Sketch 14
In which, like others, I cut and run

IT SEEMS I VACATED the stage at exactly the wrong moment. No sooner had I left the goldfields country than a spate of daring robberies on the roads commenced. Bailing up the mail coaches, they call it. The coincidence with my removal was so exact as to be highly suspicious to anyone with a suspicious mind—it is a wonder that Sir Frederick Pottinger did not come galloping after me.

Sir Frederick. Now there is a Nob for you, a Nob of the first water: a baronet. In England he had run through most of his mother’s money, and all of his own, at the race courses, and with a record like that, what better place to send him than New South Wales. Botany Bay may have been in the family’s mind, or hopes that he would succeed on the goldfields. He didn’t, of course. If he was that unlucky in the old world, why would fortune be expected to smile on him in this? And doubtless my father would have glowered that the young scapegrace could expect fortune’s frown to follow him into the next.

Be that as it may, Sir Frederick concealed his title, and joined the police force as a regular mounted trooper on the gold escort. That must have concentrated his mind on the activities of bushrangers; for when the secret of his background leaked out—and who else knew about it but himself?—he won rapid promotion, as happens when a title is in the balance, and he made it his business to chase after those miscreants in particular. He was hopeless. Race courses aside, he could ride a horse as well as most, but he had to have a horse good enough, and he had to know his quarry when they were not in their customary regalia. For as it turns out, he missed his mark and bungled his ambushes more often than is credible. He would not have made a good bushranger.

While he was a mere unknown trooper he was involved in a violent fight over a game of billiards. He did not take kindly to being called a cheat, and recognising the similarity between the thick end of his cue and a truncheon, used it to quell the affray he himself had started. More recently he has been officially reprimanded for being involved in another drunken brawl, at Lambing Flat. Nobody seems to know what that was about, but evidently his blue blood comes to the boil rather quickly. Or perhaps it has something to do with being a policeman. Just like the bullies at Bendigo and Ballaarat.

Several times he has missed recognising individuals wanted for arrest, and cheekily present in the towns and at the race courses. They were right under his nose but he didn’t see them. The people are starting to laugh at him, calling him blind Freddy. And less amusing, he has arrested young men who are then found not guilty of the charge he lays against them.

One reason for my interest is that he reminds me of the current pitiful hero of the hour, Robert Burke, another one for making the wrong decisions. As is now widely known, the great expedition from Melbourne, designed to explore the back country all the vast way to the northern coast and preferably ahead of the South Australian expedition pursuing the same object, has ended in disaster. Search parties have found the remains of the explorer and his loyal deputy, and an enfeebled survivor; and the ghastly irony of how closely they missed connecting with the main party waiting for them at their base camp is admitted by everyone. It is such a story that it strains our credulity. It did not have to happen like that. Burke was a policeman too, and pompous. It is said he had a special compartment built into one of his camels’ packs to take his top hat, just what you might need in amongst the sand dunes when you encounter a native chieftain. And there are low-voiced questions, disturbing, about his treatment of the fourth member of his party, the one who did not return with them. Not a man easy to admire, in my view.

Such is the universal interest in the Burke and Wills tragedy that it is an opportunity not to be missed by an illustrator, much like the wreck of the Dunbar. So I have set about devising a set of ten scenes, drawing upon what I remember of the dry creek beds and sand dunes I saw with poor Mr H. Another Nob, come to think of it. Another cameleer. And I remember Goliath too. I have a good idea of what a camel looks like, as good an idea as anybody, but I should not like to get caught up in another Veno shambles.

I was not sure when I painted the camp at Cooper’s Creek just how much water should be flowing in it, but bushmen have told me that the explorers chose one of the best seasons ever known to make their crossing. Considering that water does not always flow in a desert, I reasoned there would not be much in the way of growth along the banks of the creek, which makes for something of an odd look; but that was how it was on my own expedition, though without water in any of the meandering depressions that might have formed a channel in a good year.

I know likewise from experience that camels for preference would rather sit or stand around chewing their cud, and that men are all too ready to stand around talking rather than getting on with their work. In my picture I have set these two groups in interesting relation to each other. As a last-minute thought I have put into the foreground a little domestic touch, showing their dirty washing hung out to dry. But the whole is of course very discreetly managed. Cooper’s Creek uncertainly excepted. I doubt that the general public will be concerned about that. They want images of their heroes looking calm and confident. And not too emaciated.

In point of fact, I had more trouble with my picture of the expedition’s departure from Melbourne, for although I had easy access to countless versions of it in the illustrated papers for example, so did everybody else; and the problem was how to draw something distinctive but also close to the common perception of that occasion. Burke, with boots as shiny as some of the dignitaries’ silk hats, was at the front of the procession on his little pony. I have him looking back to his followers and pointing the way forward. Superfluous, actually, as there is nowhere else for them to go but along the route marked out by the cheering crowds. Huzzah three times three. Incidentally I have noticed that gentlemen in top hats are disinclined to remove them, or disinclined to lower themselves to any such undignified behaviour. If you are waving your hat, it must be some more manageable, less genteel kind of headgear. You do not disgrace the outward and visible sign of your elevated status in society. It is a modern version of Lord Chesterfield’s injunction, that a gentleman does not laugh out loud; he behaves impeccably at all times.

It says something for Melbourne that everyone present in my picture is well behaved. No barking dogs, no boys climbing up trees, no aborigines, no empty bottles. And isn’t it curious how things come about? The expedition’s camels had been purchased from Coppin, who had bought something of a menagerie, apparently, in yet another business venture, a pleasure gardens just outside Melbourne. I have not put him in the picture.

To ensure that distinctions are preserved, I have Burke in his blue jacket, and the others all in red serge shirts. I had not intended the hint, but it did not displease me that these look a little like a hunt club in their riding pinks; in slow motion because of the steady rolling action of the camels. In my series Burke stays on his pony all the way to Carpentaria; the men walk, leading their camels. And I thought it important to acknowledge the humanity of the natives, so that the series leads up not to the deaths of Burke and Wills—Wills has been sheltering under a thin ragged mia mia—but to the rescue of King, who has been cared for by the natives. They are in the foreground, Howitt still at a little distance, approaching through the scrub. You could say help is at hand; and you might want to think about that.

Working on this series was a useful distraction for me. I had my own private discomfort to attend to; and domestic discomfort too. For when I returned from my tour of the interior, Elizabeth was not there, which was not altogether unexpected; but neither was the piano. She returned a little later, and while I do not mind when men are a little woozy, it does not look well when women are unsteady. The piano had been taken back, she explained, because the rental had not been kept up. I am sure that I left her with sufficient funds to cover our regular expenditure.

That led to an initial quarrel. And then a much more unpleasant conversation about how it was that I had contracted my unfortunate illness. When she understood what I was implying, she was furious. Vile insinuation, she hissed. Bravo madam, says I, bowing ironically, a sentiment straight from the stage. You learned your lines well enough there. I know my own behaviour has been above reproach since Ballaarat. I do not claim immunity from other occasional engagements before then. I had from time to time enjoyed the creature comforts at the Irish Trumpet, for example, but that was before I met Elizabeth.

It had occurred to me that in fact I knew very little about her or her family or where she had come from. From one or two hints she had let drop, I gathered that she had at times taken small parts upon the stage. Perhaps that was the real connection with Lola Montez. And that is where she had acquired her taste for champagne. And now, as I have observed, smoking. And for experimenting with opium, if I am any good guess at the perfume.

It was difficult to maintain the calmness this discussion required. Elizabeth felt no necessity for moderating either her voice or her opinions, and so from one thing to another. I have for the time being taken a room just around the corner. I do not think of myself as hot-tempered, but as with the unhappy day when I stood up to my father so on this occasion it seemed to me too important an issue to leave alone. Our differences have quickly turned into a competition over who is the more outraged. I prefer to think that I have left as the injured party, rather than that I was shown the door. Either way, I find our domestic circumstance utterly disagreeable now. Though I don’t feel I have come out of this as well as I would like.

As for my physical condition, although there had been a remission for a while, for which I was very grateful, now it was back with me and I have had to attend to it. Have it attended to. I found my way to an Irish doctor, whose rooms were not too far away from my studio, on a square near where the old military barracks once were. Doyle, his name was, Doctor Doyle, who had previously had a surgery in his rooms in Ballaarat, and who has given public lectures on the causes and cure of illnesses such as mine. Syphilis. There, I have said it, though I hardly like to say it even to myself. It happens. You would be surprised how many contract it. No doubt I would be surprised too. Like the poor, it seems to be always with us. The human condition.

He is an interesting fellow, full of Irish blarney of course, but surprisingly good company. Big and bushy-bearded. He seems to have seen and done everything, if you are to believe him. He has made anatomical models for the waxworks museum here—it had enjoyed a season or two in Melbourne and has now been relocated for the edification of the good citizens of Sydney. Ladies of course are enjoined not to visit one of the rooms set aside, in order that they may not be embarrassed. I think it takes a strong stomach to look at the gory display. Surgeons, like lawyers, have an unusual way of looking upon the world.

In his public lectures he is insistent on the importance of bodily cleanliness, and on teetotalism—which, in an Irishman, should have cautioned me. He had recently been declared an insolvent, which ought to have sounded another caution, but because of my own history I was on the contrary more sympathetically disposed. And he let me know that he was an amateur artist himself. Oh, oh and oh. Now that really should have put me on my guard. This consultation seemed to be all about him, whereas what I wanted was treatment for myself.

It so happens that one of his popular lectures was on the restorative benefit of the Turkish bath. He was an enthusiast about it. They cure and purge and heal and do everything short of mend a broken limb. The Turkish bath makes you feel a better person. It is a new version of a moral ablution—cleanliness being next to godliness.

You can imagine how uneasy I was feeling. What I wanted was an ointment, a mercury salve, an embarrassingly intimate injection, a poultice, a patent bolus. A plunge? We agreed that I would visit the new Turkish baths recently opened in Bligh Street, just across the road from where I had drawn that series of rooms on the Frenchman’s commission. A Dr Brereton was the principal behind this new facility, and every bit as passionate an advocate as Dr Doyle. But for myself, I wanted some kind of medication as well, some kind of unguent. Some of the famous blue pills, or grey. Some calomel.

I had heard about patients having their illness sweated out of them, of course, but I had never been to a Turkish bath. I was not convinced that someone with my condition would be welcomed. From time to time I have made use of a public bath, especially if I had been out on the goldfields or travelling about the country, when a quick splash over my face from an icy mountain stream has had to suffice. Even though you have your own cubicle in a public bath, I was not comfortable with the general arrangements there; I felt uneasy about removing my clothing and knowing that another was in similar disarray in the cubicle next door. So you can imagine how much courage it took for me to sit wearing little more than a strategically placed face cloth in a large steamy room.

I declined the massage treatment that Dr Doyle recommended. I did not fancy an attendant’s great big hands all over me. When it came to this encounter, the man looked ridiculous with his hang-dog eyes and a walrus moustache draggled with perspiration. But I am obedient in some things, and reported back to Dr Doyle who continued to monitor my condition. My improvement, he said.

What he really wanted was to show me his sketches. He had them in a folio in the next room, if I had a minute. And out he went, without waiting to hear my reply. Indeed, now I think back on it, he hardly listened to me at any stage of our connection. Who was consulting whom?

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. What he painted was quite different from my own work. He liked to depict night scenes, and exotic plants; he completely covered his page but with large assured shapes and contours, not fussy little Flute-like specimens. They were bold and confident, like the man himself. What I could not understand was how and when he had come to paint these, for the majority were scenes from the far north of Australia, and I could not work out when he might have travelled there. His life in Australia was too crowded to have allowed for the necessary time that that would have taken.

He had a proposal to put to me. We should join forces and put out a collection of Australian drawings in a splendid production for the market in Britain. And local too, of course.

I understood what he was up to. He wanted to swing off my coat-tails, and that was flattering I suppose. Yet when I thought about it, I could see an advantage for myself. It meant a bigger volume without requiring a lot of work from me, as I could make use of some of the sketches from my recent tour but which were not of the goldfields. For example, of the squatter. And others from my notebooks, street scenes—though not scenes of streets. After a lot of booming humbug from one side, and non-committal mumbling on the other, we agreed to pool our material and see what the job lot might look like; and then I would approach the publishers I was acquainted with.

Which meant that while I was waiting to recover from my various sores and sorenesses, my headaches and my rashes, I set to with a will, working up my sketches as I used to and tidying up the detail. It renewed my interest, I have to say, in thinking about the different conditions of the three colonies I had lived in, as well as the differences between Australia at large and an increasingly distant England. And while I was still as interested as ever in landscapes, I was more and more interested in finding little vignettes from ordinary life that spoke of larger truths. Or finding homely touches to point at social pretensions whenever and wherever those were on display. But not with my father’s reformatory enthusiasm; rather, to amuse people back into some sort of good fellow feeling. Tolerance, I suppose. I allow that there has not been much evidence of that in Woolloomooloo.

What Dr Doyle drew was something to look at. He showed an uninhabited landscape, though of course the artist had to be there to see it; and to let the viewer see it. But he does not show how people are accustoming themselves to their new country, how they are living in it, how they are living with each other. As I prefer to do. I would say he has not yet absorbed a point of view that relates to this country. I hope I have. For that is what I have worked at. He takes advantage of the opportunity that presents itself—as do so many in their various paths of life. I should have seen that and taken alarm.

I handed over to him a dozen or so sketches for his consideration, and he modified his own selection in relation to them, and made an arrangement that pleased him. That did not concern me much. I made plates of them all, and I also devised a title page, for his approval. All seemed in good order; it only remained for him to deliver them to the publisher I had recommended. And then silence.

When I went round to his rooms the best part of a week later, I was astonished to find that he too had decamped. He had been declared insolvent yet again and had taken himself and his wife off to the Hunter Valley. I was all the more astonished when at last I found the assembled sketches. The title of the work had been amended to read ‘Dr Doyle’s Sketches in Australia …’—no mention of me. And when I looked through the sketches I found he had inserted his own initials over the top of mine in some instances, though in others such as the picture of the squatter, he had cut his initials into the stockyard post but had not seen my initials cunningly worked into the foreground, in among the lines indicating rough earth. The effrontery of this rogue! Once again, my own work had been taken over by another, and I had been erased. In fact it was even more flagrant than Flute’s piracy, of maybe highway robbery.

I was able to put a stop to this, but the damage to the original plates would require complete redrawing; and as I had not enough scenes to make a whole new book I was inclined to leave it, at least for the time being.

I just do not understand how people can behave like that. They are sure to know that I will see what they have done. Evidently that is of no concern to them.

I have given up on the Turkish baths too.

In my current despondency, I have begun to spend more and more time down in the area near my studio. Where I used to have my studio. The printer below, where I had displayed my work, took it upon himself to comment that my recent sketches are a little thicker than used to be the case, and offered me a new set of brushes. Impertinence. He presumes to teach me my own business. I have felt that remark particularly keenly because the printer then asked for someone else to prepare the plates, as my line was not fine enough for him. The polite justification was that that would leave me more time to prepare actual sketches, but I could see through the bluff. So I have removed myself from the studio; I don’t need it now, anyway. And I no longer have to compete with a piano or a street band.

As a de facto bachelor, it is cheap and convenient for me to resort to the oyster bars down at the bottom end of George Street, to buy an eel pie or the like from a street vendor, and to comfort myself in the hotels down along there. The name of the Nil Desperandum hotel rather takes my fancy. If the journey back to my room becomes too difficult, I may even roll under a bush somewhere out of the way. As others do; especially those who have exhausted all they once owned in going to the goldfields.

It is disagreeable to stay over long in those taverns and pot houses. The local customers are rough-looking men, with hard flat eyes, unblinking. It is inadvisable to join in with their conversation; they do not take kindly to strangers. That is no great hardship for me as I tend to prefer my own company anyway. It would have been even more inadvisable to encounter them in a dark alley, and I have taken particular care to ensure that I leave the saloon on my own.

No doubt a good many of these patrons still have scars on their ankles and backs, and their souls. And some of their old acquaintance, ne’er forgot, are doubtless still labouring in the iron gangs on the Argyle Cut. A way was broken through the Cut some little time ago, but while you can make your way through there it is not yet a finished road. Sydney still has its work gangs, even though transportation is over and done with. Convicts completed most of the improvements to the main semi-circular quay, and now they are working on the defensive fort in the middle of the harbour. But they are part of the history that Sydney would rather do without, and so they are kept out of the way as far as possible. Ladies are escorted at a distance from them, lest they hear something uncouth; gentlemen avert their eyes if they do not manage to avoid a chance encounter. You can understand the general desire here for respectability, to blot out that shameful past; and yet it is still with us.

I look, of course, but as discreetly as I can. They interest me—some of them may even have been in those hulks I saw as a young fellow in Portsmouth. They are grey, and drag their feet, and look deeply defeated. They have the sinister look of the Van Diemen’s lot on the Victorian goldfields. Their clothing is thoroughly nondescript, a kind of grubby yellow clay. Or perhaps the colour of decaying sails. Indeed, their prisoners’ garb may actually be made from old sails. Yet in spite of my curiosity, I do not choose to sketch them. It would be in poor taste, it would be taking advantage.

From what I can make out, some essential part of their individual character has become submerged. You do not see a full person, you see only a shell. It does not interest me to draw caricatures and grotesques, and how can you make a sensitive picture of a subject who is all too patently insensitive, dead to his feelings, or at best closed off against us?

A number of the convicts are housed on an island in the inner harbour, called Cockatoo Island. I suppose it must be half a mile or so from the surrounding shores; an island reduced almost entirely to a rocky outcrop, all but denuded of trees, so that the cockatoos are no longer attracted to it. Instead, gulls have found nesting sites on the sharp cliffs—one kind of raucousness replaced by another. The convict barracks is perched austerely on the top hump of the island, exposed to the full sun in summer and the blustering gusts of wind along the harbour most afternoons, especially in winter. Their quarters look harsh; forlorn and brutal. As I suppose was intended, poor wretches. Those who are confined to the island spend their days hacking a great trench into the rock, to form a dry dock. The popular story is that the guards throw offal and the like into the waters there, to encourage sharks, and to discourage absconders. No prisoner has ever escaped from it.

Until quite recently, that is. A young man, Fred Ward, has won his freedom for the time being at least, by swimming across the dangerous channel, assisted by his aboriginal wife (as she is thought to be; perhaps they were handfasted too) and that has embarrassed the authorities exceedingly. There was a great hue and cry, and a reward offered for any assistance leading to his apprehension, but his companion was too wily in the ways of the bush to leave any tracks, and so they escaped into the interior.

Just imagine how that must have been, slipping into the dark water at night, shrinking at every accidental splash, trying to swim away and yet all the time keeping an eye back on the guard house, and waiting at every moment for the first approach of a shark from the murky depths below. But they made it across the strong pull of the current, and on to the shore without rousing any dogs in the neighbourhood, and stole away.

The upshot is that Sir Frederick now has another bushranger on the loose. Young Ward has already made several bold attacks, and calls himself Captain Thunderbolt. Like the others up around the Turon and Bathurst and over to Forbes he has a good eye for horses. Indeed, as with so many of these young fellows, he had first been imprisoned for either stealing horses or receiving stolen horses; he was not able to explain how such a fine mob happened to be in his care. The reward offered is of less value than the horses he rides.

A man who has an appreciation of fine horses cannot be all bad.

I do not think Elizabeth would have come to help me.

I have time enough to myself now, to look about me and to draw what I see. Sometimes I don’t see very much at all, if the truth be told, when I go on what is aptly called a blinder. When I sit by myself with my black bottle. And sometimes, when I rejoin the world outside, I see situations, I suppose I might call them, and devise imagined figures. I draw pawnbrokers with a devil’s tail curling from behind their legs, I draw a scandalised parson who looks exactly like the older brother of street urchins—I have called this picture the Pure merino. I draw the bully boys of Sydney, something like my squatter only bigger and fatter and uglier, just stepped out of their club and with their equally ugly bulldog at their side. And I draw natives dressed in borrowed finery, the man in a cast-off military jacket and a collapsing top hat and walking barefooted down the street, with his clay pipe at a jaunty angle and his hands clasped behind his back, like a commandant reviewing his troops, only the baton tucked just so under his arm is a waddy. It is a fair imitation of the other such jacketed individuals. His not-so-fair lady wears a very pert little hat tilted down over her face and carries an elegant parasol, and wears the top half of a crinoline. All the underworks are on display, and so also her bare legs. They are almost à la mode; they are in their own way surprisingly fashionable. It is the fashion that is burlesqued. They are curiously dignified.

And in my darkest mood I have painted something that frightens me whenever I look at it again, the King of Terrors, Death himself with his evil dart and with a glass of hot toddy in his crown, stepping out along the street, the great lanky warden taking along with him in chains a harlot holding her own black bottle, and a frightened drunkard not quite able to keep up. Elizabeth’s hat, and mine. Those are my long teeth, too, rotting and horselike. The streets of Sydney are no longer for me. I have not met with the success here that I had hoped for. Sydney does not want to know me. I am for Melbourne, where once my work was admired.