Skins

by Sarah Hay

  William kept her from thinking. He took her up to the steep rise behind the hut and into the bush where black cockatoos crawled over the red bottlebrush tree, ripping the heart of the flower and tearing strips from the bark with their strong curved beaks. They would peer sideways with eyes that saw everything. She was there when Caroline called. There was someone for her at the door. Police Constable Dunn. He announced that she was required to give evidence tomorrow. It was as though small spiders crawled down the nape of her neck.

  She woke in the night, cold. The fire had gone out. She set about finding more wood. It was usually by the door. But tonight there was none. Outside, the darkness was heavy and she stumbled towards the woodpile. She could see a light down the hill and to her right. That was Spencer’s farm, Sir Richard Spencer whom she would have to speak to in the morning. She wondered where they had put him. And Isaac too. For they had both been charged. She had been told to go to the old commandant’s residence on Parade Street. Perhaps they were in the old gaol. She didn’t think it had been used since the settlement was an outpost for New South Wales convicts.

  When the dark sky brightened she walked alone down the hill. There were two ships in the harbour, sitting like old ducks on still water. And the shoreline was dotted with small craft coming and going, ripples stretching wide in their wake. She wore her tammar-skin shoes but she had borrowed her mother’s dark brown gown. She had straightened her hair with oil and had parted it in the middle, holding it in place with combs behind her ears. She shivered for she was without her seal skin.

  She reached the ballast brick house of George Cheyne and turned right following the road to the creek that cut the little town in half. Timber planks had been placed across it.

  No one had asked her what she was going to say. But their unspoken words had hung heavy. She walked along the thin planking but her feet got wet at the other end when she stepped off into the mud.

  The street was wide and dirty. On either side of it there was bush and then occasionally, where it had been cleared, a small cottage. Some were half finished: a whitewashed wall standing alone and sticks of wattle strung together in bundles. She reached the end of the street and turned up towards the old commandant’s residence, a shabby grey building enclosed by a brush fence. She noticed a group of people standing in a half-circle. She could see the wooden door to the house. She would be able to slip inside without them noticing her. As she was about to enter she glanced up and saw between two people. They were gathered around Anderson. He was in stocks. His head bowed by the wooden restraint, his big hands useless.

  She grasped the side of the wall for support. His head lifted slightly and he saw her. In that moment she saw everything: the anger, the shame, the defeat and the injustice. She looked at the big solid door in front of her and she pulled it open. Three men sat at a long table at the other end of the room. In the middle was Sir Richard Spencer. On his left she recognised Captain Peter Belches, and on the other side Captain Alexander Cheyne, for they were both men who had come out on the James Pattison. She stood just inside the door, hesitant at first and then she took a deep breath, lifted her head and walked tall towards the row of seating facing the men.

  Afterwards she knew what she had done was right. But it was no comfort. Not when she was to go home and look into the faces of her family. So she stayed down by the water’s edge, watching the clouds clear and the colours deepen. She overheard men who were waiting at the landing stage for flour to be taken out to one of the ships. The ship was taking female convicts to Sydney. It had been damaged in a storm and had called in for repairs. There was no sign of life on its decks for clearly the women were being kept below.

  When she did go back to the house there was no need to say anything. Jem and Manning weren’t around. And Mary and Matthew had gone to enquire about a passage to Sydney. She wondered how they felt. Knowing that Jack’s life was in their hands. She had told the three men the truth. That she had gone to live with Jack after three weeks. Now everyone would know. But what did it matter?

  She sat on the step at the front of the hut. There she could see the purple ranges in the distance. She heard there were grassy plains at the foothills and that men had taken sheep to them. Already she felt as though a part of her life had ended. She almost couldn’t remember what the island was like. And although she had caught a glimpse of him that morning, the memory of his face, his eyes, his mouth was fading. The way his lips moved when he spoke her name.

  She sat quietly in the corner while everyone ate together. She found it impossible to swallow. Manning had said that a decision would be made in the morning. And he would be arranging his passage to the Swan River. She noticed his quick glance towards Netty when he spoke. She was pleased to see that he was ignored.

  The next morning she looked for her mother and found her at the back of the house sitting on a tree stump. She could see that she wasn’t well. She seemed hollow, as though what life she had in her was leaking out. For as long as she could remember her mother’s hair had been grey. It was wrapped around the back of her head but listless strands hung about her face. And beneath her eyes lay dark shadows. She looked up when she saw her daughter. Dorothea came and sat opposite her on the fallen trunk of a tree.

  After a while she said: ‘They had him in stocks.’

  ‘He’s a bad man.’

  ‘He ain’t, Ma. He ain’t a bad person.’

  Her mother sighed and she shook her head wearily.

  ‘A black man is a bad man. Whether he is or not.’

  So when Anderson appeared around the side of the house they both stared at him, speechless. He stood in front of the sun, a featureless black man against the white light of day. But when she got closer she saw it was him. Even though she spoke the truth, she hadn’t expected the three men to listen. He told them it was Mead’s evidence as well that had made them realise it was impossible to prove that he and Isaac had stolen forty-six pounds from Manning. The trial would not go ahead. She smiled and the air left her lungs easily. She glanced at her mother and read in her eyes a warning but she took no notice. She brought him food. And he ate outside under the tree.

  Later they walked down the hill as the sun was setting behind them. He led her to the pub on the waterfront where he had taken a room. His whaleboat had been restored to him. Mead and Isaac had sold the skins and bought new supplies to take back with them. They would camp beside the boat that night and leave before dawn. Jack was worried about the black women.

  There were about twenty people around the bar, mostly mariners. She liked the fact that when she entered with Jack they looked away. One of them didn’t for it was Church, who was seated away from everyone else by the window. She met his gaze and smiled at him for she felt strangely pleased to see him. Anderson was facing the bar when Church got up and came towards her. He didn’t look any different. He still wore his black coat but perhaps his hair and his beard had been trimmed.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Waiting for another vessel,’ he said, and he looked towards the window and in the direction of the sea. He shrugged his thin shoulders. ‘There is no place for me in this wilderness.’

  ‘But where will you go?’

  ‘I’m returning to England, to my brother and his wife,’ he said as he turned back to her, his eyes inscrutable.

  Anderson looked over his shoulder at Church and acknowledged him with a nod. Church raised his hat and moved towards the door. Then he was gone and she wondered where he had got the money for his passage. She realised too that she had never felt as far from England as she did now.

  The bar was nearly empty when she looked intently at Anderson.

  ‘I want to come with you,’ she said.

  He studied her face. After a while he spoke, shaking his head slightly: ‘No, you don’t.’

  She didn’t say anything. But the next day when it was time to push off from the shore and the light beneath the land cast a weak path to the east,
she was standing beside him.

  22 January 1886

  The minister came today. He asked after George. I didn’t say that I hadn’t seen him. He wanted to know if I was reading my Bible. After he left, I looked inside the cover. 18th January 1837, Dorothea Anderson. It cost me four shillings from Hugh Spencer who drowned, I think. I bought it because I wanted to know what Jack knew. That was the year our daughter was born.

  Was Matthew there when you died? I hope he held your hand. Jack is close to me now. I can smell him. It is like the rich scent of a seal. I know I will see you soon. And that you have forgiven me.

  Afterword

  Dorothea died on 22 January 1886. Her passing was noted by Kate Keyser, a resident of King George Sound (Albany), Western Australia, from 1837 to 1886. She wrote in her diary: Old Dolly Pettit died today. A woman of property and yet it is said she died of neglect and starvation. Poor old thing she had no children to care for her.

  Most of the events that occurred in the life of Dorothea Newell, or Dolly Pettit as she later became known, are true. Dorothea came out from England with her family to King George Sound in the early 1830s and died there in 1886.

  The people mentioned in her story are also true. Their characters, however, are my own invention and in some cases I have created their backgrounds. The inspiration for the story was drawn from Western Australia’s Records of the Colonial Secretary’s Office, 1 August–30 September 1835 and from the Albany Court House Records 1834–1841.

  The house where Dorothea died is now a popular restaurant in Albany. When this book was almost completed, I spoke to its current owners. They were unaware of the early history of the house. They claim it is haunted by a small grey-haired woman who sits by the fireplace in one of the front rooms and by a man who comes up from the sea and walks around the house to keep her safe.

  A note on characters and sources

  References to the Newell family can be found in the Dictionary of Western Australians 1829–1850; Volume 1: Early Settlers, published by the University of Western Australia Press. An outline of Dorothea’s experience on Middle Island was recorded in her deposition at Anderson’s trial (Albany Court House Records 1834–1841). What happened to her after Middle Island has been pieced together from snippets of fact and hearsay recorded in newspaper articles and other documents collected by the Local Studies Section of the Albany Library. However, her time in England and that of her family’s was my own invention. It is also generally believed that her father came to Australia as a New South Wales convict. Descendants of the family believe otherwise, however, and think that James Newell senior was mistaken for someone else. I am convinced that there is sufficient evidence to support their view. I have remained true to what is generally thought to have been the fates of all the Newell family members.

  John Anderson, or Black Jack Anderson, the African-American, has been mentioned in Australian historical texts on sealing and Kangaroo Island. He is recorded as appearing in the 1830s, possibly as a deserter off an American whaler. Little else is known about him. He and Isaac Winterbourne were charged with the theft from James Manning of forty-six pounds. They were acquitted due to lack of evidence. Anderson was also charged over altercations with the sealer William Andrews. Anderson, in his defence, claimed that Andrews had robbed him of a variety of items, including two native women. On 29 March 1837 Robert Gamble reported Anderson’s death in a statement made to Patrick Taylor, Justice of the Peace at Albany.

  The names of the two Aboriginal women with Anderson and the one Aboriginal woman with Isaac on Middle Island are unknown. A native woman was apparently killed with Anderson on Mondrain Island.

  The conversation between Mead, Church and Matthew about a copper plaque on page 190 refers to an actual historical event. Charles Douglas was Matthew Flinders’ boatswain. As the HMS Investigator approached Middle Island on 18 May 1803 Douglas died of dysentery. He was buried on the island and an inscription upon copper was placed over his grave. Until now this copper plaque has never been found.

  The circumstances in which James Manning found himself on Middle Island are true. However, he was a passenger on the Defiance and not a crew member. The crew, who set off back to Sydney in a longboat after the Defiance was wrecked, was in fact never heard of again. Anderson accused Manning of stealing but it wasn’t from Owens. It was from George Merredith, the captain of the Defiance, while they were all on Kangaroo Island. Manning and Jem Newell were left by Anderson to walk from the mainland near Middle Island to Albany. The letter on page 205 is an edited copy of the original letter written by Sir Richard Spencer, Resident Magistrate of Albany, to the Colonial Secretary’s Office. I have been unable to discover what happened to James Manning but it appears that he never reached the Swan River colony. If he did, there is no official record of it.

  Mary Newell married Matthew Gill, by then a servant of Sir Richard Spencer, on 8 September 1834. A Mary Gill was buried in Sydney on 25 March 1840. She was twenty-eight years old.

  The other people named in the story — Owens, John White (Johno) the boy James (Jimmy) and Francis Mead, as well as Isaac and Anderson — were officially recorded as being on the island at the time. Evanson Jansen and his crew and passengers landed on Middle Island after the Mountaineer was wrecked at Thistle Cove, near Esperance.

  For this story to be authentic in its descriptions of the sealers and the experiences of early colonists such as the Newell family, I have drawn on the following sources:

  A Charles Begg and Neil C Begg, The World of John Boultbee Including an Account of Sealing in Australia and New Zealand; W Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks, African American Seamen in the Age of Sail; Don Brown, ‘Black Whalers, They Were Great While it Lasted’ in American Visions, 1987, October, 26–30; WA Cawthorne, The Kangaroo Islanders, A Story of South Australia before Colonisation; Phillip A Clarke, ‘Early European Interaction with Aboriginal Hunters and Gatherers on Kangaroo Island, South Australia’ in Aboriginal History, 1996, 20, 51–81; JS Cumpston, First Visitors to Bass Strait; JS Cumpston, Kangaroo Island; Paul Edwards and Edward Dabydeen (ed), Black Writers in Britain 1760–1890; Tatania de Fircks, ‘Costume in the Early Years of Western Australia’ in Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, vol 9, part 6, 1988, 27–38; Tim Flannery (ed), John Nicol, Mariner, Life and Adventures, 1776–1801; Donald Garden, Albany, A Panorama of the Sound from 1827; BK de Garis (ed), Portraits of the South-West Aborigines, Women and the Environment; Neville Green (ed), Nyungar—The People, Aboriginal Customs in the South West of Australia; Pamela Horn, The Rural World 1780–1850, Social Change in the English Countryside; Lawrence C Howard, ‘A Note on New England Whaling and Africa before 1860’ in Negro History Bulletin, 1858, 13–15; Jorgen Jorgenson, Jorgen Jorgenson’s Observations on Pacific Trade and Sealing and Whaling in Australian and New Zealand Waters before 1805; Leon F Litwack, North of Slavery, The Negro in the Free States 1790–1860; GA Mawer, Ahab’s Trade, The Saga of South Seas Whaling; N Plomley and K Henley, ‘The Sealers of Bass Strait and the Cape Barren Community’ in Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, vol 37, 1990, 37–127; Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea; Rosemary Ransom, Taraba, Tasmanian Aboriginal Stories (DECCD); John Rintoul, Esperance Yesterday and Today; Winnis J Ruediger, Border’s Land Kangaroo Island 1802–1836; Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians; Iain Stuart, ‘Sea Rats, Bandits and Roistering Buccaneers, What Were the Bass Strait Sealers Really Like?’ in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 1997, 83(1), 47–58; Vernon Williams, The Straitsmen, A Romance; Guy Wright, Sons and Seals.

 

 

 
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