The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  It suited my own frame of mind to work my initials into the ruts and bumps in the dirt, in along the foreground.

  Sketch 14

  In which, like others, I cut and run

  IT SEEMS I VACATED the stage at exactly the wrong moment. No sooner had I left the goldfields country than a spate of daring robberies on the roads commenced. Bailing up the mail coaches, they call it. The coincidence with my removal was so exact as to be highly suspicious to anyone with a suspicious mind—it is a wonder that Sir Frederick Pottinger did not come galloping after me.

  Sir Frederick. Now there is a Nob for you, a Nob of the first water: a baronet. In England he had run through most of his mother’s money, and all of his own, at the race courses, and with a record like that, what better place to send him than New South Wales. Botany Bay may have been in the family’s mind, or hopes that he would succeed on the goldfields. He didn’t, of course. If he was that unlucky in the old world, why would fortune be expected to smile on him in this? And doubtless my father would have glowered that the young scapegrace could expect fortune’s frown to follow him into the next.

  Be that as it may, Sir Frederick concealed his title, and joined the police force as a regular mounted trooper on the gold escort. That must have concentrated his mind on the activities of bushrangers; for when the secret of his background leaked out—and who else knew about it but himself?—he won rapid promotion, as happens when a title is in the balance, and he made it his business to chase after those miscreants in particular. He was hopeless. Race courses aside, he could ride a horse as well as most, but he had to have a horse good enough, and he had to know his quarry when they were not in their customary regalia. For as it turns out, he missed his mark and bungled his ambushes more often than is credible. He would not have made a good bushranger.

  While he was a mere unknown trooper he was involved in a violent fight over a game of billiards. He did not take kindly to being called a cheat, and recognising the similarity between the thick end of his cue and a truncheon, used it to quell the affray he himself had started. More recently he has been officially reprimanded for being involved in another drunken brawl, at Lambing Flat. Nobody seems to know what that was about, but evidently his blue blood comes to the boil rather quickly. Or perhaps it has something to do with being a policeman. Just like the bullies at Bendigo and Ballaarat.

  Several times he has missed recognising individuals wanted for arrest, and cheekily present in the towns and at the race courses. They were right under his nose but he didn’t see them. The people are starting to laugh at him, calling him blind Freddy. And less amusing, he has arrested young men who are then found not guilty of the charge he lays against them.

  One reason for my interest is that he reminds me of the current pitiful hero of the hour, Robert Burke, another one for making the wrong decisions. As is now widely known, the great expedition from Melbourne, designed to explore the back country all the vast way to the northern coast and preferably ahead of the South Australian expedition pursuing the same object, has ended in disaster. Search parties have found the remains of the explorer and his loyal deputy, and an enfeebled survivor; and the ghastly irony of how closely they missed connecting with the main party waiting for them at their base camp is admitted by everyone. It is such a story that it strains our credulity. It did not have to happen like that. Burke was a policeman too, and pompous. It is said he had a special compartment built into one of his camels’ packs to take his top hat, just what you might need in amongst the sand dunes when you encounter a native chieftain. And there are low-voiced questions, disturbing, about his treatment of the fourth member of his party, the one who did not return with them. Not a man easy to admire, in my view.

  Such is the universal interest in the Burke and Wills tragedy that it is an opportunity not to be missed by an illustrator, much like the wreck of the Dunbar. So I have set about devising a set of ten scenes, drawing upon what I remember of the dry creek beds and sand dunes I saw with poor Mr H. Another Nob, come to think of it. Another cameleer. And I remember Goliath too. I have a good idea of what a camel looks like, as good an idea as anybody, but I should not like to get caught up in another Veno shambles.

  I was not sure when I painted the camp at Cooper’s Creek just how much water should be flowing in it, but bushmen have told me that the explorers chose one of the best seasons ever known to make their crossing. Considering that water does not always flow in a desert, I reasoned there would not be much in the way of growth along the banks of the creek, which makes for something of an odd look; but that was how it was on my own expedition, though without water in any of the meandering depressions that might have formed a channel in a good year.

  I know likewise from experience that camels for preference would rather sit or stand around chewing their cud, and that men are all too ready to stand around talking rather than getting on with their work. In my picture I have set these two groups in interesting relation to each other. As a last-minute thought I have put into the foreground a little domestic touch, showing their dirty washing hung out to dry. But the whole is of course very discreetly managed. Cooper’s Creek uncertainly excepted. I doubt that the general public will be concerned about that. They want images of their heroes looking calm and confident. And not too emaciated.

  In point of fact, I had more trouble with my picture of the expedition’s departure from Melbourne, for although I had easy access to countless versions of it in the illustrated papers for example, so did everybody else; and the problem was how to draw something distinctive but also close to the common perception of that occasion. Burke, with boots as shiny as some of the dignitaries’ silk hats, was at the front of the procession on his little pony. I have him looking back to his followers and pointing the way forward. Superfluous, actually, as there is nowhere else for them to go but along the route marked out by the cheering crowds. Huzzah three times three. Incidentally I have noticed that gentlemen in top hats are disinclined to remove them, or disinclined to lower themselves to any such undignified behaviour. If you are waving your hat, it must be some more manageable, less genteel kind of headgear. You do not disgrace the outward and visible sign of your elevated status in society. It is a modern version of Lord Chesterfield’s injunction, that a gentleman does not laugh out loud; he behaves impeccably at all times.

  It says something for Melbourne that everyone present in my picture is well behaved. No barking dogs, no boys climbing up trees, no aborigines, no empty bottles. And isn’t it curious how things come about? The expedition’s camels had been purchased from Coppin, who had bought something of a menagerie, apparently, in yet another business venture, a pleasure gardens just outside Melbourne. I have not put him in the picture.

  To ensure that distinctions are preserved, I have Burke in his blue jacket, and the others all in red serge shirts. I had not intended the hint, but it did not displease me that these look a little like a hunt club in their riding pinks; in slow motion because of the steady rolling action of the camels. In my series Burke stays on his pony all the way to Carpentaria; the men walk, leading their camels. And I thought it important to acknowledge the humanity of the natives, so that the series leads up not to the deaths of Burke and Wills—Wills has been sheltering under a thin ragged mia mia—but to the rescue of King, who has been cared for by the natives. They are in the foreground, Howitt still at a little distance, approaching through the scrub. You could say help is at hand; and you might want to think about that.

  Working on this series was a useful distraction for me. I had my own private discomfort to attend to; and domestic discomfort too. For when I returned from my tour of the interior, Elizabeth was not there, which was not altogether unexpected; but neither was the piano. She returned a little later, and while I do not mind when men are a little woozy, it does not look well when women are unsteady. The piano had been taken back, she explained, because the rental had not been kept up. I am sure that I left her with sufficient funds to cover our regular e
xpenditure.

  That led to an initial quarrel. And then a much more unpleasant conversation about how it was that I had contracted my unfortunate illness. When she understood what I was implying, she was furious. Vile insinuation, she hissed. Bravo madam, says I, bowing ironically, a sentiment straight from the stage. You learned your lines well enough there. I know my own behaviour has been above reproach since Ballaarat. I do not claim immunity from other occasional engagements before then. I had from time to time enjoyed the creature comforts at the Irish Trumpet, for example, but that was before I met Elizabeth.

  It had occurred to me that in fact I knew very little about her or her family or where she had come from. From one or two hints she had let drop, I gathered that she had at times taken small parts upon the stage. Perhaps that was the real connection with Lola Montez. And that is where she had acquired her taste for champagne. And now, as I have observed, smoking. And for experimenting with opium, if I am any good guess at the perfume.

  It was difficult to maintain the calmness this discussion required. Elizabeth felt no necessity for moderating either her voice or her opinions, and so from one thing to another. I have for the time being taken a room just around the corner. I do not think of myself as hot-tempered, but as with the unhappy day when I stood up to my father so on this occasion it seemed to me too important an issue to leave alone. Our differences have quickly turned into a competition over who is the more outraged. I prefer to think that I have left as the injured party, rather than that I was shown the door. Either way, I find our domestic circumstance utterly disagreeable now. Though I don’t feel I have come out of this as well as I would like.

  As for my physical condition, although there had been a remission for a while, for which I was very grateful, now it was back with me and I have had to attend to it. Have it attended to. I found my way to an Irish doctor, whose rooms were not too far away from my studio, on a square near where the old military barracks once were. Doyle, his name was, Doctor Doyle, who had previously had a surgery in his rooms in Ballaarat, and who has given public lectures on the causes and cure of illnesses such as mine. Syphilis. There, I have said it, though I hardly like to say it even to myself. It happens. You would be surprised how many contract it. No doubt I would be surprised too. Like the poor, it seems to be always with us. The human condition.

  He is an interesting fellow, full of Irish blarney of course, but surprisingly good company. Big and bushy-bearded. He seems to have seen and done everything, if you are to believe him. He has made anatomical models for the waxworks museum here—it had enjoyed a season or two in Melbourne and has now been relocated for the edification of the good citizens of Sydney. Ladies of course are enjoined not to visit one of the rooms set aside, in order that they may not be embarrassed. I think it takes a strong stomach to look at the gory display. Surgeons, like lawyers, have an unusual way of looking upon the world.

  In his public lectures he is insistent on the importance of bodily cleanliness, and on teetotalism—which, in an Irishman, should have cautioned me. He had recently been declared an insolvent, which ought to have sounded another caution, but because of my own history I was on the contrary more sympathetically disposed. And he let me know that he was an amateur artist himself. Oh, oh and oh. Now that really should have put me on my guard. This consultation seemed to be all about him, whereas what I wanted was treatment for myself.

  It so happens that one of his popular lectures was on the restorative benefit of the Turkish bath. He was an enthusiast about it. They cure and purge and heal and do everything short of mend a broken limb. The Turkish bath makes you feel a better person. It is a new version of a moral ablution—cleanliness being next to godliness.

  You can imagine how uneasy I was feeling. What I wanted was an ointment, a mercury salve, an embarrassingly intimate injection, a poultice, a patent bolus. A plunge? We agreed that I would visit the new Turkish baths recently opened in Bligh Street, just across the road from where I had drawn that series of rooms on the Frenchman’s commission. A Dr Brereton was the principal behind this new facility, and every bit as passionate an advocate as Dr Doyle. But for myself, I wanted some kind of medication as well, some kind of unguent. Some of the famous blue pills, or grey. Some calomel.

  I had heard about patients having their illness sweated out of them, of course, but I had never been to a Turkish bath. I was not convinced that someone with my condition would be welcomed. From time to time I have made use of a public bath, especially if I had been out on the goldfields or travelling about the country, when a quick splash over my face from an icy mountain stream has had to suffice. Even though you have your own cubicle in a public bath, I was not comfortable with the general arrangements there; I felt uneasy about removing my clothing and knowing that another was in similar disarray in the cubicle next door. So you can imagine how much courage it took for me to sit wearing little more than a strategically placed face cloth in a large steamy room.

  I declined the massage treatment that Dr Doyle recommended. I did not fancy an attendant’s great big hands all over me. When it came to this encounter, the man looked ridiculous with his hang-dog eyes and a walrus moustache draggled with perspiration. But I am obedient in some things, and reported back to Dr Doyle who continued to monitor my condition. My improvement, he said.

  What he really wanted was to show me his sketches. He had them in a folio in the next room, if I had a minute. And out he went, without waiting to hear my reply. Indeed, now I think back on it, he hardly listened to me at any stage of our connection. Who was consulting whom?

  I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. What he painted was quite different from my own work. He liked to depict night scenes, and exotic plants; he completely covered his page but with large assured shapes and contours, not fussy little Flute-like specimens. They were bold and confident, like the man himself. What I could not understand was how and when he had come to paint these, for the majority were scenes from the far north of Australia, and I could not work out when he might have travelled there. His life in Australia was too crowded to have allowed for the necessary time that that would have taken.

  He had a proposal to put to me. We should join forces and put out a collection of Australian drawings in a splendid production for the market in Britain. And local too, of course.

  I understood what he was up to. He wanted to swing off my coat-tails, and that was flattering I suppose. Yet when I thought about it, I could see an advantage for myself. It meant a bigger volume without requiring a lot of work from me, as I could make use of some of the sketches from my recent tour but which were not of the goldfields. For example, of the squatter. And others from my notebooks, street scenes—though not scenes of streets. After a lot of booming humbug from one side, and non-committal mumbling on the other, we agreed to pool our material and see what the job lot might look like; and then I would approach the publishers I was acquainted with.

  Which meant that while I was waiting to recover from my various sores and sorenesses, my headaches and my rashes, I set to with a will, working up my sketches as I used to and tidying up the detail. It renewed my interest, I have to say, in thinking about the different conditions of the three colonies I had lived in, as well as the differences between Australia at large and an increasingly distant England. And while I was still as interested as ever in landscapes, I was more and more interested in finding little vignettes from ordinary life that spoke of larger truths. Or finding homely touches to point at social pretensions whenever and wherever those were on display. But not with my father’s reformatory enthusiasm; rather, to amuse people back into some sort of good fellow feeling. Tolerance, I suppose. I allow that there has not been much evidence of that in Woolloomooloo.

  What Dr Doyle drew was something to look at. He showed an uninhabited landscape, though of course the artist had to be there to see it; and to let the viewer see it. But he does not show how people are accustoming themselves to their new country, how they are liv
ing in it, how they are living with each other. As I prefer to do. I would say he has not yet absorbed a point of view that relates to this country. I hope I have. For that is what I have worked at. He takes advantage of the opportunity that presents itself—as do so many in their various paths of life. I should have seen that and taken alarm.

  I handed over to him a dozen or so sketches for his consideration, and he modified his own selection in relation to them, and made an arrangement that pleased him. That did not concern me much. I made plates of them all, and I also devised a title page, for his approval. All seemed in good order; it only remained for him to deliver them to the publisher I had recommended. And then silence.

  When I went round to his rooms the best part of a week later, I was astonished to find that he too had decamped. He had been declared insolvent yet again and had taken himself and his wife off to the Hunter Valley. I was all the more astonished when at last I found the assembled sketches. The title of the work had been amended to read ‘Dr Doyle’s Sketches in Australia …’—no mention of me. And when I looked through the sketches I found he had inserted his own initials over the top of mine in some instances, though in others such as the picture of the squatter, he had cut his initials into the stockyard post but had not seen my initials cunningly worked into the foreground, in among the lines indicating rough earth. The effrontery of this rogue! Once again, my own work had been taken over by another, and I had been erased. In fact it was even more flagrant than Flute’s piracy, of maybe highway robbery.