Imagine this picture: A flock of brilliant, multicoloured butterflies hovers across the whole image. They diminish in size from left to right, as they recede into the distance, flying away from the viewer. They don’t have the bodies of insects—they are all beautiful women with elaborate hairstyles, graceful arms and tiny feet. Beneath them lies the sea on which there is a sailing ship, and a small rowboat. The sun in the sky seems to be rising. In the left bottom corner of the frame is a small sketch of a cliff on the top of which are some pale biscuit-coloured Georgian buildings in England. Everything is pale, etiolated, except for the vivid butterflies. Between the buildings and the edge of the cliff, stand four tiny women wearing long blue dresses, white caps, and aprons. They seem agitated, and two are wielding brooms. There are two speech bubbles. What are they saying? I need a magnifying glass to read this. ‘I’d be a butterfly’ and ‘Varmints’. Then in the opposite corner, where the ship is coming in, stands a group of little men in grey, one with a wooden leg.
In the distance can be seen castellations, and soldiers with guns. On a rock in the foreground, is a fellow with a tall butterfly net, reaching up and out. In his speech bubble it says: ‘I spies mine.’ In the very far right of the foreground stands a plump priest in his white surplice and dark stole. ‘I sees a prime ’un,’ says one of the men, and adds: ‘Get ready clargyman.’ And etched into the dusty brown hill behind the group are the words: ‘Van Diemen’s Land.’
So what is going on?
This lithograph is a satirical (yet strangely poignant and lyrical) record of the arrival in Van Diemen’s Land in 1832 of the Princess Royal, the first ship to bring non-convict women from England to be the wives and servants of the men in the colony.
It takes a very close look and a magnifying glass to release the narrative of the journey the butterfly women are making from a hostile England to a rapacious Van Diemen’s Land. It is not a joyful picture; it is a depiction of a chapter in a tragedy. The butterflies seem to be unwanted in England, but they are welcomed in Van Diemen’s Land, for they are going to be, on the one hand, the wives and mothers of the colony, and on the other the servants, and also ladies of the night. In their garish finery, as they flutter across the ocean, they might be dancing at a glittering ball, or decorating the lounges of a bordello. They don’t look much like servants, wives or mothers. In fact they are a pretty plain statement of the butterfly as signifier of the labia and vagina. It also means the soul, and resurrection. But in the case of the Fair Game girls, I think the labia will do.
Why did Van Diemen’s Land need a boatload of non-convict women in 1832? Well here is a very brief account of how things got to where they got.
The date that is enshrined in historical narrative as the date of the ‘discovery’ of the island by Europeans is 1642. As a child, I liked to collect accounts of other events that happened in 1642. They’re not relevant to this story, but I just want to note that 1642 was also the year of the beginning of the English Civil War. A Dutchman, Abel Janzoon Tasman, sent by Antony Van Diemen, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, was exploring southern seas when he found not only Van Diemen’s Land but also New Zealand, Tonga and Fiji. It was in 1803 that the British, extending their prison colony of New South Wales, set up another outpost in Van Diemen’s Land. This place was about as far from England as you could get, and it was an island, which is useful for a prison colony. There were soldiers, there were convicts, there were gaolers—a few doctors and clergymen—and in due course there were ‘free’ people who fled social and economic conditions in England with hope of a new and better life. It took about five months of dangerous sea journey to get there, and, in spite of the generally pleasant climate and the fresh water and the possibility of growing food, it was far from being paradise. By 1855 the convict ships had stopped arriving, and the island changed its name to ‘Tasmania’ in the hope of making a new start, putting its horrible history behind it. With the disappearance of the convict ships went the loss of government monies on which the people of Tasmania had come to rely. By 1874 when Anthony Trollope visited Tasmania, it was, he wrote in his book Australia and New Zealand, like Sleepy Hollow, too lazy to rise out of a lethargy brought about by the disappearance of public subsidy. Truganini, a woman of the Nuenonne group, born on Bruny Island off Tasmania in about 1812, died in 1876. At that time, her death was written about as marking the end of the first peoples of Tasmania. This was not the case, since there are untold numbers of living descendants of unions between the original peoples and the invaders. The two dark narratives of Tasmanian history are those of the lives of the convict slaves, and the genocide of the indigenous peoples.
By 1836 (four years after the voyage of the Princess Royal) the total population of the colony of Van Diemen’s Land was 43,300. The numbers are approximate. Of these 43,000, 19,000 were convicts and 24,000 were not. 17,000 of the convicts were men, and 2,000 of the convicts were women. 14,000 of the free people were men, including 1,000 soldiers, and 10,000 were women. So look, there were in total 31,000 men and 12,000 women. Gosh. The two hundred women on the Princess Royal in 1832 were a mere drop in the ocean. I take the figures from A Short History of Tasmania by Lloyd Robson, published in 1985.
The butterflies in the watercolours of Butterflies of Tasmania have a palette of orange, brown, umber, ochre, green and black. Their habitat dictates that they won’t come flashing out in the sunlight dressed in shining tropical colour. The patterns too are humble and too subtle. However the girls in the lithograph of Alfred Ducote are flying with jewelled fairyland wings of dazzling delicacy. A soaring wealth of fantasy scarlet, Tuscan red, pink, blue, green, yellow. Sapphire, emerald, ruby, garnet, topaz, silver, gold. And pearl. Cherry pink, apple green, poppy red. They tumble and soar and float in their joyful passage across the skies, above the wash of pale blue ocean. On their fancy Georgian hairdos they wear tiny delicate coronets, these princesses. So much energy, so much joy, so much hope. Gorgeous yet fragile endangered creatures freely sailing from one awful place to another, from the shock of the Industrial Revolution to the farthest prison colony across the seas. The year after their journey, England stopped sanctioning formal slavery—but this didn’t put an end to effective slavery in Van Diemen’s Land. Only by the inhumane use of convicts as slaves was it possible for the colony to fashion its handsome stone buildings, to put down its beautiful road between the north and south of the island. Coach houses and bridges and elegant churches and pretty stone houses remain today to tell part of the terrible saga of the British entitlement to colonise, to create a nightmare that will never completely go away.
