The Discovery Of Slowness

by Sten Nadolny

  What kind of doctor did they have in Port Arthur? What kind of clergyman? These were not meaningful reflections. Forward. John heard the order as clearly as at that time on the Investigator. He didn’t want revulsion and rage to work on him too much, for he wanted to act. Here it was more complicated. It was not enough to hoist a flag. He couldn’t dismiss or incarcerate all the wardens in one day. Above all, he couldn’t dismiss his own minister without a good, well-documented cause.

  Then Flinders Island. He looked forward to this, probably because it bore Matthew’s good name. And the rest of the original inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land were reputedly receiving the best of care.

  Sixty-seven emaciated, miserable creatures with matted hair, listless expressions, dirty skin, and bent backs were the remaining survivors. They squatted apathetically on a desolate, nasty piece of land and waited for death. Children were no longer born, and that made sense: what should children do in a world where there was nothing but Flinders Island? The sad pictures penetrated John’s eyes; he tried energetically to stop them inside his head, but they found their way into his bones. There they sat, and asked, What are you going to do, John Franklin? He answered, Not allow myself to be paralysed.

  How different they looked now – the pretty white houses, the purple-dark mountains, the blue river, the wide-sleeved ladies and the gentlemen with buttoned overcoats and stern faces beneath respectfully doffed felt hats. Behind the high-sounding phrases different truths emerged.

  The police were no longer the protectors of civil order. The sumptuous villas at Battery Point no longer allowed admiration for progress and constructive development, and the streets, the Cathedral of St David, the houses – they had all been built by convicts.

  Now Franklin knew not only what the convicts wanted but also what they lived through. The newly built dockyard with the sweet smell of wood from half-finished hulls became repellent once one knew that the shipbuilders were walking in chains. Even the smell of fish on drying nets on Salamanca Place had nothing comforting about it any more. How often did those nets hold one of the dead who had plunged down the steep shore?

  Sir John Franklin barricaded himself behind his desk. His office became his main headquarters. He wanted not simply to oversee, punish, make war, but also to win over people who had the same feelings in their bones as he did. And they must multiply.

  He had to find a better place to live for the original inhabitants. He discussed this with Montagu in a friendly but cautious way. The latter did not agree and raised several objections. But the next day John’s plans for the establishment of a large reservation were on their way to London.

  Jane played her role as the governor’s wife to perfection. When John had to appear in public she was a watchful ally. She concerned herself with the women’s prison and corresponded with someone named Elizabeth Fry in London about matters of prison discipline. She invited wives and daughters of officials and settlers to hear string quartets and scientific lectures. She ran the entire complicated household and cooked cheerfully, though with moderate success, for twenty people when the cook was ill or had escaped. She spoke her opinion about everything frankly and without shyness; it never occurred to her to be an immaculate, snobbish society lady on the model of Mrs Arthur. She had travelled too widely for that, had read too many books, and had observed too many different people on three continents. She concealed her high spirits as little as her beauty. Jane’s enterprise became nearly infamous: a fortnight after their arrival she became the first woman to climb Mount Wellington – 4,165 feet high; that was no mere stroll. John was independent of Jane’s judgment but listened to it with respect. He loved her without passion but confided in her more than he had ever confided in Eleanor. He did not need her around him all the time, but she was also never in his way. Happily, it was the same for her. If this was not love, well, it was mutual understanding.

  ‘Don’t expect anything from Montagu,’ warned Jane. ‘He’s Arthur’s man. He wants to make you dependent on him and paralyse you.’

  ‘I know,’ answered John.

  ‘He thinks governors come and go, but Montagu remains.’

  ‘That may be,’ answered John, ‘but I still need a first officer who’s quick, knows the ropes, and is part of the government. Without such a person I wouldn’t have a free hand for the real work. Hepburn can’t do it. Maconochie has too little insight. And, foolish as it is, it can’t be a woman.’

  Jane knew that. ‘I can’t take government business off your shoulders. But I can warn you, and I’m now warning you about Montagu.’

  ‘Good,’ said John. ‘And I’m warning you about Maconochie. He’s an idealist. We mustn’t betray our politics with sentimentality.’

  Jane looked at him intently: ‘Nor the other way round.’

  At night she put her head in the hollow between his shoulder and neck. This way she could fall asleep while he lay awake and watched that her head rested comfortably. Now and then she read an adventure novel and put out the light long after John had begun to snore. One morning she said, ‘You’ve been grinding your teeth at night; you’re worried.’ He confirmed it.

  John Montagu declined to speak more slowly to a slow Excellency. In this the colonial secretary reminded Sir John of officers Walker and Pasley on the Bedford. He was well informed and could present his information to others clearly and rapidly; he was circumspect in his actions and forgot nothing – no name, no appointment, not the merest slight. Sir John treated him benevolently but, after careful consideration, no more so than anyone else.

  Ambition kept the colonial secretary in a state of tension; he acted like a cat before jumping. He concealed this tension behind a seemingly relaxed and open manner, making himself accessible to everyone and laughing jovially, his watch-chain clinking over his bulging waistcoat, never taking his watery eyes off the other person for even a second.

  When Sir John made the legislative council an open forum, Montagu was already ‘worried’: a meeting had just taken place of three hundred and thirty-six settlers demanding representative government. To him that was a danger signal. When John became interested in excesses in the punishment of prisoners and dismissed a few officials, he did so against Montagu’s advice. Montagu also opposed the resettling of the aborigines on better land. And when Sir John made it a regular practice to go on board the arriving prisoner ships to tell the convicts not only about their duties but also about their rights, Montagu began to rally Arthur’s old allies round him. Still, he also sought to persuade Sir John to change his ways by reciting to him with emphasis the two ‘iron principles of a penal colony’.

  ‘First: any deviation from a principle once acknowledged as being correct is treason.

  ‘Second: any deviation from current accepted practice is a weakness and encourages the miscreants.’

  John looked at these practices thoroughly from all sides. Then he suggested Montagu consider that a combination of those two maxims would exclude any change. For him, however, a person was also a traitor who identified a new principle as being correct and was too cowardly to act on it.

  It appeared that Montagu took this reply as a personal affront. In circles of the Arthur party he said with a bittersweet smile, ‘For Sir John I’ve recently become a coward and a traitor. He’s simply always a discoverer; nothing remains hidden from him.’

  Maconochie heard about this by way of a servant, and conveyed it to the governor. He did not believe it. In other words, he decided to ignore the hint.

  * * *

  Ella was Eleanor’s daughter through and through. When Jane told her not to impale a piece of meat on a fork and point at the guests with it, she specifically asked for an explanation of why not. Sir John told her about Trim the tomcat, who wouldn’t have let such a chance slip by. ‘That’s the one the city’s named after,’ Ella exclaimed. ‘Was supposed to be named after,’ John corrected her. ‘They later thought Lord Melbourne was more important.’ Jane glanced over to the guests and suggested it m
ight be better to change the subject. Sophia laughed.

  Early in the morning John walked with his daughter under the eucalyptus trees in the garden of Government House. Everything seemed so clear and simple. This colony would some day be a land where children could grow up without half of everything having to be concealed from them all the time. As it was, Ella had asked about convicts and prisons long ago. ‘How does one become a miscreant?’ she once asked. She was used to the fact that Papa always had to think for several minutes before giving an answer. She preferred that to explanations which merely repeated in different words what she already knew. ‘A miscreant,’ said her father, ‘doesn’t know his own correct speed. He’s too slow on the wrong occasions and too fast on the wrong occasions as well.’ Ella wanted a more exact explanation. He went on, ‘He does too slowly what others want him to do; for example, obeying and helping. But he tries much too fast to get what he wants from others; for example, money or––’ ‘But you’re slow, too,’ Ella declared. ‘A governor is allowed that,’ answered John, biting his lip.

  John Franklin’s system matured; it took on contours appropriate to a colony. He believed that he had found, theoretically at least, the correct method for life, discovery and government.

  ‘There have to be two persons at the top. Not one and not three. Two. One of them must conduct the day-to-day business and keep up with the impatient daily inquiries, requests and threats of the governed. He must give the impression of vigour and still concern himself only with cheap, unimportant and urgent matters. The other maintains calm and distance; he can say no at crucial moments. For he does not worry about immediate urgencies but looks at specific individual details for a long time. He acknowledges the duration and speed of all events, allowing himself no respite. He makes things hard for himself. Listening to his own inner voice, he can say no even to his best friends; above all, to his first officer. His own rhythm, his own well-preserved long breath, is his refuge from all apparent urgencies, from all supposed emergencies, from short-lived solutions. If he has said no, he is obliged to give reasons. But with that, too, there need not be too much of a hurry.’ This is how Franklin formulated it and wrote it down.

  ‘That’s the monarchy!’ exclaimed Maconochie. ‘King and Prime Minister – you have invented the monarchy. That’s how far we’ve come.’

  ‘No,’ said John. ‘It’s the art of governing in general. The monarchy is only most easily recognised in it.’

  ‘And where’s the people?’ asked Maconochie.

  ‘It can take the place of the King,’ answered John. ‘Without slowness nothing can be done, not even a revolution.’

  The secretary was not satisfied. ‘That only means waiting. Whom do you seriously want to recommend this to? At sixty-five I won’t make a revolution any more.’

  ‘I, I,’ John stuttered involuntarily.

  The government in London sent their convicts: workers who had destroyed machines in Devonshire, rebels fighting for Canadian independence, supporters of general suffrage who refused to be intimidated by the police. For Maconochie they were heroes; for Franklin, ‘political gentlemen’. Montagu spoke of them as miscreants against God and Crown. He recommended that they be confined in Port Arthur, the prison for the most serious offenders, for such had been the custom until then. Under no circumstances were political prisoners to be sent to settlers as workers: ‘The spark can easily leap from one to the other.’ John decided otherwise, although he knew that any decision taken against Montagu’s vote took a toll in nerves and paperwork. Montagu understood like nobody else how to sabotage decisions already made.

  And Maconochie said, ‘Office work does not suit me too well. I don’t see my mission realised in the misery of day-to-day administration. I want to help this land call up a brighter spirit, to lend my sword to justice.’

  John replied, ‘You can do that only within the administrative routine. It’s particularly favourable for you because you’re my secretary here.’

  Maconochie felt misunderstood, as always when a polished speech had left no impression.

  Especially dedicated was his fight against assignment. He favoured closed penal institutions and the scientifically founded rehabilitation of prisoners with appropriate personnel. Justice, he said, was the basis of education. But a criminal could find justice only in a prison, not with private masters, whom no warden could supervise effectively.

  John was of a different opinion: ‘It follows by simple logic that in prison nobody has a chance. The error of too many felons can be found only in their confused sense of timing. They’ve got the wrong speed, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow. How could they possibly learn the right speed behind high walls? In prison, time is perceived differently from the way it is in the outside world.’

  Maconochie did not understand this because John had spoken much too haltingly for an impatient listener to be able to follow. But Maconochie knew what his objections to assignment had to be: ‘The settler is a poor helper on the way to virtue. He doesn’t improve the convict; the convict corrupts the settler. Assignment is a temptation to commit injustice and cruelty. The settlers don’t spare the whip, either, and they drag female convicts into their beds.’

  John feared that the discussion would degenerate into a mobilisation of arguments in which details were forcibly recruited for a general war of conflicting opinions. He wanted to change the subject, but Lady Jane listened to them and said, ‘No prison administration is the least bit interested in treating prisoners justly, and that has had its effect, as we can see. The settlers are different: they need the convict for good work for their own profit.’

  ‘And exploit him!’ exclaimed the secretary.

  ‘But in the long run nobody can treat another person badly in his own home,’ Jane replied. ‘People of good will have a chance on assignment; in prison even the most harmless person becomes a relentless foe of mankind. You yourself are saying that one should trust men to be good. But you’re too much of an educator; you trust freedom only when it’s developed from your pedagogy. Why can’t you bet on the good sense of the settlers? After all, they alone represent the future of this island.’

  Again Maconochie felt himself misunderstood. Closing his lips tightly in a heroic gesture, he bowed and retired. John did not find any of this amusing, but Jane laughed. She loved combat of any kind.

  John Franklin placed his bets on the free settlers. He consulted Alfred Stephen, one of their most independent political leaders, and invited not only government officials but also cattlemen and merchants to his receptions. He wanted not only to acknowledge their existence but even to talk with them. Ironmongers, linen-weavers, greengrocers, cobblers felt they were noticed officially for the first time. They praised the new governor.

  Politically, the free settlers still had little more say than the convicts, and that rankled with them. True, there were some slight beginnings of popular representation – three settlers sat in the legislative council, but they were reliably outvoted by six government representatives. The executive council, on the other hand, was composed only of officials, and of them the majority belonged to Arthur’s party. John bet on the settlers, but he knew only too well that he had taken by far the most insecure and inconvenient way – the political way.

  The settlers had earned good money during the decades of high grain and wool prices. They were independent, well established and aggressive. They had no safety-valve for their oversensitivity and self-importance, and no worthy opponents except for the governor’s officials. Petty jealousies among individual families were a mere pastime. Even the different newspapers printed in Hobart and Launceston, which sparred regularly, suffered from political ineffectuality. As a result, they shifted even further towards a journalism of pinpricks, especially against the colonial administration: its personalities, personal offences, suspicions.

  John looked at the homes of the wealthy landowners and their expensively decked-out daughters. He listened to the moralising speeches, observed the
well-groomed gardens. Behind all this something else seemed to be concealed. John thought he detected falsity in the settler’s speech, an appetite for conflict hidden behind reasonableness, particularly among the big cattlemen at the borders of the wilderness. This depressed him, especially since he did not immediately understand malicious innuendoes and had to ask for them to be repeated. He longed for more businessmen, for shopkeepers with flexible, calculating minds, with friendly ways and the patience of merchants. But in Van Diemen’s Land these were in the minority, while of booted gentlemen talking alternately of eternal principles and of making short shrift of anything, there were far too many.

  The first annoyance came soon enough: John’s desire to return a small area of land to the original inhabitants seemed to these booted folk an attack on their very life and property. They had money and connections and, lo and behold, soon a dispatch from the government in London instructed Sir John to leave the Tasmanians where they were. Maconochie suspected that Montagu was behind this. John said, ‘Nonsense. True, we’re adversaries, but he is a man of honour.’