The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  Wakefield Press

  Adrian Mitchell was born in Adelaide, and for many years taught and published in Australian literature, at the University of Adelaide and then at the University of Sydney, where he remains an Honorary Research Associate. His interest now is in retrieving the stories of those who have been passed over or forgotten, and in finding new ways of re-presenting them, beginning with a book of memoirs about Adelaide, Drawing the Crow (2006); Dampier’s Monkey: A reading of the South Seas narratives of William Dampier (2010); Plein Airs and Graces: The life and times of George Collingridge, short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fictional prose (2013); and From Corner to Corner: The line of Henry Colless (2015), all with Wakefield Press.

  Wakefield Press

  16 Rose Street

  Mile End

  South Australia 5031

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 2015

  This edition published 2015

  Copyright © Adrian Mitchell 2015

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Cover design by Stacey Zass, Page 12

  Edited by Penelope Curtin

  Ebook conversion by Clinton Ellicott, Wakefield Press

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Mitchell, Adrian, 1941– , author.

  Title: The profilist: The notebooks of Ethan Dibble / Adrian Mitchell.

  ISBN: 978 1 74305 165 8 (ebook: epub).

  Subjects:

  Gill, Samuel Thomas, 1818–1880.

  Biographical fiction, Australian.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Publication of this book was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council,

  its arts funding and advisory body.

  Contents

  Sketch 1 Wherein I am neither here nor there

  Sketch 2 In which I make a scene

  Sketch 3 In which I start on my own account

  Sketch 4 In which my fire burns low

  Sketch 5 In which I begin to show my colours

  Sketch 6 In which I venture into the wilderness

  Sketch 7 In which I turn to stone

  Sketch 8 Wherein the penny drops

  Sketch 9 In which all that glitters is not gold

  Sketch 10 In which I eat humble pie

  Sketch 11 In which I am out on the town

  Sketch 12 In which home truths are revealed

  Sketch 13 In which everything is churned up

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

  Sketch 15 In which I revise my views

  Sketch 16 In which I stumble upon a home truth

  Sketch 17 The finishing touches

  Postscript

  Afternote

  List of illustrations

  For Kirsty

  An admission or two

  In what follows I have taken up the paintings and sketches of Samuel Thomas Gill as my chief source; and for the most part these are all real events, though with a bit of a helpful gloss here and there. That is, this book is a kind of biography, an attempt to bring Gill to life, but indefensibly, without the usual kinds of evidence biographers draw on. In Gill’s case, the pictures are pretty much all we have to go on.

  Gill was one of those who happened to be in the right places at the right times—and what times they were—and he recorded them in all their turbulent vitality. He was there for the beginning of South Australia (1839–51), the Victorian gold rushes (1852–55), and again in Victoria in 1864–80 for the making of marvellous Melbourne; and he lived a while in Sydney, 1856–64, when it was trying to become respectable. He didn’t miss much of the truly bizarre behaviour which is the legacy our forefathers left to us. In turning his pictures into words I have given my idea of the kind of evolving whimsical reflections I think he might have had on life in the colonies. His way of thinking, as I see it. And there has been very little need to invent anything. Our history is colourful enough.

  For the most part, people are given their right names here. But as we can’t know for sure all that Gill did and saw, I have given my colonial observer another name. As it happens, there was a Mrs Gill who played the piano for Lola Montez. Whether she was Gill’s de facto wife, who can say? It is just too good a chance coincidence to ignore, but not verifiable. There are a few other changes too. George French Angas’s inexcusable light-fingered appropriation of others’ works of art is evident for anyone to see, but not the exact nature of his attachment to the Government House set. I have reduced the size of the Horrocks party, and reassigned roles, and called the homicidal camel something more telling.

  Bit by bit I have shifted from the sand dunes of our first grounding. Once started, I found I needed other small adjustments, which will offend the purists no doubt, but those are mere details. And why let details get in the way of a good story? The gist of Gill’s record is here.

  I have been helped along the way. Right at the start by Michael Wilding, though he might not recognise this outcome from those early conversations about colonial Melbourne. My old friends Peter and Janet Whitham of Clare were hospitable again, and knew about some Gill paintings in Burra; in turn they introduced me to Joey Duncan of Penwortham, who gave us an informative tour of Horrocks’s cottage, led us to his elongated north–south grave—the orientation for explorers—and pointed me to Anne Horrocks’s diary in the Mortlock collection in the State Library of South Australia.

  My particular thanks once again to Michael Bollen at Wakefield Press, for his patience as ever. And to Penelope Curtin, whose gimlet eye misses nothing. Such flaws in style and concept as remain are there, like the knots on the underside of a Persian carpet, to demonstrate human insufficiency. Or perhaps to conceal obstinacy.

  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 mott
o 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.