Reverend Ewing told us that the entire population of Van Diemen’s Land – including prisoners, individuals bearing a ticket of leave and administrative staff and settlers – was in the order of thirteen thousand persons. The colony had been settled for thirty years, after a naval surveyor discovered it was not a part of the mainland. As this occurred during the Napoleonic Wars, a small panic had ensued in the British Parliament about the fertile island’s vulnerability to French annexation. Little time was wasted in sending a ship bearing supplies and a party of officials, guards and convicts to stake the Crown’s claim on Van Diemen’s Land. So successful was the settlement that roughly a third of the inhabitants of the Australian colonies now lived there.
We travelled for the better part of the morning to reach an area called The Queen’s Domain. I became entranced by my fleeting glimpses of blooms flourishing in the nearby Botanic Gardens but Reverend Ewing insisted that there was no time to tarry. The hour nigh for hunting, we made haste disembarking the wagon, making our way on foot to the very summit of the hill to begin combing for birdlife. I was nonetheless eager to explore the various native plant genera and discover their species’ nuanced differences. I farewelled the menfolk and took Mary’s hand and my drawing equipment for a meander through the scrub. Away from the guns, my attention was drawn to the delicacy of colour in the local shrubs, the silvery softness of the acacia’s leaves, the combs of the grevillea, the unique petals of the anemone-like flowers secreted inside the woody gumnut. The alien textures and hues fascinated my painter’s eye. I tore a leaf from a shrubby eucalypt and crushed it in my fingers, bringing it to my nose to breathe in the unfamiliar oil. ‘Mary,’ I called, ‘smell this. It’s heavenly.’
‘You could almost rub a perfume from it,’ she observed.
A soft screeching in the branches above us revealed a parrot. I looked closer, identifying a rose hill parakeet, which I had drawn from a specimen in England. The bird had a striking crimson head and chest, a patch of white on its cheek, a yellow underbelly and blue tail feathers. As it fluttered its wings, I could see they had black scalloped edges. I could not wait to draw the creature from life but before I had the chance to retrieve my sketch pencils, the bird took fright. We did not have to wait long before we had another visitor, as a flash of bright blue attracted Mary’s eye. We hushed and crouched, noticing busy movement in a tangle of low brushes. From inside a thorny band of scrub came an extraordinary singing, like needles softly clacking, such that we had to grow utterly still to hear it.
On the end of a leafless branch stood the male superb fairy wren, the same I had painted not six months ago for our latest folio, The Birds of Australia and the Adjacent Islands. The creature’s tiny feet curled on the branch like a miniature coathanger’s hook. I dared not move, but sweat was trickling down my cheeks and I was forced to wipe at my brow. The wren moved his head; he had seen us. But he kept his ground, as if he had decided that we did not pose a threat to his tiny kingdom. And a kingdom it was. We waited in perfect silence, and soon, out of the tangled brambles, appeared no less than three hens. They had red eyes, fawn backs, white breasts and pink bills. The male made his high-pitched trills, the females their quieter, weaving whispers in response. I was fascinated by the iridescent blue patch on the male’s cheek and crown, offset by a jet underlay. His lower body was brown.
Silently I gathered pencils and paper and sat on a low-hanging branch, making rapid sketches as the birds hunted for insects. The females darted out and about, spending little time at rest; it was up to the male, it seemed, to stay on the lookout for trouble. The hens busied themselves with plucking and trimming wiry strands of foliage, which they clasped in their bills before disappearing into the tangle of brambles. They were like girls at their needlework, intent and industrious in their gathering of tiny strips and threads from the surrounding grasses and bushes.
All of a sudden, their singing reached a fever pitch. Brown females darted like mice into the shrubs.
‘What have we here?’ whispered John, inspecting my drawing.
Absorbed in my work, I had not heard his approach. ‘You sent them away!’ I said, bidding him quiet.
‘They’re nesting. They’ll be back. It’s a matter of waiting,’ said John.
Soon Gilbert and the remainder of the party arrived. A discussion took place, and it was decided that Reverend Ewing would lay out his snare nets to entrap both cock and hens. I identified the brushes the females had been darting about in. Reverend Ewing enlisted Will and Henry to help lay down the snare, unfastening a saw from his belt and removing the branches in the way of the netting. When all was arranged, we crept to the perimeter of the scrub and waited, hoping to witness the fairy wrens’ return.
Reverend Ewing made sure to leave an opening in the snare. He stayed closest, ready to shut off the hole. We watched in awe as one by one the birds emerged from the foliage. First two hens, then a third looking to the others for direction. Finally – our prize – the male in his summer colours reappeared. I heard John’s intake of breath.
The male glanced at each female and then, rising off his perch, darted into the hole in the netting. The females followed. Henry moved to close the trap but Reverend Ewing grabbed his shoulder, a finger to his lips. My heart pulsed with anxiety, sure at any moment the male would reappear from the shrubbery and swoop back outside the netting to safety. Instead, more females appeared and quickly disappeared into the low thorns. Reverend Ewing rose and, in a single movement, seemed to dive onto the netting with his hands out, as if catching a football, and sealed the opening. With the birds inside the snare, it was now a matter of lifting the snare off without drawing the thorns along too. While Reverend Ewing, Henry and Will attempted to calm the panicking animals, Gilbert and John set to work sawing off branches to get at the nest concealed deep within the shrub.
Soon the wrens and their nest were all safely in our possession. But what happened next I had to leave out of the letter I later wrote to Mother and the children describing our encounter with the fairy wrens. I lingered instead on Henry’s crucial role in helping to ease the birds and their egg-filled cargo into the brace bag. What a trusty aid he was! But there I had to halt.
We had hurried back to the inn, excited to examine our fairy wrens. In the temporary stuffing room that we had created, John gently untied the bag. We should have known by the lack of movement from the burlap sacking that something was amiss. We had shut the windows and doors to prevent flight, but there was no need. Four little corpses fell onto the worktable. We had a cage ready, hoping to observe them, even thinking that they might hatch their eggs in our care. The eggs were pebble-sized, a matt-white colour with chestnut blotches. The nest had been constructed from dried grass bound together with spider’s web. It was a loosely built structure, shaped like a Grecian beehive, woven deep within the brambles. The interior, where the eggs lay, had been softened with a matting of grass and some kind of marsupial fur.
‘It’s just as well I sketched them from life,’ I said sadly, tears welling in my eyes. ‘I’m so very disappointed.’
‘I’m so sorry, Eliza,’ said John, ‘But I’m afraid you’ll have to grow used to it.’
‘I’m not sure I will,’ I said, stroking the azure crown of the male.
‘It pains me, too, if you must know.’
‘When I was a girl, the people in the township would always capture a wren on the autumn equinox. They would put it in a box with a glass lid and take it from door to door – they believed it had the power to absorb all the fear and pain of winter.’
‘An avian scapegoat,’ said John.
‘If you will,’ I replied quietly. Though it put me in mind of birdmen, tucking their carefully preserved specimens into sealed tins, displaying them like treasure for all to view in their glass-topped cabinets.
What was I to make of the deaths of the fairy wrens? Even if we had succeeded in making pets of the first species we captured, it would have been a false reprieve. The number of a
nimals whose lives we and others would sacrifice in the service of science was uncountable, and there was no escaping the truth that it was we who wielded the power to decide whether a creature, no matter how beautiful or unique, lived or died.
Before dawn of a morning, John, Gilbert, Benstead and Will would set out in the bullock cart to explore premium trapping locations. Their second expedition, again guided by Reverend Ewing, led them part of the way up the rise of Mount Wellington, where John was excited to discover a new species of thornbill.
In their absence I took walks with Mary and Henry, familiarising myself with Hobarton’s vast array of birdlife. The orchestra of birdsong tuned its strings at dawn and did not lay down its bows until well after supper. The abundance of feathered life had each member of our walking party trying to outdo the other in discovering and drawing attention to an unfamiliar species. There were willie wagtails, known by the natives as jit-te-jit-te and wil-la-ring, which were said to bring rain. There were parrots, green and red, orange and olive, yellow and brown, darting overhead in gibbering mists. There were wattlebirds with dangling facial warts and calls so harsh that we could not help but laugh at each vocalisation. In a park one day, Mary sighted a barn owl asleep on a branch. Only we bird people knew how much leg it had tucked under its feathered rump, the spindly construction of its neck, the overgrown round of its skull. Its beak was like a toenail and a stiff ruff of feathers enclosed its face in a heart. The currawongs called to one another with tinkling chimes. Local farmers claimed they were so gifted with intelligence as to communicate with dogs, piercing holes in carcasses with their beaks so the dogs might tear the leathery skin open and expose the meat for them both to feast on.
To promote our expedition as we travelled, John had brought along twenty coloured lithographs from The Birds of Australia and the Adjacent Islands. He wasted no time making an appointment at the offices of the Hobart Town Courier to encourage them to write an article about our trip, hopefully enticing new clients to sign with us.
The article, which appeared on a Saturday, proved that John had succeeded in dazzling the reporter with our hand-coloured plates of the black honeyeater, the star and zebra finches, the cockatiel and blue bonnet, as well as New Zealand species such as the kiwi and the huia. With his usual consummate skill, my husband had told the story of our Australian visit in a way that was bound to capture the public imagination as well as new subscribers. He explained that he had been so inspired by mere glimpses of the extraordinary species to be found here that he planned to devote two years to capturing, recording and painting the continent’s birds in their native habitats, a feat no one had attempted before. Our mission would include observing the birds’ cycles of migration, nourishment and reproduction; studying their ranges and distribution; and finding out as much as possible about the tribes unique to this part of the world: the menura, the honeyeater, the fairy wren and bowerbird, the megapode, the pardalote and two-toed button quail. But John had pointed out that the expedition had a second goal, too – one less measurable by callipers, weights and rulers, or by publications in the Transactions of the Zoological Society. That was to use our particular knowledge and skills to deliver bird lovers everywhere the most superb illustrations of Australian species yet produced.
To top it off, the journalist included the detail that when we had finished our run of lithographic impressions, in the order of two hundred and fifty, we would have the stones scored and scrubbed down until nothing remained of the original template. This exclusivity, an in-built collectability, appealed to a certain kind of subscriber and John was confident that gentlefolk of this calibre inhabited Van Diemen’s Land.
Closing the newspaper, John pronounced happily that it was far better than taking out a paid advertisement.
‘I couldn’t agree more. You have outdone yourself. But who can resist being caught up in your enthusiasm? Tell me, though, has Mr Gould a preferred Australian species, I wonder?’
‘Not yet.’ John smiled. ‘I’ve found so many fascinating ones – robins, wood-swallows, kingfishers, finches, pardalotes – but I suspect my greatest finds will be on the continent. And you?’
‘I’m much taken with the soft-tailed fairy wrens,’ I confessed. In London I had drawn a plate showing the male and female of the black and red species, and a mated pair of the popular, garden-inhabiting variety called lamberti. I recalled how challenging their fragile bodies proved to stuff. How easy it was to snap a bone, how painstaking to remove the slivers of meat and stitch closed the tiny abdomen without damaging the plumage.
Now that we were living among Van Diemen’s Land’s birdlife, I began to have reservations about the work we had started in London. The plates we had published, taken from study specimens provided by my brothers, seemed woefully inadequate. At home, I had been proud of my artistic successes. But that was before encountering superb fairy wrens in the field, watching them preen and sing, cavort and peck and defend their nests; before I had wandered Hobarton’s parks and promenaded the banks of the Derwent, gazing into the tempestuous sky stretched over the sapphire harbour. It was as if the designs I had created in London were no more than practice for the real event.
My best work was yet to come, I realised with a jolt of excitement. I had made such excellent sketches of the living fairy wrens that the desire to finalise my drawings had me leaping from bed, eager to face the new day. Though our wrens had perished we were still attempting to hatch their eggs, wrapping them in cotton in their nest, keeping them in a cosy position in our bedroom, away from light. While we waited for a juvenile to emerge from its shell, I felt as though I was the embryonic chick within. Checking for signs of life of a morning, I sensed the gestation of my own particular talent. John left to see Gilbert and Benstead, busy stuffing specimens in the room they shared with Will. Alone, my thoughts collected like the leaves in the bottom of my porcelain cup. The sun flooding through the dining-room window warmed my hands and neck. Missing my Broad Street routine of breakfasting and reading the catechism to my youngest children, my mornings in Hobarton had required some getting used to. Aboard the Parsee it had been easy to let myself become caught up in the adventure of voyaging. I was able to push away the pain I felt at not having daily contact with my babies by the sheer disconcertedness of being at sea. But in our temporary Hobarton lodgings, with John distracted by his passion for collection, it was more of a challenge to ignore our separation. I felt so many complicated emotions. No sooner had I mastered my longing to pat and primp Lizzie, Louisa and Charlie – I soothed my mind by imagining Mother and Cousin Sarah feeding them breakfast, getting them into their clothes, assuaging their fears – than a terrible guilt arose that I was responsible for any fears they might be suffering. And that I should be by their sides.
The safest distraction was to write letters to Mother and Sarah. In my correspondence, I strove to paint a picture of life in Van Diemen’s Land, describing all the many wonders we had seen. I reminded Mother to dress the children in warm clothing for winter, to ensure the girls wore nightcaps lest they catch a chill.
I looked around the sitting room of the inn, thankful I was the only person who occupied a table. For, as I wrote, a tear fell onto the paper, smudging the ink. Pausing to dry my eyes, I picked up the newspaper John had left behind, folding it into my writing case. Later, I would take my scissors and clip out the article to fold into my letter. The journalist’s glowing report justified our expedition in ways I was unable to. His admiration and extravagant praise for our venture persuaded the reader of the necessity of our visit, of our pledge to contribute to a greater understanding of Australia’s birdlife. One thing I could confidently predict was that Mother would be immensely proud of her Eliza, and I trusted that she would do her utmost to convey these sentiments to the remainder of our household.
Chapter 13
Grey Fantail
Rhipidura albiscapa
Davey Street, Hobarton 1838
In our accommodation at Fischer Inn I mastere
d the trick of candling: holding an egg over wax and flame, as close as possible to the shell, to discover if any young had begun to develop. Against the light the eggshell became transparent, showing the outline of the embryo. If no fish-like body appeared, I could set to piercing each pole of the egg with the tine of a fork and ever so gently, using a tiny straw, blow the phlegm of white and yolk into a ceramic bowl. Later, I put the treat out for the inn’s cats. The shells of robins and wrens were a sheer film, set like a French custard, and it required the most excruciating delicacy of touch to avoid crushing them when attempting to extract their liquids. Satisfied I had removed the last trace of innards, I wiped the eggshell clean with a rag and placed it in a small box on the windowsill to dry.
John sat on the bed, copying his collector’s notes accompanying the eggs into a field journal. As we worked he entertained me with tales of his meeting with the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin, potentially our most powerful ally on the island. The Governor’s experiences as a young midshipman, sailing on the Investigator under the command of Captain Matthew Flinders as he explored the eastern coast of Australia, had inspired a lifelong love of birdlife. As a consequence, my husband expected that Sir John would be sympathetic to our research and, more importantly, offer us the help and provisions we needed.
‘The Governor relished our discussion about the scientific curiosities of the settlement. I think I provided a welcome break from his administrative challenges, from the threats of the English Parliament to put a stop to the transportation of prisoners to New South Wales. Sir John fears all convicts will be sent to Van Diemen’s Land, turning it into a dumping ground. Apparently the resources here, what with the drought in New South Wales, are stretched to breaking point.
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