is no hope of competing with him when stories are being told, for he projects enormously and talks right over the top of any rival. And should he be momentarily forestalled for a topic, he breaks into one of his jolly Billy Barlow verses, either recently performed or one currently in the making, by way of a trial. He gave us a comical account of his own arrival at Port Misery, with his wife in a cart, together with the light luggage and well veiled against the flies, and as he told us, you could map the rough rise and fall of the bullock track, the main road if you please, by the ascending and descending screams of Mrs Coppin, and the unladylike ‘oof’ when one of the wheels sank into a hole in the dust. Accompanied herself all the way to Adelaide, he said, leaving me to follow in her wake. And he winked.

  Ladies and gents—yes you, not the cast—

  We’re pleased as old Punch to have got here at last,

  We’ve come such a way to put on a show.

  Transported with rapture was Mrs Barlow—

  Hey raggedy ho, but I’d rather go

  In a handcart to hell, says Billy Barlow.

  Mr Coppin arrived in
the colony with his wife and a troupe of fellow actors about a year ago, and they have made a great success of their start here. They had spent several years in the eastern colonies, especially in Port Phillip, where they first established their reputation. He tells an amusing story of how the decision was made to come to Australia in the first place, rather than to America. It was a toss-up, says he, quite literally. His wife was in favour of America but immigration to Australia was also being spoken of very highly at the time. He put his hand in his pocket and extracted one of the very few halfpennies in it, and flipped a coin. I could not but think of the division of the mining lands at Burra Burra, and reflected if only momentarily on the fortunes that have followed in each case. All too evidently I have been making the wrong call; or I lack a lucky penny.

  Coppin has undertaken the renovation and extension of a set of billiard rooms in a square just off Hindley Street, and converted them into a theatre. It is a most respectable establishment, and the entertainments are very proper, but just as in the theatrical districts of the great cities of the world, so here the surrounding side streets and laneways lend themselves to post-performance activities of quite another kind. As it happens, that is also where I currently have my lodgings, though I am thinking of looking for another set of rooms soon.

  He has other interests too. He is considering buying a racehorse, as do so many of the publicans here, and he takes a great interest in public affairs. He has made it his business to know all sorts of things; and his information seems to be very good. He knew before almost anybody else that our old Governor, Captain Grey, has been given a knighthood, and chuckled that this would only re-ignite Captain Strutt’s ambitions. Or more to the point, those of his good lady.

  As with others in the community he has not been sorry to see yet another Governor go, Major-General Robe, Captain Grey’s successor, leaving the balance of power in the community still unresolved. Most thinking men wish to have representatives determining the province’s fortunes, whereas governors seem to find that state of affairs unthinkable. As Billy Barlow commented, between ourselves,

  There’s a chair at the table where councillors meet,

  They count with their fingers and vote with their feet;

  The old governor’s gorn, as governors go,

  But they don’t have the gumption of Billy Barlow.

  Hey raggedy ho and here’s a rum show,

  He’s pig in the middle is Billy Barlow.

  Mrs C. is charming and elegant company. She is if I may say so slightly more advanced in years than her consort. To be very truthful, I think she looks more fetching upon the stage, but her lively coquettishness is very attractive to us when she condescends to join her husband in the private room in the hotel. And of course none of the Hindley Street girls dares to loiter near the door when she is present.

  Whether she is speaking or just seated, she is always striking a pose. She is wont to put the back of her hand carefully to her brow, her chin raised but her eyelids lowered, to express her disapproval, or mock dismay, or rejection of something she does not wish to hear or think about—but always so turned that her arm does not block her profile. Or she folds one hand over the other and clasping them to her bosom leans forward to express earnestness, or sympathy. And she leans back and flings one hand away in an elegant gesture of dismissal. When she walks about, she cocks her wrists and her hands dangle like empty gloves. I suspect that I should soon learn all her attitudes; but for all that, her theatricality is presented with a most lively wit, so patently feigned that you enjoy the sheer performance of her conversation.

  Coppin almost never launches into Billy Barlow in her presence.

  The Coppins have been a great comfort to me in my most recent distress. Mr Flute’s folio of sketches has come out, published in London. There he is, simpering away in a frontispiece portrait, looking like a lovesick spaniel, leaning against a carefully dusted-off rock and displaying for us his paintbox, beautifully cleaned for the occasion, and likewise showing us that he is at the end pages of his sketchbook, presumably filled, with a pencil that looks never to have been disturbed apart from having been sharpened for the pose. To me it is a still life arranged to suitable effect. He looks to have not a worry in the world, nor a shred of moral conscience—as has been revealed in his book. For when I looked through his published sketches, oh the supercilious cheat! Contemptible fraud! Cad, scoundrel, grub! Oh the dirty dog! Deepest dyed villain. Yet his visage is as smooth and bland as a coddled egg, and smug with it. What has he done? He has included in his volume three of my sketches, he has passed them off as his own. Wretched disgrace of a man. And he is one of our betters? One of the Nobs? He is no gentleman.

  I am almost sick with anger, and helplessness. It is of little comfort to see what may be easily seen, that my pictures stand apart from his. And he has a picture of Captain Strutt’s departure for the interior, yet Flute was in New Zealand at the time. I have looked for traces of my own painting in his construction. Mr Coppin has heard that there are also three portraits of natives, which are the unacknowledged work of another artist in Sydney. The wickedness, the weasely wickedness, the effrontery. That is what it is, his sheer smug gall. The hide of the man. He disgusts me.

  I should have found some distraction from this in another exhibition of our local artists, given the warm reception of last year’s display. I submitted new copies of the Burra Burra watercolours, and several other new pictures. In all, the exhibition was three times as large as its predecessor. But everything is untoward at present. Some self-important blithering incompetent determined that what we in the colonies most required was a contributory presence of classic paintings, ancient and modern. That is not what the exhibition was for, and reports in the local papers agreed that it was a less interesting display in consequence. It did nothing to placate me that several of Mr Flute’s pictures found a place in the midst of all this muddle.

  Mr Coppin tactfully took me down into his quite extensive cellar, and there we sat and drank until I became more mellow, more agreeably resigned to the wicked ways of the world, down among all the great wooden kegs. The candlelight and the rough beams and stone walls and the dark corners of the basement reminded me of the mines. He has a different view. Sometimes, says he, I can’t tell the difference between this and an unresponsive audience. I know which is the jollier company. I took his hint and we settled down together for a session of sustained applause; and he led me on to talk of my art, and what I have tried to accomplish through it, and then to more practical matters, as particularly how to make a more productive living through my work.

  I was diverted for a while by the contrast between the shadows on the wall, and the other shadows deep inside those casks, a new version of the old fable, and the question of the relation between shadows and pictures and things in themselves. And where the artist stands, or sits, in all this. What does a man have to do to get himself noticed, I sighed. The particular point Coppin wants me to recognise is not Flute’s perfidy, but his success. Flute, he points out, sells large quantities of his works, in lithographed copies. I should do likewise. Better, I should master the art of engraving on stone myself, and perfect it, and so make my own fortune.

  We talked also of how I have been moved by the hard life the miners endured, and their bravery in making themselves as independent as they could of the Mining Company. Dear boy, you should hardly have been surprised, says he. Harry Ayers, don’t you remember him? He is from your old home town. His father worked on the Portsmouth docks. Young Harry has come a long way to leave his father behind.

  I don’t mind saying that I felt unsettled by this remark, and am unsure whether he was in fact quizzing me.

  Harry Ayers shipped out as a carpenter, says Coppin, which should have been a warning. He wouldn’t know one end of a hammer from the other. Dear boy, he worked as a clerk in a law office before he pretended to be a useful member of society. As a carpenter he applied for a free passage to South Australia for himself and his br
ide; and once disembarked, presented himself to a law office, never worrying a jot about perjury, malfeasance or chicanery. Perfect preparation, wouldn’t you say, for his role in the Mining Company? He doesn’t care for anyone to remember that he had taken assisted passage. That is why he is so hard on those who are too like himself.

  That is the one significant difference between the Snobs and the Nobs, he went on, the Snobs have made and covered their own tracks, to arrive at a comparable level of advantage. Flute, says he, coming back to the topic of my unremitting interest, Flute has made himself free of Fortune’s lottery. He is not hoisted by its unsteady whim. He was born to good fortune, and he has ensured that he stays ahead of any possible adversity. Flute will never toss a penny. He calculates exactly what he is going to do, whether in his life or in his paintings. We might say he pays scrupulous attention to detail, except that we know he has no scruples. He walks circumspectly around any potential hazard. And that is why he will make no discoveries for himself. He leaves that for others, such as yourself, dear boy. He has made the forecourts of the great his particular beat. He appears in order to be known. You, dear boy, sit to one side in order that you may study the ways of men and the life of the landscape, how things come to be. He walks about that he may be studied and remembered.

  I doubt whether any of that has made me feel any better. But it has given me a direction to follow. And a resolution to cast my own stone.

  Sketch 8

  Wherein the penny drops

  EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING at once. In what should be the even tenor of our days, these are turbulent times.

  Mrs Coppin has died. If it were not so sad, you would say such an unexpected turn of events was like a plot device in a play. There had been no hint that she was less than her usual sparkling self. She had been performing her role as hostess at her husband’s dining table, and had stood at his side at public receptions, with all the elegance and refinement for which she was so renowned. And yet, within what seems no more than a blink of the eye, just a matter of a day or two, she died, of convulsions the doctor said. She charmed the lawyers and magistrates, the travellers and businessmen, the investors and Oddfellows and Freemasons who frequented the Auction Mart Tavern. Her fetching ways and her gay and colourful dresses were no mean incitement to prefer this watering hole, reliable water as the overlanders jokingly call it, above all others. She ensured a loyal and respectable clientele, which is of course exactly what Coppin had aimed at.