Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

by Richard Flanagan

  Audubon painted marriages, courting, all the vain pretence of polite society, & all of it was birds & all of his birds sold & it was all up a very clever thing that he was doing, a natural history of the new burghers. I could, I suppose, paint the fish in some similar imitation of the schools in which the local free settlers swim. But the fish come to me in the true condition of this life: alone, fearful, with no home, nowhere to run & hide. And if I were to place two of my fish together would I then have a school? Would I have the appearance of the ocean beneath the waves which only the native women diving for crayfish see?

  No.

  I would only have two fish: each alone, fearful, united solely in the terror of death I see in their eyes. Audubon painted the dreams of a new country for which there is always a prospective purchaser; my fish are the nightmare of the past for which there is no market. What I am painting is not clever like the work of Jean-Babeuf Audubon, nor will it ever prove popular: it is a natural history of the dead.

  In the end the boat was burnt, we said by angry creditors, they said by us: whatever, we were all ruined, & the last I saw of Jean-Babeuf Audubon was him waving a sooty lace cuff out of a slit in the local lockup where he had been incarcerated as a debtor. But this time no birds magically appeared. Keats, who was sitting outside, was reading aloud for Audubon’s benefit some of his brother’s lamentable verse on the treacherous promise of the New World—verse I did not think much inclined to cheer Jean-Babeuf Audubon, who in his cell was pleading with his captors, yelling in his deplorable Creole accent: ‘I ham Eenglesh caportlist. I ham.’

  Outside, Keats paid no heed to such argument, declaiming: ‘Their bad flowers have no scent, their birds no sweet song.’

  ‘A men of the on-ore,’ the aggrieved Audubon was shouting, ‘and shell pay—if cursed.’

  ‘And great unerring Nature,’ continued Keats, ‘for once seems wrong.’

  VI

  TWENTY YEARS PASSED.

  There ought be a full reckoning of my life through that time, but I have just read to the King what I have so far written. Tellingly, chillingly, he has offered no comment. His natural courtesy forbids open criticism, but I caught his opaque eye & his contempt is transparent, his wisdom—as always—instructive.

  I can see he is saving me from the folly of recording what he &, I suspect, you have no interest whatsoever in hearing—what happened to Billy Gould in those years. You may think every moment of Billy Gould’s life has equal weight, but the King knows that to be untrue. Most of it passed as in a miserable dream that dissolves upon waking, because it is too immemorable to recall, beyond its ending in arrest for forgery in Bristol in 1825.

  I wasn’t a forger, & I wasn’t happy being accused as such. I was a Villain on the lam who had once painted, & I was insulted that anyone would accuse me of stooping so low as counterfeiting Bank of Bristol notes. Still, having always maintained that the best way of battling power is to agree, upon being sentenced to be transported to Van Diemen’s Land for forgery, I became a forger. After all, what else could I do?

  Claiming to be an Artist seemed consistent with the lie of my conviction, & offered the prospect of a better billet than labouring in a chain gang & made me look like something other than the common criminal I was, & that is the only forgery I was until then ever guilty of—forging myself anew as an Artist.

  But it didn’t begin so well.

  My first attempt at a painting, admittedly somewhat derivative of a lithograph of Robespierre I chanced across in a pamphlet illustrating the horrors of the French Terror, was of Captain Pinchbeck, the commander of the convict transport, who had requested his own portrait upon discovering my trade. My picture so angered the captain that he had me clapped back in chains for the rest of the boat’s six-month journey to Australia. I tried to make it up by then rendering him as the more manly Danton, but all up it seemed to the captain only a further, & in this case, unforgivable insult.

  Too late, as I was being brought up from the stinking hold, did I discover from the mate that the captain had for some time suffered the ignominy of being cuckolded by a French whaler.

  I began condemning the pandering ponces of other races to Captain Pinchbeck, only to be told by him to shut up, whilst he lectured me on the horrors of the French—most particularly their dreaded noyades. These had taken place at the height of the Terror in the hulks of old slave ships that were filled with rebels from the Vendée & sunk of an evening in the harbour of Nantes, to be each morning ingeniously refloated, emptied of their watery corpses, & refilled with more rebels of whom there was an inexhaustible supply, because, as Captain Pinchbeck put it, tyranny will always bring forth its opponents as the rain does grass.

  When finally finished with telling this interminable tale he had me taken to what he called his petite noyade, the perforated coffin-like box in which men were locked then dragged behind the boat’s wake, so that I could discover what it really felt like to be French.

  I would like to say that when I was then dropped for a full minute into the Pacific Ocean inside that bubbling black wet box of slimy oak, I had the first intimation of what the true consequence of Art for my future was going to be. But that would be untrue. I merely resolved to look for templates other than those of Frenchie trouble makers & pants-men, & held my breath until I reckoned I was about to burst.

  When I was pulled back out of the water the captain told me that if I ever painted him again he would personally feed me to those he called the sea-lawyers—the sharks that trailed our boat. As I was dragged out of the petite noyade, a convict constable gave me a good kicking in full view of the captain. Curling up into a ball, it occurred to me that Captain Pinchbeck might just be wrong on the matter of tyranny, that for every tyrant born, so too are a thousand men willing to be enslaved, & that whoever the rebels of the Vendée were, they deserved to be drowned for entirely misunderstanding this truth of human nature.

  I don’t want you to think because of this that my reinvention of myself as a painter was a total lie. After all, I had watched Jean-Babeuf Audubon work, & had once even finished off for him a pair of bald eagles that he had to get done in a hurry to honour a pressing debt. There was my time spent with the engraver Shuggy Ackermann, but that didn’t seem to count for anything more than the possibility of further criminal charges. As well, I suppose I could mention my half-year of Potteries experience, but I don’t feel like going into that just now, because it makes me all sad thinking of how I had once danced the Old Enlightenment with such gusto, & now have only Widow Thumb & her Four Daughters to play with.

  Elsewhere there may have been other prospects with both work & women, & frankly I would have welcomed them. But I had to take work as it came, to learn the rules of my art as best I could from such bad experience.

  Upon arrival in that grotty modern world of Van Diemen’s Land in the stinking late summer heat, all hideous new sandstone warehouses & customs houses & chain gangs & redcoats, I was assigned to Palmer the coachbuilder in Launceston, what passes as the capital of the island’s north. For him I painted shiny family crests on coaches, inventing coats of arms for the bastard issue of the New World that wished to dress up in the absurd livery of the Old. Lions rampant & oaks evergreen & red hands & swords ever erect mixed with no good reason & little need for explanation on our coach doors, underlined with absurd Latin mottos provided by an Irish cleric doing time for bestiality: Quae fuerent vitia, mores sunt (What were once vices are now manners); Vedi Hobarti e poi muouri (See Hobart & die); Ver non semper viret (Spring does not always flourish). It was my first great artistick lesson: colonial art is the comic knack of rendering the new as the old, the unknown as the known, the antipodean as the European, the contemptible as the respectable.

  VII

  I ABSCONDED AFTER six months. I made my way south, heading back to Hobart Town by shanks’s pony, with the hope of escaping by boat from there as I had two decades previously. The long weary war with the savages was still far from over, the savages s
howing such a craftiness in their attacks that many colonists—their dwellings at the edge of great black forests where fear naturally engenders suspicion—believed them sorcerers. The back country was their country, but upon it was a plague of escapees & bushranger gangs that shot redcoats & redcoat patrols that shot bushrangers & vigilantes out for the pleasure of shooting up some savages or, failing that, anyone.

  The occasional armed compound that passed for a homestead was even more fearful. I approached one in the hope of a night’s shelter & was only saved from the wild dogs set on me by the warning musket shots fired from slits in the great outer wall.

  I resolved that rather than continue making my way by skirting the highway through the midlands, I would take the longer but far safer route down the coastline of the east. I walked to where green sea broke light into a shrapnel of silver & scattered it over glistening white beaches, along which I often came upon the bleaching bones & skulls of savages slaughtered by sealers in their raids for black women. Such a sight was a peculiar comfort, for it meant the beaches were safe for me to travel, for except in the remote west the savages now tended to avoid the coast. Still of a night I made no fire for fear of the savages finding & killing me, though it was early spring & the frost bitter & hard.

  Four days out of Launceston & hopelessly lost I fell in with a man who said his name was Roaring Tom Weaver. He tried to interfere with me on our first night but seemed not put out when I told him to leave me alone, him replying I wasn’t really his sort of molly-boy anyway.

  Upon being shot at by a whaling party foraging for water the next afternoon, we headed inland. We followed the stars into the night but then it clouded over & we finally halted on a rocky outcrop. It was thick with flies, but we were lost & too tired to continue. We slept like dead men. When the sun rose it was to reveal that the flies had as their home the sloughing corpse of a black woman who lay not a hundred yards down from where we had stopped the night.

  She had been staked out on the ground, abused in a most dreadful fashion & then left to die. Parts of her shimmered white with the light of the sun playing on moving maggots. Roaring Tom began to wail & screech. He was a wild animal & it was a long time before I could have him halt his awful keening.

  That night, by a miserable fire we were too afraid to feed with anything other than the smallest of sticks, we said nothing. The following day we hit on open country, a delightful parkland beneath a sky so perfect a china blue—a sky the likes of which I never saw in the Old World—that it seemed brittle, as though it might at any moment break apart & reveal something awful behind all that glorious light.

  We smelt the smoke of the burning shepherd’s hut long afore we saw that bark & daub hut’s smouldering ruins & the charred corpse of its tenant being pulled out of the ash on a long piece of bark by his mate, who could not stop weeping. The weeping man was an emancipist who had a backblock in the next valley & sometimes came over to see his cobber the shepherd, both being Roscommon men. He had arrived too late: the savages had speared his friend in the hut & then set it alight, leaving him there to be burnt alive. Upon him firing on them the savages scattered. The emancipist pointed to a fallen tree, behind which lay a savage he had shot. He had never killed a man before & it was unclear what upset him more, the death of his friend or this killing of the savage.

  Seven days out from Launceston we fell in with Clucas, a barbarous man who had been doing work for the free settler Batman, helping round up the savages. He could, said he, talk their cant from his time sealing & knew something of their ways. We were defenceless, hungry & again lost. Clucas carried a pistol & a musket he could flourish, wallaby meat & flour he was willing to share, & he knew the way to Hobart. He dressed like so many of the Diemenese banditti: coarse-cut kangaroo & tiger skins roughly stitched together, a tiger-skin cap on his long-haired head. He happily talked of bursting in on the camp fires of the savages on Batman’s instructions & shooting up to a dozen or more & then cooking them on their own fire. He said he was no beast like some sealers he had met on the islands in Bass Strait, such as Munro, who sliced off part of the thigh & the ears of his woman, Jumbo, & made her eat them as punishment for trying to escape. When we told him of the staked woman he was for a moment reflective, & then laughing said some gins were right Amazons & had it coming.

  Camping just down from Black Charlie’s Opening there was a wild thunderstorm, we could see the plains of Pittwater & beyond Hobart’s snowcapped Mount Wellington lit by great lightning strikes. Wet through & miserable we struck out before dawn. A little after sunrise we came upon what was once a great peppermint gum tree, a good two yards in diameter at its base. Broken by the violence of a white lightning strike, the rest of the tree—its trunk & all its branches—were shattered into a great mess of white & black fragments thrown up to two hundred yards away. Everywhere broken timber, woodchips & sticks, great boughs & tiny shavings. There was no way of telling how big & wonderful that tree of Van Diemen’s Land once was, now broken into a million splinters.

  VIII

  UPON MAKING IT to Hobart under cover of a chill night, the banditto Clucas arranged us a hideout in a sly-grog shop in the wharf area of Wapping run by a Liverpool maroon called Capois Death. He promised to find a place for us both on a departing whaler within the month.

  Two days later we were picked up by the wallopers on Clucas’ information. Roaring Tom Weaver turned out to be a runaway catamite & was sentenced to fourteen years retransportation to Sarah Island. I was nabbed in the Shades taproom painting a mural of bald eagles garlanded with wisteria to pay off a considerable rum tab. I was sentenced to three months on the chain gang at the falsely named Bridgewater, dragging boulders in wooden sleds to create a causeway across the Derwent River. Within a week Lieutenant Perisher, the officer in charge of the causeway, had me taken out of irons & hired me out to paint portraits of officers’ & free settlers’ wives & other prey freshly killed—weird kangaroos & emus with a pheasant drawn from memory draped scarf-like over tables.

  In those days the muddy streets & stinking rookeries of Hobart Town almost seemed something of an artist’s colony with more than a few working there under government patronage: there was Bock the abortionist, whose hands had once administered mercury draughts to young fearful women, now painting the colony’s complacent rulers; there was Wainewright the murderer, who was as adept at pencilling sketches of virginal maidens as he had once been with poisoning his wife with strychnine-laced laudanum; & Savery the forger, who wrote mannered trash about the colony that flattered its audience with so many imitations of their own stupidity. One day you might see one or another of these artists on a chain gang, breaking rocks with a napping hammer down the Salamanca wharves; the next week they were bustling out of an upper Macquarie Street parlour with pad & paints, trying to look oh-so-very much the Professional Aesthete, but—in rotten old twill trousers & coarse old canary coats, with mangy hair rough-hacked & poxed skin stubbly—inevitably failing.

  I, to the contrary, playing the part of the jobbing journeyman, doffed my cap & never pretended to be other than where I was on the Van Diemonian Ladder—at the bottom. Competition wasn’t so fierce, my manner was not so threatening, & a few holes in the market opened for me.

  IX

  I BEGAN TO find my services in demand: the painting of portraits of milky-eyed patriarchs on their deathbed; of infant corpses for grieving free-settler families, in which I shared with the undertaker that most hopeless of tasks, trying to discover the shape of a soft smile on those pallid faces; prize stallions, boars & quick sketches of naked women in the manner of melting love pictures—luridly welcoming a young-man-as-bull entering them, trying for a stylised rather than honest line.

  The rate of pay was not entirely favourable: Lieutenant Perisher took nine-tenths of every commission. Still, it was easier & warmer work than dragging boulders, barefooted & chained, through the icy mud & hoarfrost & mist of Bridgewater. And, whatever Lieutenant Perisher’s sins, he turned a blind eye t
o my nightly outings.

  My subsequent time in Hobart Town I now can recall only as a tedious repetition of lockups & breakouts: sometimes nabbed by the Crown, generally for absconding or some minor mis-demeanour, more often by irate publicans & sly-grog shop owners demanding some form of painting work to recompense them for the bill run up by me during one binge or another. It was, in the main, a pattern of drink, debt, imprisonment & incarceration in cellars & barrel sheds where I had to paint in exchange for my liberty, a clean slate, & a fresh opportunity for me to mollynog with some of the ladies—fine or less fine, I was never that fussed—I perchance might meet around the traps. And in the main, it was fine. Did I say tedious? Well yes, that too, but it had the virtue of rhythm & the pleasure of certainty. It was like a child’s spinning top that sooner or later cracks.

  As my artistick production had to be maintained at an equivalent rate to my drinking, my paintings quickly became as much a feature of Hobart Town taprooms as their tobacco & whale-oil smoke stained walls. At the Hope & Anchor, for example, I was not let out of the woodshed until I had completed a painting of some dead meat in the Dutch style in payment for my rum tab there. I composed an original picture full of the old rustick favourites—a dead hare strung up by its back legs, a few pheasants, a musket or two, a brown demijohn for domestick effect, & a bald eagle on a perch.