This raucous place they call Hobart Town. What do you see as you stride down streets of cobblestones and sawdust and horse dung on your way to your storeman’s job at the Immigrants’ Home? There are convicts with calloused hands hauling stone slabs, carpenters furiously sawing and hammering, blacksmiths swinging their mallets like Thor himself, pounding hot metal against their anvils until it bends to their will. The chill of autumn might be in the air but the entire town is perspiring, toiling in rivers of sweat and industry.
Hard workers, most of them, diligently obeying the directive from Colossians 3:23: ‘Whatever you do work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.’ But not a single one can hold a candle to those few brave souls tasked with the hardest occupation in this town.
The clergymen.
Spare a thought for those who must spread God’s word. ‘He is placed as it were in the very gorge of sin, in the midst of the general receptacle for the worst characters in the world … of necessity compelled to take the “Bull by the horns”, to grapple at the very gates of hell if he would rescue a soul from the headlong ruin to which he is hurrying.’
These are the words of Charles Medyett Goodridge. He knows a thing or two about standing before those gates of hell and staring into its flaming abyss. Goodridge lives in Hobart for many years, working as a ferryman on the Derwent, earning his keep transporting livestock across the river; a man never far from a salt breeze and a swaying deck. In the early 1830s he publishes a book with a deceptively dull title – Statistical View of Van Diemen’s Land. But its pages are far more than a turgid catalogue of lists and numbers. They come to life as Goodridge guides us on a virtual tour of the good, the bad … and the very bad, of which there is plenty.
It is why the man insists that a Hobart preacher has the toughest job in town: ‘This truth will be painfully impressed upon the mind of any one who views the streets of Hobart Town during the time of divine service. Idle men and women may be seen loitering here and there … some standing impatiently around the doors of the public houses, waiting until the hours of public worship are over when the houses may be opened and they may go in to continue their carousing.’
A pastor’s duty, he says, is the most important a man can undertake, ‘but in these penal colonies it is extreme. He has to struggle with the enemy at close combat, face to face and foot to foot, and to brace himself up to the utmost point of exertion … his zeal and industry will readily show themselves by the character and success of his works in the pulpit.’
Good fire and brimstone stuff, this, straight from the hand and heart of a man singed by those very flames of hell.
Charles Goodridge is another Robinson Crusoe, a shipwreck survivor who lived off penguin eggs and the raw brains of sea elephants for two years. Really? Just how many of these characters can one century produce? Back in the early 1820s he had been a merchant sailor on the Princess of Wales, a cutter sent to the rugged limits of the Southern Ocean with enough salt in its hold to preserve the skins of 10,000 seals. The men would be dumped on rocky outcrops in the middle of the cold sea for weeks at a time, their small rowboats turned upside down to shelter them against the icy winds, the skin torn from their hands as they crawled across jagged boulders, hunting prey in such numbers that within decades the industry would be on its knees.
As with any decent Robinson Crusoe experience, a huge storm came out of nowhere and its monster swell seized the Princess of Wales, dashing her against rocks and leaving her crew stranded. This small band of sealers spent the next two years eking out a miserly existence, the blubber of walruses their only fuel, their raw brains a rare source of protein and their skins the only protection against the extreme weather. But what put steel in these men’s hearts and hope in their minds? The only reading matter they managed to salvage from the wreck was a single copy of the Bible and it was in the pages of the good book, read by the flickering glow of a blubber-fuelled fire, that Goodridge was reminded each night that God had not forgotten him, that if he continued to believe in Him those gates to hell would remain locked.
Salvation eventually arrived in the form of a passing ship making its way to Hobart Town. But no sooner had he set foot in Van Diemen’s Land than Goodridge was struck by the sheer meanness of the town and its ‘want of charity’. A bid to raise funds for the crew attracted just a few pounds. Money, it seemed, was good for one purpose. ‘The vice of drunkenness was extremely prevalent, more particularly among the convicts, but I am sorry to add it greatly pervaded all classes.’
While Goodridge would go on to praise many aspects of life in Hobart before making his way back home to England, he never forgot ‘the most humiliating scenes of drunkenness, disgusting indeed to the spectator’. And that, in large part, is why he insists the preacher of Hobart has the toughest job in town.
‘The great work of reformation must begin with him. If one mode of exhortation does not succeed he must try another, and his mind must be continually on the rack to discover the best means of accomplishing some part at least of the great work before him.’
Well, if those Hobart preachers have their work in front of them, just what sort of fate awaits the Reverend William Waterfield? He arrives in Hobart in March 1838 and in just a few weeks will make his way to Port Phillip to become Melbourne’s first appointed congregational minister. Waterfield is a devout and private man who shuns parties and public displays of any sort of exuberance. Melbourne will sorely test his patience. Over the next five years he will see people out and about on the streets on Sundays, engaging in all sorts of riotous behaviour … like walking … and laughing in public on a day reserved for contemplating the Lord’s work. Waterfield will peer through his window and refuse to join these outrageous scenes because his ‘mind was too harassed’. He will be mortified to discover a couple sharing his home who, on Christmas Day, suddenly begin singing before getting up to … well … it’s almost too obscene to put down in words … but they … well, they stand up and start … dancing.
But before his departure for the Gomorrah that is Port Phillip there is one man he insists he must meet. Yes, another of God’s workers wants to talk with you and gain some insight into those heathen natives he will be forced to contend with once he crosses Bass Strait.
On 28 April the Reverend William Waterfield writes in his journal that he is introduced to you after dinner and the usual questioning begins immediately. ‘I … asked him many questions and found that the natives had no idea of a Supreme Being or a God of any kind, that all the future state that they believed in was that when they died they would be turned into white people and visit again their own land.
‘Buckley was a man about 6ft 6in. He informed me that the native fruits were very few and were something like the black and white currant. He thought the people were quite harmless. They avowed no chief but were on equality with each other.’
So far, so good. But then Waterfield throws a question your way that has to do with another of those myths that have built up around you, that you were part of a group of British soldiers who staged a mutiny in Gibraltar in 1802. It’s a story that has circulated for years. Yes, there was a mutiny in Gibraltar. And, yes, six soldiers involved in that mutiny were put on board the Calcutta at the last minute as it sailed for Port Phillip. But no, you were not one of them. When that mutiny was being staged you were making your way to the hulks at Langstone.
‘He would not acknowledge to having been at Gibraltar,’ writes Waterfield, as though he does not quite believe you. ‘He denied it altogether. He was originally a bricklayer but did not attempt to teach it to the natives. I was pleased with the interview.’ He’s not a man for extensive details, our Reverend Waterfield.
But there are others who do manage to extract far more information. All types have been beating a path to your door since your arrival in Hobart. One of the first was Dr John Lhotsky, who sat down with you just a few days after that ridiculous attempt to get you on stage at the Theatre Royal.
An eccentric Polish explorer and naturalist, Lhotsky is a divisive figure in Van Diemen’s Land. He is debt-ridden and hounded by several local newspapers that claim his request for public donations to develop his private collection of rocks and specimens into a museum is nothing but a scam. He will soon leave for London but the scorn he has earned from Hobart’s polite society will follow him. ‘Here he assumed the rank of Gentleman,’ reads a typically scathing assessment of the man in The Tasmanian, ‘… and the pomposity of a great Philosopher, mineralogist, geologist and every other ist imaginable …’
We’ll never know how Lhotsky manages to sit you down. Perhaps, as that historian and noted pedicurist to the rich and famous James Bonwick might say, he employs ‘the steamy vapour of the punchbowl’. But it’s an exclusive interview that not even The Tasmanian can decline; no matter how much it loathes the good doctor.
Lhotsky, in fact, should have considered adding another ist to his many titles – that of journalist – for he has a natural talent widespread in this era for taking the truth and … stretching it a little.
‘Buckley must have been a splendid young man, being nearly seven feet high,’ writes a clearly impressed Lhotsky, unfortunately shattering any claims he may have to being a man of science and a master of measurement. ‘Even at the present moment there is something original, but quite sedate about him. His features have been rather darkened by thirty-two years exposure to the sun of Australia, and there is certainly something stern and “savage” in them, however thoroughly softened by a certain moral and intelligent composure, if I shall call it so.’
Did you hear that? A certain moral and intelligent composure.
‘Upon being asked whether the blacks were in the habit of killing their sickly or deformed offspring, he paused a good time very significantly, and replied that they do no such thing; but, on the contrary, that they treat their children with the greatest care and tenderness.
‘Buckley being so deeply and justly attached to a race of strangers, amongst whom he had lived for so many years, I mentioned that they doubtlessly treated him well after they became better acquainted with each other; but the answer which I received, and I believe a tear glistened at the same time in his eye, was that they had treated him from the very first like one of their own.’
Lhotz is … almost spellbound. ‘It was very satisfactory, and at the same time touching to me, to find a civilized European feeling so deeply (as I saw he did) the kindness which he had received from (what we call) savages.’
So impressed is Lhotsky that he goes on to give us a hint as to why some of his critics have come to regard him as a tad pompous: ‘I was forcibly reminded of an old adage of mine, viz., that “it is easy to despise mankind, but difficult to comprehend it!”’
Well, the man doesn’t mind quoting himself. But his interview with you is the best piece of press you’ve received in a long time. If we didn’t know any better we’d be tempted to think all that hobnobbing around Hobart – rubbing those immense shoulders with the powerful, pressing those huge hands into the palms of the rich and influential – is having an effect, stripping away your layers of naivety and replacing them with a certain moral and intelligent composure …
What a pity you still have to work for a living.