II
UPON BEING REAWAKENED from his faint with salts, Mr Lempriere refused outright his own cure-all for every blight, arguing that bleeding the sex was an affront to a man of his dignity. He cited Sir Isaiah Newton, mentioning several instances of brewers’ droop becoming a permanent condition after such precipitate & unscientifick treatment, & so instead of slicing himself he swallowed large amounts of laudanum, tinted green from the copper pot where it was kept for the Commandant. Beyond granting him a vision splendid of the Commandant as a rutting elephant, the opiate did nothing to alter the steady progress of his sex over the next few weeks from a sorry red worm to a large black slug, which he rested upon a small Huon pine platform he had built for the purpose. This he would daily fasten to his body by the expedient of looping a turquoise silk ribbon around the upper rim of his voluminous love handles & tying it in a large, ostentatious bow on the boil-contoured & hair-forested flab of his back.
He wandered the settlement, shirt flaps splayed out like sails over his pine promontory, a bowsprit of suffering that he constantly inspected whenever alone, witnessing the transforming wonder as bruising turned septic, as flesh turned putrid, as red turned black turned green. In the end the stench was so unbearable that it enraged even the odourphilic Commandant, & he ordered Mr Lempriere to be tied down, a funnel inserted into his protesting gabbling gob & several pints of pisco poured down. Through the ensuing procedure the Commandant cradled his dear friend’s head as if it were that of a newborn, blubbering all the while that it was his love for his friend that demanded this of him. After a wait of a quarter of an hour the Commandant had wearied of his own compassion. He nodded to a convict cook who had been standing in a shadowed corner, slowly running a long filleting knife back & forth on a steel. The cook stepped forward &, before Mr Lempriere could protest in either French or English, had with a single slice severed the suppurating penis.
After the sorry loss of his member, Mr Lempriere was at first even more bellicose & obnoxious than he had been in the past. But then his choleric manner underwent a change autumnal, slowly altering into a melancholy so deep that he seemed to have lost all interest in life, even his passion for collecting & cataloguing.
He grew solitary & acquired the odd habit of spending long periods of time talking to Castlereagh, one sad monologue after another about the Hard Hand of Fate & what might have been if he had only specialised in lichens or liverworts. The pig, accustomed to roaming its hellish sty alone, unbothered, seemed to grow ever angrier with Mr Lempriere’s commentaries, headbutting the sty’s fences every time the Surgeon appeared, shaking them with so much force the island trembled with each blow. The Surgeon was oblivious to his companion’s antipathy, not noticing that the more he talked the more the pig grew in size & savagery until it blocked the sun, until it was accused of causing lunar eclipses & interfering with celestial navigation of a night. The enraged animal would sometimes squeal as if the endless torrent of talk was drowning it, a shriek so high-pitched & grating that it drove men far out to sea wild with aural pain, yet such pitiful displays only seemed to fuel Mr Lempriere’s tales of loss & failure & personal oblivion.
Lost, depressed, gelded, his most intimate companion a monstrous pig—it scarce need be added that Mr Lempriere had by now lost all interest in getting me back from the Commandant to paint fish.
I had tried painting a few fish in the oils with which I was so liberally provided by the Commissariat for the paintings of the Commandant. But oils are a medium of the earth, too loaded with gravity, too opaque to serve for a fish. I needed the Surgeon’s watercolours.
I determined I would visit Mr Lempriere in the hope of reigniting his interest in the project of the book of fish. I intended to ask if I might borrow his watercolour set, to seek to continue with the fish in what little spare time I could find.
I told myself it was only about survival, to ensure if my billet with the Commandant ever ended I had some alternative to the chain gang. But that was a lie, & though I tried to veil my heart from my mind, the truth was that no longer being compelled to paint for Science, my feelings for the fish were for a second time changing, & what I had formerly hated I now missed. For the oddest of reasons I now found myself needing the fish.
The fish were at the beginning only a job, but to do that job well & keep the undoubted benefits that flowed from it, I had to learn about them. I had to study the manner in which fins passed from the realm of opaque flesh to diaphanous wonder, the sprung firmness of bodies, the way mouths related to oversized heads, heads to expanding bodies, the way scale dewlapped with scale to create a dancing sheen. On one fish I would seek to perfect those inexplicably sensuous mouths, on another the translucence of fins. And I would have to admit that all this painting & repainting began to affect me.
Perhaps because I spent so long with them, because I had to try to know something of them, they began to interest me, & then to anger me, which was worse, because they were beginning to enter me & I didn’t even know that they were colonising me as surely as Lieutenant Bowen had colonised Van Diemen’s Land all those years ago.
They were boring into me, seeping through my pores by some dreadful osmosis. And when within me glimmered the unexpected, somewhat terrifying knowledge that they were taking possession of my daytime thoughts, my night-time dreams, I grew frightened & longed to repel them, to fight back as the blackfellas had. But how do you attack a dying gurnard? A mullet in its death throes?
It was as if it was not possible to spend so long in the company of fish without something of their cold eye & quivering flesh passing across the air into your soul.
I use the word ‘across’ advisedly.
It was as if their spirit was seeking another watery medium, & at a certain point when death was imminent this spirit to ensure its own survival would leap across the deadly medium of air, a leap so sudden & so quick as to be invisible to the naked eye. In the way the blue flame had leapt from the condemned man’s mouth at the fair into my mother, I wondered if all spirits seek another eye to enter at the dreadful mortal moment, to avoid being consigned to some nether world of lost shades.
It was just my idiocy, like when I went back to Old Gould’s daughter after she announced her betrothal to the ironmonger from Salford & I asked her to elope with me & she laughed in my face, I just had to go back for more fish & why?—for as long as I was charged with the task of painting ever more of these cruel new settlers of my soul, first by an insane Surgeon & then more insanely by myself, there seemed no escape from their insidious invasion, no respite as they commenced swimming toward the backblocks of my heart, of my mind, preparing to take total control of me.
And how could I have known that day I went to see him, that within that huge head of Mr Lempriere’s was being born one final tawdry passion, that was to forge fish & me into one forever?
III
ON MY WAY to Mr Lempriere’s cottage that still, blue winter morning two convicts in dirty smocks crossed my path, sweating & cursing as they dragged a sled on which long heavy hessian sacks rolled around.
‘More dead niggers,’ one said without looking back at either me or the sacks.
The savages had arrived the previous week with the white conciliator Guster Robinson on a cold, blustery day. They were a motley, emaciated party, some covered in a skin disorder, many coughing & spluttering incessantly; slashing their afflicted chests & throats with broken bottles & sharp rocks. When their sickness turned to fever, they lacerated their foreheads similarly & blood streamed down their faces so that they might, as they put it, ‘let the pain out’. They began to die as soon as they had arrived.
Yet such doomed savages regarded us convicts as slaves below themselves. By their own account they were a free & noble people who had given up their nation for exile & who in return would be looked after by the government & did not have to work like we did. Of a night some convicts in the Penitentiary pissed through the boards on the savages housed on the floor below us to prove the su
periority of an imprisoned white man over an exiled black man.
To his quixotic, government-sponsored venture with the savages—in the service of which he had travelled the length & breadth of the dark, wild woods of Transylvania—Robinson had given the grand title of the Conciliation, a white man’s mission to round up all the savages who had for so long waged war against them & who still remained at large in the wilds.
In the paintings of him I had seen back in Hobart Town—large canvases trying, & failing, to create a noble & tragic history of saviours & damned for the antipodes—Guster Robinson appeared as a podgy presence in bright relief against the dull background of assembled savages, his fingers pointing portentously to some unseen future, a Renaissance prophet centre-stage in Regency motley, all enlightened & billowing blues & whites, Beau Brummell as an improbable & foppish Moses of the South Seas.
But when I was summoned to meet with Guster Robinson, he cut no such dash.
The savages called him their word for eel, which I cannot recall with any accuracy. He was, it must be admitted, a short string of a man, wasted worse than his black charges. Hunched over in ragged slops as filthy & lice-ridden as ours, a lost apostrophe in search of a word to which he might belong, he radiated little beyond the superior air of his self-appointed task that he claimed to be sacred.
Robinson treated the savages as though they were his entourage, & the savages treated him like he was one of the many stray dogs they picked up on their travels. Neither seemed to notice the earth falling away beneath them as a breaking wave.
Robinson thought convicts scum, & was the type who would happily walk naked in front of you, so little opinion did he have of those he felt below him, as though you were a dog to be kicked or a chamber pot to be pissed in. When I arrived he was talking with Musha Pug—who as a convict constable he must have regarded as a little higher on the ladder than an ordinary lag—& rather than making any attempt to acknowledge my presence, he kept on, telling Musha Pug how the black women stolen by the sealers & taken to the islands claimed that the Devil comes to them when they are hunting seals & has connection with them, that they are often with child by this spirit & they killed the evil issue in the bush. They said that they sang to please the Devil, that the Devil told them to sing plenty.
The Commandant’s maid, the Mulatto, said he, was known on the islands as Cleopatra. Before being brought to Christian enlightenment by the Quakers she was infamous for inventing the Devil dance. The Devil dances were, said he, the most obscene that could be imagined & were known only to the sealers’ women on the islands & not the mainland.
She had been seized by the sealer Clucas whose conduct was notorious throughout the strait. Clucas, in company with some other sealers, had been on a raiding mission. They had rushed a mob of blacks on a beach, but only managed to seize a baby boy before being beaten back to their boat by the natives. The sealers made it clear that the child was now theirs, & if their mother wanted the boy she would have to come with them. The mother was Twopenny Sal.
She came to the boat & offered herself to them if the child could go back with the tribe. The sealers grabbed her. Clucas, taking hold of the boy by his legs, swung him against the rocks & beat his brains out. Then they rowed off with Twopenny Sal. One native man swam after them & succeeded in gaining hold of their stern post. Clucas chopped off his hands with a tomahawk. On Clucas’s island, where she was condemned to live as a slave, Twopenny Sal was reputed to have had two children to Clucas, & killed both by stuffing grass in their mouths.
Having finished his tale, Robinson turned to me & informed me that the Commandant had agreed that I might paint some of ‘his sable brethren’, beginning with the one he called Romeo.
A tall elegant man, with something of the look of a Hasidic Jew of the east, Romeo in his own language was called Towtereh. I discovered that he was a chief of the Port Davey people &, it transpired, the father of Twopenny Sal. I witnessed their reunion. Both wept much & seemed greatly moved to be together again.
Talking with Towtereh, I found my own opinions of the savages changing, & I could no longer think of them as I formerly had. Towtereh was a fine wit, fond of making puns across the black & white languages. Moreover he was a true patriot, whose profound love of his country seemed undeniable. I painted Towtereh as a man of dignity, a portrait which for a single, very obvious reason, has no place in a book of fish.
Among the blacks’ number to whom Towtereh introduced me was a flash man known as Tracker Marks. In stark contrast to us convicts he dressed like an Eightways dandy. He was meticulously clean, & in the filth of the settlement was fastidious about daily washing his clothes. He wore a white shirt with long lapels that he spread outwards over—instead of under—his collar, & a stiff round hat that was somewhere between a fez & a stocking cap, in the fashion of the American whalers with whom he had once roamed the southern oceans. He was quiet unless challenged, but his fierce eyes & the angry stretch of his mouth suggested that challenge would be unwise.
Tracker Marks was a mainland native who had for a time worked for the Van Diemonian troopers tracking down bushrangers, & had then, for no clear reason, fallen in with Robinson’s mission to bring in the warring tribes from the wilderness. He seemed not reconciled to what he did, nor yet was he hostile. In his words, Robinson’s party was simply a mob to travel with, but it was not his land through which he travelled, & though he was a black, they were not his people. Unlike Barrabas, the other New South Wales black, he did not deride the Van Diemonian savages as rock apes, as if by denigrating them, he might advance a little further up the Europeans’ ladder of creation. He seemed to have no feeling for anyone, only an immense & knowing weariness.
For a time Tracker Marks was often to be seen in the company of Capois Death. The two would talk incessantly in a queer, jumpy argot of their own invention: a blend of English-influenced Creole & Aborigine-influenced English. Tracker Marks would tell Capois Death of his people & their world, of their land & their place in it. Capois Death, who had only ever known rupture as his heritage, would listen intently. Each seemed to be searching in the other for what they had never known: Capois Death for where a black man came from & where he would go & what it meant, but he could not in the end overcome his own sense, beaten into him on the San Domingo plantation, that the white man’s ways, if not the white man, were better than the blacks’. For Capois Death hated the white man, but loved his civilisation.
Tracker Marks was of a different opinion. Though he seemed more white than a white man, he had no time for their ways. For him his dress, his deportment, was no different than staying downwind in the shadows of trees when hunting, blending into the world of those he hunted, rather than standing out from it. Once he had excelled at the emu dance & the kangaroo dance; then his talent led him to the whitefella dance, only now no-one was left of his tribe to stand around the fire & laugh & praise his talent for observation & stealthy imitation.
The whites have no law, he told Capois Death, no dreaming. Their way of life made no sense whatsoever. Still, he did not hate them or despise them. They were stupid beyond belief, but they had a power, & somehow their stupidity & their power were, in Tracker Marks’s mind, inextricably connected. But how? he asked Capois Death. How can power & ignorance sleep together? Questions to which Capois Death had no answer.
Then more blacks began to cough & splutter & enough snot flowed from their noses to fill the harbour, enough blood ran down their lacerated heads to dye the island pink, & within two days seven more of them were dead.
Tracker Marks disappeared from Sarah Island not long after. Maybe he worried how much longer he was going to survive Guster Robinson’s oft-professed deep respect & love for his sable brethren. His last words to Capois Death before his flight were incomprehensible to the former slave from San Domingo, who constantly told & embroidered his own personal history in the belief it explained & meant something.
‘Hide your life,’ said Tracker Marks to Capois Death. ‘Completel
y.’
When that morning on the way to Mr Lempriere’s, I watched the two convicts empty their sacks into a large pit just off the side of the track, I noticed with a shock that those dead black bodies were headless. The convicts quickly covered the decapitated corpses with a shallow layer of soil, leaving the rest of the pit unfilled, & ready, I presumed, for more dead.
‘That’s right,’ I heard the other convict say, without looking back at either him or the pit as I scurried away down the hill to Lempriere, ‘dead niggers. One’s Romeo, but there’s no way any of the others is a Juliet.’
IV
MR LEMPRIERE’S COTTAGE was empty, but from out the back I heard the muddled sounds of exertion & wood occasionally cracking, like a giant eucalypt dropping boughs. I headed down the side lane & then saw, outlined against the umber tones of the muddy yard that flanked Castlereagh’s pen, the ivory profile of Mr Lempriere’s great wen of a head.
In that way peculiar to a Van Diemonian winter, the sun was an intense egg-yolk & the sky a vivid ultramarine, yet the day was chill. Still, Mr Lempriere did not have to exert his mighty bulk greatly to raise a torrid sweat, & he clearly had been busy that morning for large beads of sweat rolled like pearls down his white-leaded face. He stood at the centre of a ring of half a dozen or so wooden barrels, one of which a convict cooper was fitting a lid onto, another of which Mr Lempriere himself was hammering away at the side of with his fists, while yelling all sorts of vile things in argument with somebody I could not see.
On noticing me, he raised a hand & flicked it away from his face, as if to say the argument was of no concern to him.
‘PAY NO HEED—HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,’ he assured me. ‘BUT!—BARREL SEALED—THEY QUIETEN DOWN.’
Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish Page 17