I was able to put a stop to this, but the damage to the original plates would require complete redrawing; and as I had not enough scenes to make a whole new book I was inclined to leave it, at least for the time being.
I just do not understand how people can behave like that. They are sure to know that I will see what they have done. Evidently that is of no concern to them.
I have given up on the Turkish baths too.
In my current despondency, I have begun to spend more and more time down in the area near my studio. Where I used to have my studio. The printer below, where I had displayed my work, took it upon himself to comment that my recent sketches are a little thicker than used to be the case, and offered me a new set of brushes. Impertinence. He presumes to teach me my own business. I have felt that remark particularly keenly because the printer then asked for someone else to prepare the plates, as my line was not fine enough for him. The polite justification was that that would leave me more time to prepare actual sketches, but I could see through the bluff. So I have removed myself from the studio; I don’t need it now, anyway. And I no longer have to compete with a piano or a street band.
As a de facto bachelor, it is cheap and convenient for me to resort to the oyster bars down at the bottom end of George Street, to buy an eel pie or the like from a street vendor, and to comfort myself in the hotels down along there. The name of the Nil Desperandum hotel rather takes my fancy. If the journey back to my room becomes too difficult, I may even roll under a bush somewhere out of the way. As others do; especially those who have exhausted all they once owned in going to the goldfields.
It is disagreeable to stay over long in those taverns and pot houses. The local customers are rough-looking men, with hard flat eyes, unblinking. It is inadvisable to join in with their conversation; they do not take kindly to strangers. That is no great hardship for me as I tend to prefer my own company anyway. It would have been even more inadvisable to encounter them in a dark alley, and I have taken particular care to ensure that I leave the saloon on my own.
No doubt a good many of these patrons still have scars on their ankles and backs, and their souls. And some of their old acquaintance, ne’er forgot, are doubtless still labouring in the iron gangs on the Argyle Cut. A way was broken through the Cut some little time ago, but while you can make your way through there it is not yet a finished road. Sydney still has its work gangs, even though transportation is over and done with. Convicts completed most of the improvements to the main semi-circular quay, and now they are working on the defensive fort in the middle of the harbour. But they are part of the history that Sydney would rather do without, and so they are kept out of the way as far as possible. Ladies are escorted at a distance from them, lest they hear something uncouth; gentlemen avert their eyes if they do not manage to avoid a chance encounter. You can understand the general desire here for respectability, to blot out that shameful past; and yet it is still with us.
I look, of course, but as discreetly as I can. They interest me—some of them may even have been in those hulks I saw as a young fellow in Portsmouth. They are grey, and drag their feet, and look deeply defeated. They have the sinister look of the Van Diemen’s lot on the Victorian goldfields. Their clothing is thoroughly nondescript, a kind of grubby yellow clay. Or perhaps the colour of decaying sails. Indeed, their prisoners’ garb may actually be made from old sails. Yet in spite of my curiosity, I do not choose to sketch them. It would be in poor taste, it would be taking advantage.
From what I can make out, some essential part of their individual character has become submerged. You do not see a full person, you see only a shell. It does not interest me to draw caricatures and grotesques, and how can you make a sensitive picture of a subject who is all too patently insensitive, dead to his feelings, or at best closed off against us?
A number of the convicts are housed on an island in the inner harbour, called Cockatoo Island. I suppose it must be half a mile or so from the surrounding shores; an island reduced almost entirely to a rocky outcrop, all but denuded of trees, so that the cockatoos are no longer attracted to it. Instead, gulls have found nesting sites on the sharp cliffs—one kind of raucousness replaced by another. The convict barracks is perched austerely on the top hump of the island, exposed to the full sun in summer and the blustering gusts of wind along the harbour most afternoons, especially in winter. Their quarters look harsh; forlorn and brutal. As I suppose was intended, poor wretches. Those who are confined to the island spend their days hacking a great trench into the rock, to form a dry dock. The popular story is that the guards throw offal and the like into the waters there, to encourage sharks, and to discourage absconders. No prisoner has ever escaped from it.
Until quite recently, that is. A young man, Fred Ward, has won his freedom for the time being at least, by swimming across the dangerous channel, assisted by his aboriginal wife (as she is thought to be; perhaps they were handfasted too) and that has embarrassed the authorities exceedingly. There was a great hue and cry, and a reward offered for any assistance leading to his apprehension, but his companion was too wily in the ways of the bush to leave any tracks, and so they escaped into the interior.
Just imagine how that must have been, slipping into the dark water at night, shrinking at every accidental splash, trying to swim away and yet all the time keeping an eye back on the guard house, and waiting at every moment for the first approach of a shark from the murky depths below. But they made it across the strong pull of the current, and on to the shore without rousing any dogs in the neighbourhood, and stole away.
The upshot is that Sir Frederick now has another bushranger on the loose. Young Ward has already made several bold attacks, and calls himself Captain Thunderbolt. Like the others up around the Turon and Bathurst and over to Forbes he has a good eye for horses. Indeed, as with so many of these young fellows, he had first been imprisoned for either stealing horses or receiving stolen horses; he was not able to explain how such a fine mob happened to be in his care. The reward offered is of less value than the horses he rides.
A man who has an appreciation of fine horses cannot be all bad.
I do not think Elizabeth would have come to help me.
I have time enough to myself now, to look about me and to draw what I see. Sometimes I don’t see very much at all, if the truth be told, when I go on what is aptly called a blinder. When I sit by myself with my black bottle. And sometimes, when I rejoin the world outside, I see situations, I suppose I might call them, and devise imagined figures. I draw pawnbrokers with a devil’s tail curling from behind their legs, I draw a scandalised parson who looks exactly like the older brother of street urchins—I have called this picture the Pure merino. I draw the bully boys of Sydney, something like my squatter only bigger and fatter and uglier, just stepped out of their club and with their equally ugly bulldog at their side. And I draw natives dressed in borrowed finery, the man in a cast-off military jacket and a collapsing top hat and walking barefooted down the street, with his clay pipe at a jaunty angle and his hands clasped behind his back, like a commandant reviewing his troops, only the baton tucked just so under his arm is a waddy. It is a fair imitation of the other such jacketed individuals. His not-so-fair lady wears a very pert little hat tilted down over her face and carries an elegant parasol, and wears the top half of a crinoline. All the underworks are on display, and so also her bare legs. They are almost à la mode; they are in their own way surprisingly fashionable. It is the fashion that is burlesqued. They are curiously dignified.
And in my darkest mood I have painted something that frightens me whenever I look at it again, the King of Terrors, Death himself with his evil dart and with a glass of hot toddy in his crown, stepping out along the street, the great lanky warden taking along with him in chains a harlot holding her own black bottle, and a frightened drunkard not quite able to keep up. Elizabeth’s hat, and mine. Those are my long teeth, too, rotting and horselike. The streets of Sydney are no longer for me. I have not met
with the success here that I had hoped for. Sydney does not want to know me. I am for Melbourne, where once my work was admired.
Sketch 15
In which I revise my views
WILLIAMSTOWN AGAIN. I suppose by its name Williamstown was intended as somehow Adelaide’s equal, as though they were intended as consorts. One difference is that prison gangs have cut and scraped and made roads. The public houses have already acquired the look of places best avoided—not so very different from the Rocks. Or as I seem to remember, Portsmouth. This is a dockyard, and the taverns that serve them are much the same everywhere, Port Misery aside. But then, it is hardly a dockyard, or not as I recollect. A port of call, and little else.
Dockyards and harbour fronts conceal, they keep an impassive and slightly belligerent face, they tell very little of what lies behind. You have no business here, they say to strangers. Move along. Which was an unnecessary admonition in the heyday of the gold rushes, as I recall from eight years ago. There is still a jostle of shipping, but no longer as extraordinary as back then.
You do not have far to walk to see a workman with his pipe in his mouth and long-handled shovel under his arm, and a pig on the end of a rope, waiting for the ferry. Move along indeed.
But Melbourne! Melbourne is now visibly wealthy. Pandemonium no longer rules here, it has consolidated. Melbourne I mean. The wide streets are lined with substantial shops and buildings; trapstone gutters and stone kerbs carry off much of the slosh that I remember, downhill to the river and so out into what sailors facetiously call the big puddle. The footpaths are raised, and paved in the better streets, and the roads are well-maintained macadam. These are much more crowded than they used to be, with gigs and cabs and carriages, and dashing coaches hurtling pell-mell through the throng, and mothers and nannies snatching their children out of the way. Consolidated pandemonium after all.
Bare-footed boys dart everywhere with a bundle of newspapers under their arm, in and out among the traffic, in and out of the saloon bars. The better streets are lined with gas lamps, a mute memorial to the unfortunate Governor Hotham. Black coats and white collars and tall hats predominate, the colourful exuberance of the diggers is much less in evidence. Wherever crowds of gentlemen assemble, at stock exchanges and banks and railway stations, the scene looks like a set of silhouettes. The people have flattened out, and it seems to me they are all coming to look like each other.
The city—for such indeed it is, now—astounds. Everywhere is built upon, and built up. Stone upon stone, shapely piles as the poets say. Everything is so very square, uniform, as if to deny that the wealth here has been a matter of random luck, a lottery. Though you still see nuggets and gold dust displayed in the banks and in gold-buyers’ windows, to excite the newest arrivals and the speculators.
Gold has made Melbourne. It has also given it heartache, for as in Sydney so here is widespread anxiety that the great Russian Czar has designs on this available wealth. Rumours abound that he wishes to make himself master of the Pacific, and will attack Britain’s dominions. The loudest rattling of sabres is of course our own; nervously.
Which agitation found a timely outlet when, utterly surprising, an American sailing ship, the Shenandoah, needing repairs, came into the bay and tied up at Williamstown. I say American, but given the current ebb and flow of their Civil War, I should be more precise. It was a warship from the Confederate side of that unending discord. The newspapers, fanning the flames as ever, note that the Russians recently anchored a part of their fleet in San Francisco, and support the Unionists against the Southerners, to whom Britain has apparently been favourably disposed. Might this not provide a pretext for sailing into our waters in large mass?
Yet even while the presence of the Shenandoah introduced much nervousness, it likewise provided a flutter of excitement. There were all those sailors and officers to entertain, balls to hold, receptions to be offered. Craig’s Hotel at Ballaarat made its ballroom available for a gala event, the Melbourne Club opened its doors to the senior officers, and the Williamstown hotels opened their arms to the crew. The visit was all too brief, alas, or so thought the young misses of the town. And likewise a party of enthusiastic young men, some forty or more, who were so taken with the engaging company of the Americans that they neglected to leave the ship when it sailed. We heard later that the captain apparently could not find a single one of them until it had reached international waters.
That is the disadvantageous side to Melbourne’s stunning wealth. If it becomes of interest to the Russians, then that will mean dealing with just a bigger sort of bushranger when the gold is shipped off overseas; it will be another unhappy proof that might is right. But much of the wealth stays here too, and with it Melbourne is even amazing itself with the rapid transformation it is presiding over. Not only are the streets now well made, and the buildings properly aligned, there are bridges and railway lines and public buildings—no longer meaning public houses. Though of those, many are grand affairs, with dining rooms and extensive bars and billiard tables and bowling saloons. The better sort may have a bathhouse, maybe a hairdresser, and even a vaudeville theatre close by. These are in many ways as good as a gentleman’s club, without the exclusive membership.
The lesser hotels and other drinking establishments are not quite so salubrious. The bar attached to the Theatre Royal in Bourke Street, now owned by Coppin of course, is one place where patrons might expect to find an easy attachment for the evening. I remember that his theatre in Adelaide was near the naughty part of town, and Little Bourke Street is, notoriously, given over to the same sorts of nocturnal adventures. The vestibule at the Royal is sometimes spoken of, rather saucily, as a saddling paddock. Yet it is also one of the popular gathering places, convenient to all sorts of respectable business activity in the city.
I saw very little of the Americans or their ship, even though these were the talk of the town. I have been busy about my own business. I brought with me drafts of the sketches that Doyle had thought to purloin for himself; that is, my own originals, without his initials scrawled hither and thither all over them. My drawings had to be reworked for publication as coloured plates, and the sooner I could get those completed the sooner Melbourne would know that I was back in town.
Which was a proper plan of action, and had worked for me in the past; but as the reviews almost immediately pointed out to me, I had miscalculated—for even though they were published as Australian sketches, Melbourne is not so interested in scenes of Sydney and New South Wales. It won’t have helped that New South Wales won the last intercolonial cricket match, either. But at least I had been noticed.
You may be sure I did not repeat the mistake. When submissions for an Intercolonial Exhibition were called for, I worked away at a number of Melbourne scenes, as well as several of my old favourites from the gold-diggings days. Melbourne cannot get enough of Melbourne. Truth to tell, the great streets of Melbourne are now lined each side by an array of handsome and even sumptuous buildings, set out on a scale intended to impress. The people in the streets are somewhat overwhelmed by these, and in consequence the cut and quality of their coats and dresses tends to disappear as incidental detail. Really, I mean, not just in my drawings.
Not that I would dare breathe a word to that effect.
The best society converges along the middle section of Collins Street. Here towards the end of most afternoons you may see the most elegant equipage, the best-groomed horses, and the equally well-groomed ladies and gentlemen, all nodding at their acquaintances, or slighting those they did not wish to see. Fans and feathers, high collars and shiny hats, sparkling carriage and harness fittings, all are part of the passing parade. Along the footpaths a comparable measured promenade takes place, with much bowing and hat raising and swishing of skirts and flourishing of canes. And as the day wears on and night falls, the Nobs turn out in evening dress, the women in a froth of white. China white does not do it justice. Here the best people meet. This is fashion in full display, the height
of colonial elegance. Or superficial detail.
One street away in either direction, or even at the far ends of Collins Street itself, alas, what a falling off is there! Mere merchandising.
This preening and posing and bustling is a long way from Sydney, where, I hear, Sir Frederick Pottinger has recently managed to shoot himself, getting into a carriage. He made a mess of that too, and lingered four or five days. Such clumsiness would not be tolerated along the Block. It occurs to me that his aim was no better than Goliath’s. Further afield, a vicious bushranger, Dan Morgan, has also been shot. There has been much less of that kind of activity, bushranging that is, but the shooting too, about the Victorian fields in recent times. The gangs seem to be more active across the border. Perhaps they felt more comfortable there while Sir Frederick was in the saddle. They will have to take fresh stock of their activities now. Perhaps they will think helpfully to forestall the Russians.
My own preferred terrain is in the adjacent streets and lanes of Melbourne. Bourke Street, where not ten years ago diggers used to try out half-wild horses just brought in from the bush, and showed their skills in sitting tight on the bucking steed of their fancy, Bourke Street is now busy with tearooms and tobacconists, and theatres with their bars and cafés. Where a man may be tumbled from an insubstantial chair with the same end result as from a scurfed saddle.
Right along the length of the street is one hotel after another, from the Imperial and the Orient at the top end of the hill, down to the Bull and Mouth somewhere about the centre, and so to the far end if you are still thirsty. They cater to a great motley trade. More to my taste are the taverns and pothouses in Little Bourke Street, and even the shanties in the lanes, though those can get somewhat out of hand later in the evenings. Larrikins hang about in the streets thereabouts, and are inclined to heckle and shove the passing custom, topers such as myself. The lanes are dark; there are no glowing gaslights such as those near the theatres, and the paving stones are uneven. Shadows shift about. You can easily stumble in the backstreets.
The Profilist Page 24