Sketch 1
Wherein I am neither here nor there

PORT MISERY. One way or another, we all come to it eventually. We know it for what it is as soon as we see it; unhappily, there can be no mistaking it. It is not where we thought we were going, nor is it what we thought we were going to, yet that is where we arrive, even when it has another name.

My Port Misery has no official name at present. I cannot decide whether a place without a name is in fact a place, but in any case that anonymity adds insult to its unsatisfactory desolation. From the very beginning, the Surveyor-General and the Governor could not agree whether it is where it should be, let alone settle on what name it was to be known by. Indeed, they were not able to resolve whether it is or will be any kind of port at all. His Excellency would have preferred a port somewhere else, egad sir, anywhere but here, indeed the whole blithering settlement should be somewhere else entirely; a sentiment his more esteemed loyal citizens heartily endorsed, banging their canes on the floor, and their hands on the bench tops. Hardly what the commissioners had in mind, damn me. Hardly the place for a welcome mat. Sends the wrong signal, harrumph.

And that much is true. The newcomer is immediately discouraged. Abandon hope and so forth, as that old poet said, though it remains to be seen whether this will prove to be our entrance to an inferno or something else. It is certainly warm enough here already, in a preliminary sort of way.

On the other hand the commercial gentlemen, anxious to get on with the business of importing and exporting, demanded and continue to demand action, not consultation. What we have will do, in their estimation; near enough be good enough. Just let us get on with it, let us start building some wharves and docks. That hasn’t happened yet. So, in this state of irresolution—which would be a fine motto for the fledgling colony—when you arrive, there is nowhere to arrive. For the astonished newcomer, it is a case of here is nothing. No one to greet you. No one to point the way to wherever else it is we must go. Nowhere for temporary accommodation. Nothing to look at, nothing to see, just featureless scrub across a monotonous plain.

And yet, after three months at sea, three meaningless months of being tossed from side to side, from stem to stern, and being caught up in the burlesque of too many ankles elevated to where shoulders should be, too many bonnets involuntarily swabbing the deck, there might yet be something to say for this flat, forlorn, God-forsaken mosquito-riddled stinky swampland. It does not heave. It does not so much as undulate.

I may come to regret writing that. The horizon is all about us, extravagantly so.

There is much to say for a horizon. I do not mean for my sketches, though a horizon is useful in those too. No, I mean that for the last several weeks we did not see anything like a horizon. On our slow tedious voyage south there was more than a sufficiency of the long prospect, and very little else. Then later came wave after wave, waves endlessly repeating themselves though never quite the same, and what you attend to is the surge and hiss of the seas. Sometimes the ship seemed to be standing still and the waves sliding by, and you could not convince yourself otherwise.

When we began to plunge about along the Roaring Forties, though, we were pursued by huge seas—enormous long, high rolling breakers surging past the ship, crashing across the decks sometimes, sometimes catching the tips of the main spars, and leaving us in their wake. Great ridge lines they were, and when they lifted us up on their massive bulging crests, the wind whipped spray through our rigging and snapped at the few scudding sails straining before that terrific gale. Down in the deep troughs we were checked, our breath, one might say, taken away, and then, relentlessly, we were dragged upwards again, and so it went day after day, night after night.

In the gloom below decks we sat fixed to our benches or bunks, listening aghast to all those fiendish sounds, the groaning and grinding and juddering about us as the timbers creaked and cracked and worked, and the howling right above us, and we would be bracing for the next tremendous crash and shudder, and perhaps a cascade of seawater bursting down through the hatches. Fierce slashing winds snatched away the screams of the gulls slicing across our track; and with all the crack and crash of whatever was happening about and above us, a horizon was not our most pressing concern—though we could not have seen it anyway. It was too dangerous to be on deck. Our tilting tipsy world was crowded in upon us. There was no far view then.

When gradually all that chaos lessened, and our stomachs returned to us, and we were once again able to look across the daunting crests, all we could see by squinting through the spray and the flurries of rain was more of the same, more dark raging waters trying to tear themselves apart—us too as it appeared—and so a little further and a little further; and we seemed to pick up their speed, and then we were surging up the backs of the great grey waves, and swooping over the top and planing down their leading face. Our groaning ship was beginning to master that rude violence.

That is when we started to see more extensively. The tumbling storm clouds lifted, and with them the darkness of the days. We had sailed out through the curtains of rain and into the light again. Our recent travails had been a prolonged passage through a kind of penumbra. The curious effect of this was that, as something you might call a horizon became more visible, so also it began to recede from us; and in a like manner the land we knew we must be approaching appeared to be retreating from us. Perverse, not to beat around the bush—another phrase which I anticipate may evolve its own regional peculiarity here.

That will be something else to remember, that this other side of the topsy-turvy world may require from us some patience if we are to see it as it is. It might mean among other things an entirely new way of seeing, let alone new things to see.

I took notice of the seaman who first sighted land, Trumble it was. He came down from the cross-trees, homo sardonicus, and claimed his reward, a mug of grog, winked at some of the gentlemen and smirked. Throughout the voyage it had been mostly the younger sailors who were sent up to furl sails and watch for whatever needed to be watched; but on this day, when the mast was no longer swinging about so sickeningly, it was one of the old hands, an old timer with a seamed mahogany face and tar on his pigtail who chose to ascend to the upper reaches. He elbowed the young ’uns aside, scrambled up to the masthead and perched aloft with the seabirds. Land ho. Oho, land ho indeed. He knew what he was about. Thankee kindly mister, and good health to us all.

Hor hor.

And so to Port Misery, which I have not yet got to, at least in my writing. By the time our vessel had swung up into the gulf, the seas had flattened almost entirely, and we could see a distant smudge of flat coastline from each side of the deck. Only as we closed in on our destination did the captain bring us nearer to the coast on our lee side, but oh so slowly as to be a torture to us all. He was an old hand too, and it defied every rule in the book for him to come up to a lee shore, but evidently he did not think there would be much of a blow in these parts. For not only had the winds flattened out the seas, as I had been told would happen, so too in the end did our sails flatten, and we no more than crept along up the coast of the new settlement. It seemed absurdly cautious, for we had not wafted along such gentle swells since we left Portsmouth—ah, dear old Pompey—and for all the excitement of seeing land at last, after three months all at sea, the coastline looked very undistinguished. Its chief characteristic is persistence, you might say. It does not make a scene because there is so much of it, all of a piece.

Somewhere or other Captain Lipson came off the shore in his little boat, clambered aboard us and took over the navigating. He is the celebrated old pilot and harbour master for the colony. Later I discovered he is also the collector of customs. You would not have thought he had the capacity to discharge so many and varied responsibilities. Though it did appear there was not a lot for him to do for us.

His chief task was to find the hole in the bushes that was our entrance into the harbour, and at our crawling pace that did not require constant attention. When he wasn’t toying with his silky whiskers, he was fastidious in another way, walking about the quarterdeck with his hands clasped behind his back, staring down at the passengers who were now all staring at the monotonous line of mangroves. In the end, their initial excitement, and all the agitation in bustling about and getting their luggage together, was defeated. The ship steadily drifted on, and on, and on, or perhaps the coast was drifting past the ship, who could tell? The real mark of our progress was beneath us. The water here is as clear as lemonade, and we could all see the bottom of the sea quite distinctly, occasional schools of small grey fish, and clumps of weed, and reefs of shell grit as we went sliding along.

So that it was somewhat of a surprise when we stopped, just a gentle bump, then a long suspended moment of—what?—cessation. Of not going ahead. Of not going. No sailors running about, no sharp orders from the captain or the pilot. It seems we had come aground at the entrance to the harbour, and we were perched on the bar. Which, my father might have remarked pointedly, would not have been the first time for me.

There was brisk interest from the captain of course, and nonchalant replies from the pilot, and a ripple of excitement among those passengers who imagined themselves knowledgeable—those who had persisted in giving us the benefit of their expertise throughout the length of the voyage and provided their own counterpart to the tedious monotony we were facing at this end of it. Evidently this bumping was not a rare event. It was what happened more often than not. If you did not happen to catch the tide at its height and you had more than two fathoms draught, you were going to be nudged by subaqueous Australia. And who could tell with any accuracy what the tide was like, for in such a large shallow body of water as the gulf, winds—if there were any—might shift it about in entirely unpredictable ways, or rather, to an unpredictable extent. There was very little point in becoming indignant about it. The tide would turn, and the ship would float off. And that would be that. With so little breeze, the sails may as well stay set.

And indeed, just as the sun began to sink, and the small silver gulls began flying in larger and larger groups up the coast to wherever their own colony was, another all but invisible colony, lo and behold, all was as had been prophesied. Our ship began to ease her bottom, skewing first on one cheek and then the other, like an old woman on an unforgiving pew, and then, with her head up, sallying forth with regathered dignity. Once more we were under way, gliding deeper and deeper in among the mangroves until we came to a second bar, and that is where our pilot determined we would drop anchor. There would be no further progress that night. For the second time, we had arrived and not arrived. Once more the passengers felt compelled to scrutinise what should have been a thicket, but here was more a kind of cross-hatched barrier, so that I do not rightly know what to call it. In any case, it was not advisable to stay on deck to peer longingly at the shore, for the mosquitoes were truly ferocious, and the smell—I think I might justifiably say stink—of the mangrove mud most disagreeable.

Of course everyone was up and about at an early hour on the morrow, and so was the anchor, with the chains creaking and the windlass groaning, and we all knew our progress was about to be resumed. To our amazement, we did not venture very much further. The channel kept narrowing, and getting shallower; just a few small craft here and there were tethered by fraying ropes to tree stumps. The tide was on its way out, an inconvenience you’d have thought our pilot might have taken into account. The water hereabouts was of a dirty black colour, a liquefied version of the banks. We had got as far as the end of the mangroves. Now the main growth was a small scrubby tree, its bark hairy-looking, and over the tops we could see at a distance the silhouette of a range of hills, maybe very low mountains. It was difficult to come at a good understanding of their size. At least they provided a break from the low horizon which was all that had been promised from the sea.

After a longish while our slow drifting came to a halt for a third and last time, still at a distance from the land, such as it was. Our voyage had stopped, exhausted itself, just short of our destination. Boats were lowered over the side, and then some of the baggage and some of the passengers; and the sailors leaned on their oars and headed towards a distant muddy trampled patch down in front of the shrubbery—and they stopped midstream too! They had rowed and poled as far as the boats could go. For another hundred yards or so the men waded along, pushing the boats until they scraped again on the mud. Thus far and no further.

Now there was nothing for it but for the gentlemen to roll up their white trousers, and for the womenfolk to remove their shoes and stockings and hitch up their gowns, and all waded ashore as best they could, juggling their parcels and carpet bags and bonnets and baskets and what have you. Two or three of the gentlemen tried to carry their wives on their backs. Not everyone managed to keep their footing, let alone their dignity, and as the party slowly emerged ashore, some were more draggled than others, and all were at least a little spattered. This was altogether more dispiriting than the excited passengers of the previous day had imagined. If you will allow the pleasantry, they did not make quite the splash they had hoped for on their arrival.

Where we struggled ashore was near some rudimentary piling, a kind of palisade still being constructed down one length of the creek, up against a bank of sand dunes, with branches from the scruffy little trees shoved in behind, to stop the sand leaking through between the stakes, and so inhibiting nature’s mockery of that labour. The effort seemed pointless, for if this pitiful shoreline was to become the beginning of a wharf, no ship could make its way so far up the shallows. Not even the ship’s boats could manage that except on the high tide. A little way off was an iron shed, belonging to the Company, but we saw no activity there. All about lay what looked like a rubbish tip, bits of farming machinery and building materials, heaps and heaps of bricks all higgledy-piggledy, and crates and barrels with the ends broken out, and yet with the colony not yet three years old this jumble must have been only just imported. It all had to be new, but it looked like what had already been thrown away.

Two or three huts were in amongst the bushes and trees, assembled it seemed from nothing other than panels of bark. Somewhere out of sight was a constable’s hut, we learned. That was not helpful. And wherever it was, near it was a temporary campsite for the German immigrants we had heard were also coming to settle in the colony.

Our way—it could not be called a track or a path—was at the far end of these elementary and unimpressive public works, up through and across two lines of sandhills. The sand was bright and white, dazzling in the intense sunlight. Little bits of bark, charred twigs, and bleached shells were mixed in with it. As we toiled up the slopes, the sand shifted beneath our feet with every step, and sifted back into the footprints made by the person plodding ahead. With every step we ascended, the sun seemed to glare more brightly, the heat increased, and unquestionably the flies had discovered our presence. They descended on us and would not let us alone, no matter how we swished at them.

What a place this was turning out to be. We had made three lunges at arriving, we had stumbled ashore, we had struggled for the best part of half an hour up through the dunes and although we could reasonably assume we were now on land, we were still not on anything that could be called terra firma. After all our protracted voyaging, interesting as it had been in many things but tiresome on the whole, it seemed that this country intended to torment us, to keep on denying us an end to the one, and a beginning to the other. There was nobody about. The sailors who had bundled ashore some pieces of luggage, returned to the boat, and so to the ship; and that would be their routine for the next several weeks as there was no other way of discharging either passengers or cargo.

It was all a bit disappointing, really. An anticlimax.

On the far side of the dunes were at last a few signs that we had arrived somewhere. An open area of churned-up sand, mud and silt showed that there was activity aplenty from time to time, if not at present. Though there was in fact a wagon with a bullock team waiting, one of the bullocks very comfortably down on its knees, blinking in the sun and ruminating. Another dray was coming towards us too, with a load of futile pilings by the look of it. Neither driver was a distinguished conversationalist, and neither would accept passengers other than those who were to be employed by the Company. They were certainly not disposed to help in retrieving any of the boxes and trunks strewn along the shore. We had to do what we could for ourselves. Lump it or leave it, so to speak.

We had arrived, and yet still we had not arrived, for the town was a further seven or eight miles off.

Which meant that what one was to do next remained an open question. A hanging question, given our exasperation. Some of the passengers, particularly the women and children, resolved to return to the ship and keep their cabin there for the next week or so, while the luggage and cargo were unlading. The captain had made that option available, for a further consideration of course. It was going to take quite some time for everything to be hoisted out of the holds, and then for the sailors to get it all on to dry land as best they could. They were no better than mudlarks, out of their element, and they grumbled about it. Meanwhile, the menfolk were to make whatever arrangements they could for more settled accommodation in the town. Most of the passengers in steerage were only too glad to give their names to Captain Lipson and scramble into the boats, taking their chances in the fresh air of the new land; though to my mind there is not a lot to say one way or the other between the two kinds of fetor—the stale air of below decks after three months at sea or the smell of a mangrove swamp.

For those of us who did not keep good Company, it was at first easy enough to follow the tracks of the drays along a narrow way across the swamplands, but once we arrived at a slightly higher and dryer ground, trails began to weave in and out of the scrub, and criss-cross and go off in different directions, unhelpfully. From time to time the wheel marks disappeared in amongst spiky grasses and scented shrubbery, and we had to cast about to find our way again. I was not the only one astonished at how easily we became disoriented in that meagre country, even when we knew we had no more to do than to head in the general direction of the hills. By this time it was toward the middle of the day, all of us were hot and some were wet with perspiration. The sun, if you looked at it for too long, became a flat pulsing button in the midst of too much incandescence; the shadows cast by the spindly trees and bushes were sharp and precise. Our own shadows seemed to shrink beneath our feet, to get away from the awful intensity.

Our clothing was not light enough for this climate. Anyone with a free hand took off his coat, though you needed to keep that hand free to swish away the pestiferous flies, with a sprig of leaves if not a handkerchief. That action merely persuaded them to desist from your eyes a while and perch on the back of your waistcoat; then curiosity would get the better of them and they would circle around to make your acquaintance once again.

At one stage, in the midst of nowhere, we suddenly met a pair of sturdy girls dragging a barrel of water on a forked branch broken from a tree, like a primitive sledge. The ends of the branches left a deep gouge in the dusty soil and leaf litter. By their language and startling bold blue eyes and their plain dress we gathered they were from the German camp. With much nodding and pointing and smiling and gesturing they gave us to understand that we could buy water from them. They were hauling their load from a spring further along the track, lugging it all the way back to the port, where fresh water was scarce, and a purchaser could readily be found. The ships had no easy access to fresh water, for example. They earned a pittance, those girls, but they were assisting their families.

We were all quite warm enough to welcome the chance of refreshment, but the sharper ones among us reasoned that if the spring was further ahead it was on our way, and we would be able to supply ourselves. Others among us chose to applaud the girls for their resourcefulness and their practical effort; and besides, we did not know whether the spring was out of our way or not. They had arrived in this strange country with almost nothing, and they were making the best of what little was available to them. With faces as pretty as theirs, they should go far. I was more than content to hand over a couple of small coins to fill my canteen, and to win a frankish smile.

We had of course been keeping together as a group. On board our ship we had heard stories of what to expect, though already I was finding that this advance information was not entirely reliable. One thing that concerned us more than we cared to give voice to was whether we would be confronted by the natives. Whether, to say bluntly what was uppermost in our minds, the natives would be hostile. We had heard that passengers straggling along the way to the town sometimes got lost, and worse, sometimes got speared. It had happened, so we were told, to a ship’s captain less than a year ago. This detail had the effect of strengthening our resolve to stay together, not to walk too far ahead of the others, nor to trail too far behind. It also kept us subdued, not wanting to draw unwelcome attention to ourselves. And that in turn left us listening for any sounds that might betray the presence of the local inhabitants.

What we heard was the astonishing silence of the bush. Some drilling noise of insects, some cracking of twigs as the sun baked them dry, and that was the sum total. Nothing moved, apart from ourselves.

So that it was somewhat disconcerting to find, just as we began to see evidence of the township ahead of us, by a kind of dusty haze milling about above the canopy of the trees, that our way led us down into a shaded area, a glade along the bank of a diminutive creek, which was romantic enough, and right beside a camp of natives, which wasn’t. We were distinctly apprehensive, first because of the sudden riot of dogs that came running out towards us, and then at the intensity with which those people fixed their dark gaze upon us. None of them moved, and we were not well disposed to make our way between their little huts and campfires. Picking our path carefully past them, we were all too aware of the long spears leaning against the trunks of trees. The scene itself was of a serene beauty, but the people there were discomfiting, precisely because they made no movement. Their alarming stillness spoke strongly of possible activity. It was like an undeclared confrontation. You were made to feel you had invaded a space that was not yours. They provoked an uneasiness which, on reflection, encapsulated in little a much more complicated and disturbing thought.

We did not feel we should scrutinise them too obviously, but to me they seemed so dark as to be somehow imprecise shadows in the shade. To my tactfully evasive eye they did not take distinct shape. They were little more than a presence, not least because we could not tell if they were actually looking at us or not, their eyes were so deep sunken. And their total silence most uncomfortable. The whole scene there in the shade of the trees was utterly unexpected, so very different from the blazing sunlight on the white sandhills, the brassy sun throbbing in the pale blue sky. It was as though a shade had come down between us and them; we did not know them and did not know how to know them. We certainly could not read their intentions towards us; if any. It is proving a land of extraordinary contrasts, contrasts as much in the mind as to the eye. I am beginning to think this country may have a sly sense of humour.

It appeared that we had wandered on to a lesser track than the one we should have been following, for as we neared the creek, or rather the chain of stale ponds that marked its channel, we could see a much more heavily used track just a little further along, where something of a crossing had been made for drays and other traffic. Most of the extensive plain we had been crossing from the harbour had been remarkably level, with just a gentle ascent as we neared the worn creek bed. Now we met with more substantial trees, some of them quite massive, and bulrushes and a kind of baked scurf on the edges of the ponds the consistency and colour of dried cowpats, and at last some birds calling.

Bits of bark and rushes and dead shrubbery up in the lower forks of the trees suggested that at times the creek comes down in quite a flood. On the far side the land rose quite abruptly—and there was our true destination, a town emerging from dusty roads and paths, and movement at last, if only of plodding bullocks, and buildings of varying degrees of temporariness and permanency, tents and bark huts and a few brick buildings, both complete and incomplete. At the far end of our way we could see that the hills were indeed substantial enough, though you would not call them a mountain range I think. They were somewhere in between the two; neither designation seemed quite to fit.

A large rough building attracted our attention, not much more than a kind of shed, made of slabs of bark held together by saplings across the sheets. Above the main entrance was what had once been a green bough, back in old England a sign of welcome and refreshment, but now unhappily more indicative of desiccation and death. Nevertheless, we honoured the intention, and went into the surprisingly cool cavern for a glass of whatever was thirst-quenching, and to wait for our luggage to catch up with us when it would. And there I finished a sketch of the camp we had just passed, and wrote up these wandering first impressions.