THE STARGAZER
On the pus of whelks—Moonbirds, their returning—Premonitions of doom—Rise of the Commandant—His seizure of power—The question of nations—Miss Anne, her subtle influence—The invention of Europe—The sale of Australia—Rolo Palma, treating of his talking with angels—Musha Pug—His hatred of catamites—Railway fever.
POBJOY, WELL PLEASED with his last Constable, has returned with some sea urchins for me to eat. It is a small reward, & not much of a meal, but one more important to me than Pobjoy can imagine. I scoop the roe out with my fingers, although in truth it is not for this small salty pleasure that I covet the sea urchin, but for the bright purple spikes with which its shell is armoured like a lurid aquatic echidna. On a low-tide early evening I snap the spikes off their shell, take two of the many small beach stones that form the floor of the cell and, grinding the spikes between the stones, make a purple powder.
Next, I swirl this powder with spittle & fat, saved from the occasional rancid gob of pickled pork, in the smooth grooved palm of the scallop shell that serves as my ink pot. In this way I make my ink, watching the purple whirling in the white shell, while thinking of how purple, the colour of emperors, seems appropriate for the next part of my tale, which is of how my fortunes became inextricably entangled with those of a Caesar of the south seas, whom none will remember & who was tormented by premonitions of the ravages he knew time would inflict upon his achievements.
The King, I suspect, deems it strange that I will spend some pages talking about the Commandant, but his story is mine & mine his, for his dreams determined my destiny. I tell the King that he cannot begin to understand the perversity of my fate if he does not fully appreciate how the Commandant finally created not one but two alternate hells. The second, which I was only to discover much later—too late as it transpired—was the one that truly terrified me in its immortal aspirations. But the utter perversity of his achievement can only be understood by those who know the full, true & terrible story of the Commandant. Our destinies were soon to meld, however much neither of us would have wished it.
The ink with which I seek to tell this tale is not, it is true, the majestick Tyrian purple of which Old Gould would wax lyrical, that dye the ancients obtained from shellfish, squeezing the pus that purpled in sunlight from a small cyst behind the whelk’s head, a dye so precious that only the richest & most powerful could afford robes of this colour, but rather an urchin purple—and that seems right for one who, far from being born in the purple, fought & kicked & killed for the sake of a colour that fades far too quickly. I make no apologies for what is then both obvious & necessary: that the prose which follows is also of a similar hue.
HIS TRAJECTORY WAS as silent & dark as his countenance, which he was later to take to hiding behind a gold mask, though whether out of shame or modesty or embarrassment none seemed to know, no more than they knew about his family or his military background. He was, like the bushranger Matt Brady who came to haunt him ever more, an enigma, though of a different kind, for where Brady was forever invisible, elusive both in life & dreams, the Commandant was everywhere to be seen. Yet none claimed intimacy or understanding, for that would have been to invite death.
There were stories, whispered and, much later, after his purported demise, shouted, that the Commandant had never been popular but was regarded as an idiot. It was undeniable that his precisely parted & oiled hair, his parrot’s beak of a nose that he inexplicably allowed to protrude through a hole in his gold mask, the slightly ovine set of his eyes, & a mouth that even when gilt-edged appeared weak & crooked, conspired to give an appearance which in power was callous & formidable, but outside of power seemed merely simpering.
The strangest of all the stories was also the most persistent: that he—like us—was a crawler, a man transported for unspeakable felonies, a lag who worked on the Parramatta gangs, who had been reconvicted & sent to Norfolk Island where he had become a fly man, beyond fear of God or indeed of any man.
When that settlement sacred to the genius of torture had been finally closed & its miserable inhabitants sent to Van Diemen’s Land, his ship had met with a great storm leading to its wrecking on a Bass Strait island. The only survivor was him, now representing himself as Lieutenant Horace, whose corpse—its white face pocked with a hundred holes eaten by sea lice—had washed up alongside him on the beach that early evening as the sky above his terrified eyes had darkened, not with dusk, but with a thrumming river of moonbirds.
Such a sight he had never seen! Hundreds of thousands of moonbirds, perhaps millions, eclipsing the falling ball of sun, all swiftly gliding in one direction on long wings that seemed but rarely to lazily flap, returning to their sand-dune burrows in what was for him always a dreadful presage of night.
Trees, shelter & comfort were, on the other hand, strangers to the island. In addition to him & the moon-birds, its principal inhabitants were fleas, flies, rats, snakes & penguins whose relentless screeching of an evening combined with the cold howl of the westerly gales to render his nights an unceasing horror.
He survived for several months upon the moonbirds’ fatty mutton-like meat & the solace provided by the one book washed up with him, Huntington’s History of the Napoleonic Wars, until rescued by two Quaker missionaries who were scouring the distant wild islands of the strait for native women either purchased or abducted from their tribes by sealers. They in turn would purchase or abduct the women, & then interrogate them in order to write a fulsome report on such abuses for the London Society of Friends, which was sponsoring their mission. He had, by the time the two Quakers rowed their small whale boat into the rocky, wind-swept crag that had been his home for so long, succeeded in metamorphosing into something else, having acquired the greasy odour of minor authority, & beneath the moonbird down that lightly fluttered over his face & clothes he had even then begun convincing himself of the inevitability of invention.
With the Quakers, a black woman, & three children of another black woman who had died, for whom the Quakers had bartered some axes & sugar with a sealer, they headed southwest. They sailed for a week across the rest of the strait, then down the west coast of Van Diemen’s Land until they came to the notorious penal settlement of Sarah Island, the subject of another of the Quakers’ investigations.
Here the rescuers & the rescued parted ways, the latter armed with a high-pitched rhetoric of penology acquired from the earnest, thoughtful Quakers, & his own, older & lower knowledge of the animality of men, two strings which when stroked by the violin bow of his growing ambition created a powerful dissembling chord. The then Commandant, Major de Groot, welcomed one more soldier to join with the undermanned military guard of the penal settlement, while Lieutenant Horace welcomed the opportunity to augment his own invention with some actual record of service.
After Major de Groot’s funeral, the Surgeon & the Commissary had quarrelled as to who was the senior official, & ought assume command. When they proved unable to resolve the impasse themselves, Lieutenant Horace stepped into the breach. Declaring himself the only man capable of maintaining order amongst the soldiers & discipline amongst the convicts, he made himself the new Commandant. In a fashion peculiar to himself, he took advantage of his own limitations by declaring that while he had no knowledge of civil law, he understood well enough the law of men under arms, & he had the pompous old Danish clerk, Jorgen Jorgensen (until his death I never saw him without the most preposterous of affectations, a lapis lazuli necklace which he claimed to have won off General Blucher in a game of skat whilst sojourning in Dresden), prepare a declaration of martial law, the first document of what I later discovered was to be a long & remarkably fecund collaboration.
Even by the ugly standards of that ugly island, Jorgen Jorgensen—in spite of his affectations—was a miserable looking piece of pelican shit, all elongated & sharp angles, a coat hanger of a body trying to remember the coat that years before had fallen off. Invariably he wore an overly long & rusting sword that trailed in the dust & mud behind him, with his principal companion—a mangy three-legged dog he called Elsinore—hopping along in its rutted wake. As he walked he often mumbled to himself, & sometimes he sang for the dog, which could stand on its two good hind legs & whistle in response. Like his dog, Jorgen Jorgensen possessed the trick of whistling the same tune as his master. At some point, this minor clerk decided that his master would no longer be Major de Groot, but Lieutenant Horace.
No-one thought overly much of Lieutenant Horace taking command, viewing it as a formality that had to be observed until Governor Arthur in distant Hobart Town appointed someone fit & proper for the post, neither attribute being in evidence with Lieutenant Horace, who merely shrugged aside the disrespectable oddities of his own behaviour, such as the retention of the black woman the Quakers had left in his care in exchange for a solemn promise of moral & spiritual enlightenment. The convicts called her Twopenny Sal, but the Commandant—as he soon insisted on being called—with whom she first found work as a domestick, then later favour as a mistress, insisted on calling her the Mulatto. In his mind perhaps such miscegenation with someone of mixed race origins was somehow more acceptable than that with a woman so obviously a Van Diemonian native. In this, as in so many other things—such as his own unfitness for the post—he at first laughed along with everyone else, saying, ‘Touch me, see, I am just like you, you can touch me.’ But even as he spoke the moonbird down was falling away from his face & something else, like rock, was being revealed.
IN THE BEGINNING, as at the end, it was as the Commandant had long suspected: he was immortal. It was said by the handful who knew where the penal colony’s Registry was that even there no precise records were to be found of the boat on which he arrived, or, for that matter, of his military history, for Jorgen Jorgensen had many years before, on the order of Major de Groot, checked through all the shipping registers & found no mention of a Lieutenant Horace.
After the Major’s untimely demise, rumoured to have been the consequence of poison, official documents were found (though, admittedly, these were loose inserts in Major de Groot’s letter books) that referred to letters signed by Major de Groot appointing Lieutenant Horace as his successor. Subsequently, according to an addendum in the margins, these letters had been unfortunately lost in a small fire that had taken hold of the Registry immediately after Lieutenant Horace assumed control of the settlement.
At first the new Commandant was a model of obsequiousness to his distant superiors. He had Jorgen Jorgensen pen long reports on his various improvements to the machinery of penal administration—his dietary reforms that made less food go further in ways guaranteed only to enhance the health & vigour of his convict charges; his new individual sleeping cages the length of a man & the height of a forearm intended to prevent unspeakable sin amongst the convicts; his rocking chamber pot with its elliptical bottom that needed two hands to successfully operate, thereby rendering impossible the crime of Onan, who needlessly spilled his seed in the sand.
No replies ever came.
No word of praise, of encouragement, or even, for that matter, of approbation or admonishment.
The tone of the letters the Commandant had Jorgen Jorgensen write began to alter. He began listing the problems of trying to run a settlement composed of the worst types of convicts engaging in unspeakable sin with soldiers of almost equally bad character—the latter only distinguishable from the former by the dull pink of their faded red uniforms; the dilemma of trying to ensure the settlement’s survival, much less—as he was expected—making it pay its way, when he was given so few tools, no skilled labourers to make boats or to build houses, no cash & no spare food that might be bartered with passing traders. He begged for a little more in the way of rations. A few more soldiers. Some officers of some calibre, rather than as they routinely were, in disgrace for having defrauded regimental funds or having slept with the commanding officer’s wife on Mauritius, or, worse yet, the commanding officer himself in Cape Town.
No replies & no supplies & no reinforcements were forthcoming.
His letters grew petulant, & then angry, & finally insulting. A short, curt memorandum arrived in reply. It was signed by an underling of the Colonial Secretary. It repeated the terms of his commission as an officer & reminded him of the sacred duty of his role until such time as the governor appointed a successor to Major de Groot.
It became clear to the Commandant that his letters, for all the good they seemed to do, might as well have been thrown into the ocean & eaten by the huge whales out beyond the heads, whose almost hourly passing in large pods was signalled by distant small rainbows of whale spout. It was at this point that the Commandant entered a slough of despond lasting several months, during which he neither shaved nor changed clothes.
When he emerged from the winter of his solitude he was wearing a gold mask that perennially smiled & other evidence of the profound effect his long isolation following his shipwreck had had upon his mind—a magnificent new blue uniform, remmiscent of that worn by Marshall Ney at the battle of Waterloo, featuring oversized feathered epaulettes startlingly similar in form to outstretched moonbird wings. Whether he adopted the mask simply to hide who he had been & prevent the possibility of exposure as an impostor, or whether he wore it to invent himself as someone who was neither Lieutenant Horace nor yet whoever it was he had been before the shipwreck, but as a new creature altogether, the Commandant, I know not.
All I can report was that the smiling mask was soon everywhere, glinting, gleeful, reflecting to us our own greed & desires, so omnipresent that no-one seemed to notice when it quietly & quickly usurped the broad arrow as the symbol of government property, stencilled on barrels & tools alike, later branded on our forearms, in a spectacular fusion of state & self & concealment so characteristick of the great man.
The Commandant had the first of innumerable long conversations with Jorgen Jorgensen after which the Dane took to penning stolid reports for the Colonial Office of steady, if unspectacular growth. In his reports progress was hampered, but never halted nor overly impeded, by the inevitable problems of isolation, of indolent & incompetent convict workers, of shortages of skilled workmen & tools. It was a picture of a well-led, respectable establishment achieving small profits & some reclamation of both land & criminal souls. But only Jorgen Jorgensen noticed that the saliva that glistened in the recesses of the Commandant’s gilded lips was black from the mercury he was already taking to treat his syphilis.
The Commandant then ordered the commissariat store to be opened up for trade. He ordered that the settlement’s entire stock of barrels of salted pork be traded with a Nantucket whaling merchant for two old whalers, which he sent out with new convict crews in search of the great fish of Jonah. One sank with all hands lost just out of Hells Gates, but the other returned to a starving settlement living on rationed flour & fish, with two humpback whales in its hold, & the Commandant began a trade in whale oil.
With his profits he bought more boats, & had others go back to the island upon which he had been marooned & hunt the moonbird for its flesh & the seals for their skins. He formed those convicts he trusted into an elite guard, had them shoot dead half his soldiers, & by not informing the colonial authorities, kept receiving their wages as dead-pay. He doubled the rate of felling of Huon pine, & halved the amount he sent back to the colonial authorities, then as trade grew brisk, quadrupled his felling & quartered the amount he sent now only as a forlorn tribute to Hobart Town, along with letters speaking of the almost insurmountable problems of poor tools, sawyers of no experience, epidemics of unspeakable sin, & weather so awful the rivers were frozen for six months of the year.
His trading grew exuberant & exotic: a score of barrels of whale oil for the decadent scent of a single overripe guava, shipwrights’ tools for iguana eggs, a whale boat for a large cargo of green bananas, much prized redcoat uniforms for silk turbans.
In spite of what the Portuguese traders told their Brazilian sailors under their breath as they emptied their ship holds of Moluccan feathers, & contrary to what the barefoot convicts grunted to each other during their cruel, unending ardour of hauling huge Huon pine logs through trackless rainforest to the frozen river’s edge, not all his trade was complete madness.
For the pine, the oil of which he claimed could be used as an aphrodisiac & a cure for the clap, making it a doubly virtuous wonder that both promoted & protected its adherents in the torrents of love, he extracted the finest silk cloth from India. For a horde of sulphur-crested cockatoos he had painted to resemble baby macaws & trained to recite melancholic verse in the manner of Pope & several songs of passion in the earthier argot of their convict trainers, he gained fourteen Brazilian caravels & seven cannons, which he promptly exchanged for a principality in Sarawak that a Levantine merchant had won in a game of tarok on his way south to the fabled kingdom of Sarah Island, the subsequent sale of which financed his palace & the new wharf.
For the continent of Australia over which he had recently claimed sovereignty by having Musha Pug row over to the mainland & there plant the new flag of the Principality of Sarah Island upon an abandoned beach, he obtained a fleet of Siamese girls. At the beginning they set up their trade in groves lined with manfern fronds, but when the evening light grew thin & their groves grew damp, the Siamese girls took to gathering with their manfern fronds along the protected northern wall of the Penitentiary. There they touted for trade & called upon the crawlers to show that they were real men, & drank their semen in the belief that it cured the consumption that had become a plague among so many of them.
His reputation grew, his name began to be spoken far & wide, & boats began appearing with all manner of traders, merchants, beggars & charlatans. The Commandant welcomed them all, & what started off as furtive trading along the southern stockade wall, administered but not controlled by the felons of a Saturday afternoon, grew into a market & the market into a bazaar & the bazaar into the idea of a nation. ‘For what is a nation?’ asked the Commandant of the Surgeon, his high voice weird & bowing as the old saw he was repeating, ‘but a people with a trading fleet? A language but a dialect with an army? A literature but words sold as provenance?’
THE COMMANDANT’S IMPERSONATION of Lieutenant Horace had one great & unforeseen consequence: the receipt of the dead man’s mail. This was unremarkable & sporadic, save for a relentless river of letters from the dead lieutenant’s sister, Miss Anne. From certain asides in her writings, the Commandant gathered the impression that Miss Anne’s original brother, before being bored in his death by sea lice, was bored in his life by Miss Anne’s letters. He rarely, if ever, had responded. But Miss Anne’s surrogate brother, the Commandant, proved more dedicated a correspondent. He wrote regularly & enthusiastically, sometimes sending two or even three letters to her every one.
Perhaps at the beginning he was intending to use the letters as a small library of relevant personal information to help in his impersonation of Miss Anne’s dead brother. Instead of himself, he filled his letters—copies of which I many years after came across in a letter book—with questions seeking to tease out details of her family, her world, her interests & passions & enthusiasms.
But the correspondence rapidly took on a life of its own. Whether it was directly implied by her writing, or simply inferred by the Commandant in his reading, he came to believe that his newly found sister was an utterly remarkable being. Miss Anne, delighting in her brother’s fresh interest & growing appreciation of her, wrote more, & wrote more closely to her heart. So changed was Miss Anne’s tone, that it almost seemed to the Commandant that they were being written by an entirely different person, one he now recognised as his true sibling. And as her letters altered, the Commandant no longer found them a necessary task of research, but rather a passion demanding demonstration. For as his confidence in the impregnability of his own position as the leader of the island had grown, so had his sense of isolation from others. Only in Miss Anne’s letters was he able to find both a source of intimacy & inspiration that demanded, he increasingly felt, some requital in kind.
I have used the image of a relentless river to describe Miss Anne’s letters, but this is imprecise. Certainly her enchanting tales seemed to be written in this fashion, twice, sometimes thrice weekly, but they were delivered & thus received only once or twice a year—and therefore their effect on the Commandant’s mind was not so much the gentle erosion of a stream upon its banks, but more that of a tidal wave, obliterating everything in its path.
When later I came to paint several of these letters, I found their tone inevitably exuberant, the form overrunning, sentences tumbling over each other, phrases leapfrogging ideas, the writer panting to tell the one she believed to be her younger brother of all the new wonders of the age, made all the more remarkable by some personal association—high tea with George Stephenson’s sister who thought her idea of calling the locomotive ‘The Ebullient Thunderer’ excellent, a risqué evening watching bear baiting at the Five Courts where she was introduced to the poet John Keats, with whom she had compared notes, wrote she, on wayward brothers lost in the New World.
These letters tormented the Commandant, who had become profoundly afflicted by the pathos of distance. They distorted his perspective of the Old World, diminishing the everyday, the banal, the chicanery & the mediocrity of Europe; exaggerating the marvellous, the sublime, the astounding of that distant world half a year’s voyage away.
In the Commandant’s mind events in Europe came to seem epochal, & connected in unexpected ways. Thus the steam locomotive & Byron’s Don Juan & Baron Rumford’s splendid scientifick fireplaces—all of which arose from some delightful personal association with Miss Anne—leapt into the Commandant’s imagination simultaneously as one, creating an idea of smokeless Romantic travel & the pleasures of the flesh that he was later to pursue with a certain mad ardour.
One night, when behind his gold mask his eyes had finally wearied from rereading her wondrous letters & closed in a dully pleasant anticipation of nearing sleep, he realised that all the new technological miracles in Europe had either been invented by Miss Anne or directly come into being from her good works, wise advice or kindly intervention: be these the locomotive, the steam ship, the steam press or the generation of the supernatural force of electricity—all were the creation of Miss Anne!
And then, after a further time, he had to concede to himself that not only matters technological, but also the very marvel of modern nineteenth-century Europe were clearly a direct consequence of his sister’s imaginings. With the force of profound revelation he realised that his sister was inventing Europe, & his body shuddered in a single, violent clutch.
The next morning, as he had the old Dane calculate on a large abacus their monthly takings for spermaceti, he found himself beginning to wonder if he might not do the same. As the black & white beads clacked back & forth something else was tallying in his mind, the sum of which was that he might make the penal colony of Sarah Island the product of his imaginative will as surely as Miss Anne had Europe.
He cried out so loud that the old Dane in shock dropped the abacus, which broke upon the flagged flooring of the Commandant’s cell. As the black & white beads rolled in every direction, the old Dane scrabbling after them, the Commandant shook his head in revelation. He would reinvent Europe on Sarah Island, only this time it would be even more extraordinary than any of his sister’s descriptions.
And that day the old Dane’s calculations were shown to be only so many black & white balls dribbling away in the dust, the Commandant found his monochrome dreams of a man inspired by the nightly return of moon-birds exploding into a kaleidoscope of colourful desires. Through a sea of convict blood he would later claim to have only ever spilt in furtherance of his people’s destiny, Miss Anne’s letters would henceforth be to him as a crazed lodestone by which he would navigate his strange journey, with us his unwilling passengers.
AT THAT TIME my life had settled into a routine that was if not pleasant then, compared to most of my fellow felons, at least tolerably comfy. Though I continued to sleep with the other convicts in the Penitentiary, between the morning & evening muster I was largely free to do whatever took my fancy & go where I liked on the island. I received extra food, a rum ration & was allowed to keep a small vegetable garden for my own use next to Castlereagh’s pen. I even had a woman, which in a colony full of men, was no small matter.
She was the Commandant’s mistress, Twopenny Sal. My assignations with her were accordingly risky & thus furtive affairs hidden from all view, normally undertaken in that one place no-one else ventured, the small piece of bush between Castlereagh’s pen & the steep bank behind it.
Here, protected by a copse of dense tea-trees & the rising miasma of pig shit, we stored in terracotta pitchers our contraband supply of a rough grog we fermented out of stolen currants & sugar, flavoured & coloured green with sassafras leaves in memory of Capois Death’s Larrikin Soup. Though I would claim I was elsewhere painting fish, inevitably I was in the tea-tree fishing for Twopenny Sal’s delights.
Hidden from the world, here we passed day after day. It was early winter. While over us brutal westerly winds cut across the island, in the tea-tree we had us our snug, warm & protected, close & holy as the night. Here we traded words.
My favourite: Moinee.
Her favourite: Cobber.
Twopenny Sal thrilled to stories of London, was at once terrified & excited by descriptions of crowds larger than the largest mob of kangaroos & buildings so tall & densely arrayed they made their own valleys & gorges & ravines without a tree in sight. She would in turn tell tales of how Van Diemen’s Land was made, by the god Moinee striking the land & creating the rivers, by puffing away & blowing the earth up into mountains.
‘And how was Macquarie Harbour made?’ one day asked I. ‘By Moinee?’
‘Macquarie Harbour?’ said she. ‘Moinee’s piss pot—cobber.’
She would smell of pickled herring & I would pass her my pipe & with the pipe clenched firmly in her teeth she would quiver like a fish, then smell of something altogether different & even better & then we were rooting swimming flying mollynogging most marvellous. She had small breasts & a large waist & skinny shanks & was at first voracious in her lovemaking. She would make a great deal of noise, somewhere between a Van Diemonian devil screeching at night & a stampede, which was both pleasing & frightening because it meant we ran the risk of being caught, even with Castlereagh carolling away in the background. No matter how much I implored her to enjoy her passion in muted delight, she ignored me. She had little knowledge of shame & when passion was upon her, which at the beginning, as I have said, was more than frequently, she would have as happily taken me in front of the Surgeon or the Commandant or a chain gang.
But I would be less than honest if I said all was well with me & my routine which was—though I did not know it—about to end. Looking back, it is true to say that things were even then beginning to fall apart. After a time Twopenny Sal did learn the necessary proprieties, but by then she had lost pretty well all interest in me & was spending time with Musha Pug, a dog who by dobbing had been rewarded with the cosy billet of assisting the storemaster in the Commissariat, & was a far better source of food & grog & tobacco than I had been. And I, who had taken her so for granted, missed her much more than I thought possible.
My style in my paintings of the fish was mercifully improving, & with it the prospects of my survival. My pictures were becoming pared down, as useful as a good boot, as solid as a well-fitted mizzen mast for the Pudding’s ship of glorious Science.
In any case—or whatever parallel—the Pudding was well pleased, sometimes to the point of glee, as his daydreams filled with images of the Glorious Return of the Great Natural Historian & Noted Ichthyologist Lempriere to the Capital London, as he mouthed silently his rejoinders to those Ladies of Society who at the Grand Soirees of Science fell at his feet & asked how did he survive Savages & Jungles & the Hungry Hottentots, & he, with the greatest humility, replying:
‘Because I believed in Science, Madam, & my own small part in its Sacred Mission.’
IN DIFFERENT WAYS does the Devil present & never one easily reducible to illustration. My work was becoming increasingly frustrating & it seemed only appropriate that the evocative & luminous name ‘stargazer’ would suggest to my mind a fish entirely different from that which the fishing gang one morning presented me to paint. I imagined a fish possessed of some ethereal quality, as if it were some meditative virtue incarnated as fish-flesh. Such a fish would, reckoned I, be ideal for the medium of watercolour, which I found difficult in capturing density, but which had a certain ability to render the passage of light.
But the stargazer the convict fishermen had given me was a far from easy fish to paint. I don’t know why I found it to be so, though in the darkness of its being, in its fiercesome looks, in its satanic horns on the edges of its terrible bull head, its vertical mouth locked in a perpetual scowl, its slimy skin, the strangeness of its eyes that sat on top of its head rather than on the side—as if it were always looking upwards at the heavens, hence its enchanting, celestial name—in all of this was contained the suggestion of something I found not alien but familiar. Yet I could not say what the nature of that familiarity was, nor why it at first disturbed me so.
A stargazer is a frightening fish by any stretch of the imagination, but not until the day I first saw one in its own world did I understand its true nature. I had gone to the fishing jetty to marvel at the netting gang’s latest catch—a giant cod, with a large ball inside its belly. Beneath the sloughs of milky skin the ball was still recognisable as Doughy Proctor’s head—the only thing left of him after attempting escape strapped to an old pickled-pork barrel. The chief of the netting gang, a Vlach from the Levant by the name of Rolo Palma, gestured me to come over to where he was standing at the end of the jetty & look into the sea.
In a way that was as much a defining characteristick of the lands he came from as it was of him, Rolo Palma’s destiny was to be bound up in other countries. Having ended up in England & finding English friendship manifesting itself typically as a lack of conversation, Rolo Palma—in the manner of his hero Swedenborg—instead took up speaking with angels. He had a fertile imagination & a keen interest in the natural world, & every prospect—if his acting on the angels’ orders had not interposed, forcing his compulsory migration to Van Diemen’s Land as a convicted murderer—of inventing a natural history system even madder than that admired by the Surgeon. But he had to make do with speculating on the existence of mythical creatures such as the minotaur & gryphon in the Van Diemonian interior & pointing out to me, perhaps five feet underwater, two devil eyes protruding from the sea floor. The fish to which the eyes belonged lay submerged in the sand—its huge head, its satanic horns, its tapering circus strongman body—still, tensed, hidden, waiting for the moment when a baby flounder drifted by overhead.
Then, an explosion of sand out of which the stargazer’s great body appeared, as if forming out of the very disorder it had created. That huge mouth opening & closing all at once & all together. A body flexing & leaping, propelling the stargazer up & sharking down the hitherto unsuspecting baby flounder, leaving only the Vlach cheering & sandy water swirling suggesting a life leaving.
The lines of my first painting were weak & untrue to this capacity to manifest menace. They failed to render the monstrous proportion, the oversized head that dominated the subordinate tapering body, & my colouring was inadequate to reproducing the tension that is implicit in the musculature of all fish, but most particularly that of the stargazer.
At such times, when the fish remained only a miserable scientifick illustration, there would enter my mind like an uninvited guest the wretched image of Mr Cosmo Wheeler reinventing the World as a Great Steam Engine like those the machine breaker had tried to smash, cogs within crushing cogs, & me & all the fish being pulped to a mass meal in between their grinding teeth of taxa & systemae.
I worked & reworked my sketches & my paintings until they overflowed with redundant crisscrossed lines & colours, all of which were a net in search of a fish, but still the fish escaped me. Finally I made a painting that was still mediocre, but which I hoped might prove passable for the Surgeon. By then the fish had gone off, & though it was still boiled & eaten as soup, the netting gang were not happy with my request for a second stargazer, which they thought would be similarly spoilt.
As it transpired they never had to give the fish to me, for my fortunes were about to take one last turn for the better before everything went to Hell, & Hell came to us.
THAT A BOOK should never digress is something with which I have never held. Nor does God, who makes whatever He wishes of the 26 letters & His stories work just as well Q-E-D as A-B-C.
The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. I believe the King is with me on this one. He is, I have no doubt, all for bends & diversions & sightseeing, which, while ever only the ongoing art of disappointment, still make a journey the memorable thing a journey ought be.
Warming to my idea, I put it to the King that this question of roads marks the fundamental divide between the ancient Greek & Roman civilisations. You make a straight road like the Romans & you are lucky to get three words: Veni, vidi, vici. You have a crooked goat path like the Greeks all over the Acropolis & what do you get? The entire damn Odyssey & Oedipus Rex, that’s what. The King, something of a Classicist, stares at the ceiling, his mind filling with gryphons & centaurs &, of course, Pliny.
How could I forget Pliny?
Once more, the sagacious King had won, showing that to generalise is to be an idiot, for Pliny may have been a Roman, but he made a book more crooked & bent than Capois Death’s face the day he came back to implicate me in yet one more inevitable digression. Oh, how the black publican seemed to resurface in my life at regular intervals with promises of infinite hope, & depart it leaving my world in complete despair. He was Adventure & I was Envy, he was Trouble & I was Excitement, he was talking & I was already not hearing thinking dreaming wishing that somehow escape might now be possible.
Capois Death was as bright & breezy as if he had just been freed from the Cockchafer, smiling as though Brady himself were his closest cobber, laughing like he was the top swell of Hobart Town, quarter-flash, halfcut, fully primed Capois Death strolling through the Surgeon’s door, crying, ‘Damn fish, Billy boy!’ & before I can say a word he’s thrown my painting of the stargazer into the dull ashes of Lempriere’s fire, & is off brightly yabbering again, saying, ‘We’ve got better work on our hands.’
Even in his government slops he still cut a dash, or at least to my mind. And, as ever, he had managed to rise back up the ladder of Sarah Island. He was now, said he, an official of the National Sarah Island Railway Station, Commissary with Special Responsibilities for Travel.
Under the influence of Miss Anne’s stories of the new steam locomotives that had become the rage in Europe, the Commandant, increasingly frustrated in his desire to be seen as a man of destiny, intoxicated by his sister’s long descriptions of the exhilaration of a New Age coming into being, riding the railway from Manchester to Liverpool, had three years before decreed that a great train station be built.
It was a huge undertaking, requiring sandstone be quarried & shipped from far up the coast, the purchase & assembly of all the machinery needed for the workshops & smiths & factories associated with a great train station. All this in face of those who quietly expressed the timid doubt that a train station on an island in the middle of a wilderness far off the coast of a nowhere land so blighted it existed only as a gaol was unlikely ever to be either the terminus or point of departure for any traveller. Such arguments were calmly refuted by the implacable conviction of the Commandant that railway lines grew out to train stations as willow roots to a lake, & that therefore before long it would be the busiest train station in the antipodes; that soon Manchurians & Liverpudlians would enviously & covetously talk of the National Sarah Island Railway Station. In this way, said he—and some even claimed that the gold mask was seen to smile—we will have traded our tyranny of isolation for the liberty of commerce.
Two hundred yards of line were laid to the roundhouse, around which ran a loop of line, such that locomotives—when they finally steamed out of the rainforest—could be turned around either on a large wooden turntable powered by a spindle pushed by two dozen convicts who had been reconsigned from the caterpillar, or by traversing the loop & then back to the station. When after several months there was still not the slightest sign of willow-like tendrils of lines snaking their way across the adjacent wilderness towards us, no evidence of iron bridges arising between the island & the mainland, the Commandant announced that he had ordered a steam train from an American whaler, using the last of the gold he had gained in selling the Gordon River & the Great Barrier Reef.
BILLY GOULD HAD not been without his problems on Sarah Island. But compared to Capois Death he had been lucky. Soon after arriving at Sarah Island Capois Death had met back up with Roaring Tom Weaver who had managed to find an easy billet for his old landlord with the shellfish gathering gang. There Capois Death incurred the malignant enmity of the convict constable Musha Pug, the gang’s supervisor, who had been transported to Sarah Island because of an unsavoury interlude with a sheep. At his trial Pug, committed for bestiality, had wrongly thought himself accused of sodomy. When asked by the judge what he had to say in his defence, he felt obliged to point out that it was not a ram but a ewe with which he had been caught. Forever after his hatred of catamites—with whom he presumed he had been so criminally confused—was for him a guiding passion that fortunately found numerous outlets for expression on Sarah Island.
After having been dobbed in by Musha Pug for selling ship’s silk to the Siamese girls of the manfern fronds, Capois Death was given a hundred lashes, strapped to the Cradle for a week, & then sent up the Gordon River to work as a sawyer. One evening, beneath the mottling shadows thrown in the firelight by the myrtles looming over them, he recalled the tragic history of the machine breaker of Glasgow to his fellow sawyers, speaking in such evocative language of the murderous power of steam machines, that it was mistakenly assumed he had some familiarity with mechanickal matters.
When the huge wooden crates of forged iron pieces marked ‘Locomotive’ arrived at Sarah Island the following month, the accompanying complex assembly instructions defeated even the ingenuity of the best shipwrights. The Commandant’s despair was complete until misinformed by Musha Pug, through his extensive network of spies, that a maroon working on the felling gang up the Gordon had been boasting of how he had once built steam engines.
Upon being summoned, Capois Death offered the Commandant confident reassurances, & gave the shipwrights erratic instructions based only on an indistinct memory of a street pamphlet he had read about George Stephenson’s new marvel. But it was only after the Commandant told Capois Death that he would have both him & the shipwrights feast on their own balls after having had them sliced off & grilled on a fire made up of faggots of their useless arms, that Capois Death was able to persuade the shipwrights to make sense of what seemed utterly without order, & manufacture out of a confusion of cast-iron a locomotive, with the unique feature of a small mast from which cantilevered cables held up a double smokestack that stuck horizontally out of both sides of the boiler, like a waxed moustache.
With the steam machine finally assembled, the Commandant took to taking his leave of the island with great ceremony & two Siamese girls every evening, band playing, cannons booming, soldiers parading. After which he would travel two hundred yards in the train from the station to the roundhouse. Here the train would spend the rest of the evening travelling around in circles until the engineer was vomiting & the outward wheels grew so worn from the extra weight thrown by centrifugal force that the train developed a wearying outward tilt. Inside the melancholic Commandant had fallen asleep, head on the lap of one or the other Siamese girls.
When after another year there was still no sign of any incoming rail traffic, the Commandant had four search parties sent into the interior to discover exactly from which direction the new railway lines must be inevitably advancing. No-one returned. In their absence the Commandant had all those who were in those search parties lost somewhere in Transylvania summarily tried & convicted, having by the application of hot brands to the belly of a returned escapee secured the true story of their disappearance, that they had all boarded an express locomotive bound for Ambleside in the English Lake District at a wayside stop near Frenchman’s Cap—from which, incidentally, Brady & his Army of Light had alighted—with the declared intention of never returning.
When it was determinedly but respectfully put to the Commandant that a train station on an island in the middle of a wilderness was unlikely to attract any other traffic that might bring in income to offset its enormous cost, the Commandant placidly & unexpectedly agreed. He then revealed that he had for the last several months not been asleep at all in the revolving locomotive cabin, but in deep discussion with a Japanese trader called Magamasa Yamada, a man in whose land there was a great demand for wood & with whom the Commandant had entered into an arrangement to sell the entire Transylvanian wilderness in exchange for more rolling stock which the pirate had come in possession of while on a trading trip to South America. These mechanickal carts would allow the Nation to reap the inevitable boom that would accompany the abolition of the wilderness & subsequent opening up of the cleared land for settlement. No-one was willing to say to His Gold Mask that the endless circling in the railway carriage had tipped the already disturbed equilibrium of his mind into complete lunacy.
The only one not surprised the following summer when the junks of Japanese sawyers arrived was the Commandant himself. He watched as they unloaded the promised rolling stock. The cabins were riddled with woodworm & rot, but as the Commandant would always sit only in the improvised coal truck that had been designated the Regal Cabin, this seemed to be of no real matter.
AS I STARED at the stargazer ascending into the chimney, now so many pieces of charred paper, Capois Death, with his cack-headed leer, began telling me all about his new position, how following his success in redesigning the locomotive, his role was to foster a notion of travel that might encourage use of the national railway station, the national locomotive & accompanying rolling stock.
I knew better than to be talking when I needed to be listening, but still I felt the need to venture the observation that on an island approximately one square mile in area, there was nowhere to go.
‘Precisely,’ said the old publican seeking—I felt—to affect an air of mystery which to my shame I must say succeeded in making me feel intrigued, ‘but there will be.’
He told me I was to present myself at the train station immediately prior to that night’s departure of the Sarah Island Express. That misty evening, as the boiler was slowly brought to pressure in preparation for departure, as the air became a fiery-coloured scrim of cinders & ash, as I stood barefoot & ankle-deep in the mud below the siding staring upwards, the Commandant, from behind a drawn sooty curtain in the Regal Cabin, explained at length to me his conviction that Commerce—for which, it seemed, he mistook the endless circling velocity of his locomotive—was now entering not only new territory for Trade, but also for Art. He then explained why he felt it entirely necessary to have me strapped to the front of the locomotive so that I might better experience the new aesthetick of movement.
He drew the curtain back a little, but from where I stood all I could make out was a little of his gold mask & two small eyes reflecting the disturbing glowing yellow of the mask. Though I demurred—politely—the Commandant insisted—gently—and had me immediately seized by Musha Pug. Without further talk, I was firmly bound with several belts & leather thongs to the locomotive’s front railing.
To the growing roar of the steam engine & the rhythmic clatter of iron wheels on iron rails, I circled endlessly. Within a few minutes I was vomiting, & a few minutes after that I had nothing left to retch save a foul green bile that spread like the vomit before over my clothes. On & on, round & round, & no attempt to lose myself in sleep or daydreaming or focusing on thoughts of food or women helped in any way. My only sensations were a nausea that bordered on a violent assault of the senses, a stench of coal smoke that filled my lungs, a feeling that my entire body was being violated & crippled, a knowledge that I was utterly alone. If this was the future, thought I in one of the few moments of lucidity granted me that long evening, it was not a future that seemed worthy of the name.
After the locomotive slowly screeched to a halt, I was unstrapped & dragged senseless & sick to an easel set up especially for the purpose with a magnificent view of the roundhouse.
For some time I struggled merely to stand upright. The world rolled in waves around me; the roundhouse rose & fell like a forest of bull-kelp, Siamese girls floated past, Musha Pug & his henchmen darted hither & thither, a school of alien aquatic creatures. Somewhat unsteadily I picked up a paintbrush, my light body stumbling in the heavy mud, recovered my balance, & set to work, fully intending despite the fug of nausea that overwhelmed me, to paint the Commandant a picture of Revelation & Profound Discovery that remade the world anew as Commerce.
But then I finished.
In every way I knew I had failed.
Billy Gould had always felt if something was worth doing, it was worth doing badly. Worry about doing it too well, he believed, & you may well be crippled by your ambition. In this regard, if in no other, he suspected he may have succeeded.
For what I had painted was not a warm thing or a happy thing, but a cold thing, a frightful, frightening, frightened thing. They had wanted of me consolation, & this was desolation. The latent violence, the manic vision: I had got none of it. They had wanted Hope & Progress, & to my horror I saw sullenly staring back at me—a stargazer! They had wanted a New God & in my monstrous confusion I had given them a fish!
It was no good. A fate worse than Captain Pinchbeck’s petite noyade, crueller than Governor Arthur’s Cockchafer awaited, the Tube Gag & the Cradle & the Scavenger’s Daughter all bound up together & me dying the most terrible death in the middle.
Feeling ever iller, I stepped backwards, gulping, slightly stumbling, terrified of what my failure might augur. As I sought to regain my balance, to my horror the Commandant, who I had not known had been standing behind me all that time watching, stepped forward.
Unlike the Surgeon, who could fill days examining a single image for flaws, the Commandant spent only a few seconds surveying the picture as I surveyed him for the first time since he had spoken to us on the day of our arrival. From behind, it was clear what the gold mask was intended to obscure: the great size of his head, the disproportionate smallness of the body beneath, that subordination of the body to the spirit.
Then he turned around, but all I could see were those jaundiced eyes highlighted by the eye sockets of the gold mask, & behind that mask’s smiling slit the suggestion of a cavernous black mouth opening ever wider. The incongruous small squawks issuing out of that dark emptiness pronounced the Commandant as pleased as I was appalled, as if I had done a fine portrait of him as one of Napoleon’s marshals he had once so admired, rather than a painting of a lousy fish.
Here, I realised, was a man clearly in the prime of his life. I smiled and, with the flourish I also remembered of Audubon, bowed.