The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  Mr Gilles is not the sort of person you would invite if you were looking to enliven an occasion such as this. He has not a lot of conversation; he would not put himself out to make the effort. Short and rotund, the very opposite of Mr Eyre, he stands where he is with his hands in his pockets, his chin tucked into his cravat, blinking his watery little eyes and waiting impassively for others to make the conversation. He does not move very much at all. If he answers it is always in a very soft, quiet voice. With his absurdly high collar, he looks exactly like a coddled egg nestling down and being kept warm in its own cosy. You might wonder whether anything is happening inside that bland exterior, though it would be a sad mistake to do so, as several in this town can testify.

  He is as strong in his religious belief as is the Governor. Possibly, if he thought it might be a competition, stronger. Yet I gather he has quite another reputation altogether, which the Governor chooses not to be aware of. I say nothing of his notorious temper. I wished I had about me my little sketch pad, but of course it would have been considered most improper for me to resort to my pencil in such company. And of course it may well have provoked Mr Gilles for one to show his famous irritability, so that it was no doubt just as well for once to be without the tools of my trade. Instead, I kept myself strategically close to the waiters, and withdrew only when I felt brave enough to do so, and before I had started to betray my newly acquired courage.

  The settlement, or the township at its centre, is called Adelaide, after the late king’s German wife. Her name ought properly to be pronounced in the German fashion, but already one hears it being spoken of as Addle-layed, especially by those who did not come out to this new country in the more comfortable circumstances. Changes are taking place here, and it is amazing to observe the rapidity with which it is becoming a place of substance, and to watch the developing behaviour of the common people. Undoubtedly something has indeed already begun. I have mentioned that those who are employed as carpenters or masons or servants are all too liable to throw down their implements at a moment’s notice, and take off to the hinterland, or perhaps to one of the other colonies. They have not crossed the world to work for their betters—they had enough of that back home in England. Their dream is to be their own master. They are as free as any man, they claim, to do as they wish; sometimes that comes out as asserting they are as good as any man, and already you see that working men no longer raise their hat to anybody as they make their way down the street or along the roads out in the countryside. They are not truculent; they just insist on their independence, including independence of inconvenient customs and manners.

  The Adelaide plains are very pleasant, but in summer the hot winds coming down across them from the interior dry everything out, and the only benefit is that the washing does not hang on the line for long. And yet, in the bright sunlight, on all that level ground, some men seem to believe they cast a longer shadow than others. I have been observing these shadows—it is a curious fact, the figures they throw have no necks. The heads are shaped like large eggs. The shadows of the trees are very sharp and precise, but the trees do not in fact afford much shade.

  As for what the settlers themselves have achieved, there is such accomplishment in settlement as to be wholly surprising. At the same time, there is an extravagance of making do, of temporary accommodations to circumstance. There is for example no prison, though Governor Gawler is as busily rectifying that lack as he is building his own elegant house. When Governor Hindmarsh held office, prisoners—for alas, there were such offenders—were held in irons aboard the Buffalo. Amazing to think that in this colony of free settlers we had in effect our own prison hulk! But when he was recalled, he took his ship and his Marines with him, leaving the prisoners behind and no one to guard them, and there was no better choice than to put them into a large tent. Though for the first several nights they were chained to convenient tree trunks and logs.

  My friends told me a ludicrous story about this. One prisoner, a bushranger who had come across from the eastern colonies, was chained up al fresco, with broken branches littered about as is usual with the local trees. See them there branches, said he, ’tain’t safe. That could do a man some mischief. They calls these here trees widdermakers. I s’pose I’ll be orlright though, says he, I bean’t married yet; nor won’t be for some time I dare say. By which reflection it seems that even here grey-cloaked philosophy is spreading its threadworn mantle.

  In this makeshift, make-do world, for all the prominent straight lines of regulation, nothing yet has become fixed. And, one might add, little has been got right. The proclamation in the wrong place, or the settlement evolving at a distance from it, was a foretaste of other such dislocations, and to say the truth, other disappointments. There is no satisfactory supply of water—water carriers fetch supplies from the tepid ponds that constitute the Torrens. Yet in truth there is no alternative site for the settlement. The large river down which Captain Sturt had floated has no ready access to or from the sea, given the substantial sand bar across its mouth. Ideally the big river should have been nearer to the Tiers; or that range of hills should have been nearer to the river, but either way this is not quite the promised land puffed up by the notices enticing investment and emigration. Whichever way I look, I see the most endearing absurdities, the most engaging nonsense. Yet one might think of all those little inconvenient details as one way by which to soften the overdetermined lines of perspective.

  At the same time, Addle-layed has its own peculiar charms: the small black-and-white magpies shrilling, the pink-and-grey parrots with their chipping call, the insane hooting of the giant kingfishers. The extraordinary sunsets, a mixture of pink and salmon and apricot and mauve. And at night, the startling intensity of the countryside lit by a huge full moon, and at a distance perhaps the campfires of the native peoples flickering through the bushes, their strange chanting and clapping and dancing. I believe I will find it in me to accept this place as my home.

  Sketch 4

  In which my fire burns low

  I HAVE BEEN TAKING every opportunity to ride into the countryside on my pony, following the new roads up through the range of hills to the north and likewise through a range of hills down towards the south. As it is not so comfortable to travel about in the rainy season, I make my forays in the warmer months, with a sandwich in my saddlebag for day excursions as well as my sketch pad; or with what is called a swag, a rolled up blanket and a sheet of canvas, and my gun of course for chance provisions so that I can camp out whenever and wherever night overtakes me.

  I have my dogs for company, Darkie, my big black dog, and Gyp, a tawny lurcher, bounding and dim-witted as lurchers tend to be, and an inveterate scavenger. And I have a consoling fire in the evenings, and the great vault of blazing stars above, and the beauty of the moon to distract me from my solitariness. In the day, the vast radiant skies, and the splendour of sunrise and sunset. In the summer months the land becomes very dry, indeed one might say the plains bake hard, and even the hills look drab. In the full heat of the day the one sign of life, the little brown grasshoppers, flicking up from clumps of dried grass as you pass by. Sometimes swirling columns of dust start up in the midst of all that stillness and then die away too, and all lies tranced under the sun again.

  Crossing the plains I see from time to time sheep tracks and cattle tracks and kangaroo pads and cart trails wandering through the scrub, wavering and meeting and separating from each other and going all over the place, literally. They do not go anywhere. There is as yet no destination for them; they make no narrative, or only the very rudiments of one.

  This is not a colourful time of the year. It is a bleached time. Even the bright blue of the skies drains to a parchment white. But the very brilliance of the light creates something like an aura in the gullies and gorges, the heat ricocheting off the broken rock faces and the beds of stones in the dried-up water courses. It is in trying conditions like these that my thoughts have been drifting back to the great soft greenness
of the South Downs, behind old Portsmouth, or taking my guns and dog with me out into the fields towards a charming and remote old inn called The World’s End. The original publican there evidently had not heard of South Australia at the time.

  Staring into the glowing red embers of my campfire, my thoughts have been bending towards Portsmouth for other reasons too. My sister died about a year after I arrived here, though the news took a painfully long time to reach me. And then my mother also passed away, six months later, and that distressing news was also a long time in reaching me, too long. But most painfully astonishing of all, my father remarried in just a matter of weeks after that loss, and has in very short order begotten another child. The indecent haste of all this, even though I only found out about these matters well after each event, has been much of a shock to me; even, I confess, to a Hamlet-like bitterness.

  Somehow the delay in learning of these things, the slow dragging-out of those sad matters contrasted with my father’s grubby impatience, makes his activity seem all the more unnatural. Or perhaps all too coarsely natural. Either way, distasteful. I have written a polite note of congratulation, and I doubt that its cool formality will surprise him. He will not miss that; but then he will have been too full of congratulating himself to need a further contribution from me. Everything is now changed for me back there. It makes my eyes hot to think of what can no longer be for me my family home. I have no desire to return to any of it.

  This is not what I have understood as detachment, not at all.

  And poking some more pieces of wood into the fire, I am thinking of the pathos of last Christmas here in the colony. We are displaced Englishmen at this furthest reach of the world. Except of course for the Germans who first settled further up the Torrens valley at a neat little settlement they have called Klemzig, in memory of their own Prussian homeland, building and whitewashing their earthen cottages and planting vines around them, and crops and vegetables and fruit trees in the cleared fields behind their hamlet—a different kind of hamlet this time.

  They no doubt have made a point of maintaining their own customs in their trim little thatched dwellings, along with their own religious observances. They seem rather more tenacious of their own old ways than we are, or less concerned with how inappropriate are customs from the other side of the world. They are a close-knit community. We are all to some degree strangers to each other here, acquaintances rather than kith and kin. We lack the friends and neighbours of long standing to greet at Yuletide, we do not gather around a festive board surrounded by those nearest and dearest to us. Indeed, Christmas here is so distant from our old English customs as to make a mockery of its celebration, or possibly to make the celebration a mockery of it. No drawing close to the cheerful blazing log here (though the reflection prompts me to kick my own glowing branch from a dead gum tree), no games and riddles. Our whole invention has been of ways to escape the heat, which mostly means resorting to bottles of claret cooling in a washing tub appropriated for the day. Instead of a roast suckling pig, we share a haunch of kangaroo. There are as far as I know, no traditional old songs celebrating the Christmas kangaroo; nor are there likely to be, I will wager. The Christmas season here is just too much of an oddity to acquire any of those mellow associations to which, in the older hemisphere, we attach ourselves.

  I have also been thinking how odd it is, my thoughts wavering around like the slow thin plume of smoke from my fire, more a shimmer than a colour, that so many of our people here have short, indeed monosyllabic surnames. Briggs, for example. Duff. Eyre. Gepp. Gosse. Hailes. Hill. Hutt. Mann. Pitt. Sturt. Wright. Not to mention all the customary Browns, Smiths, Clarks and Jones. Where are the Fazackerlys and Featherstonehaughs, the Fotheringills and Hickinbothams, the Polkinghornes and Throckmortons? We are to be a people of blunted nomenclature it seems, and we are perhaps acquiring unawares a defining character of our own, even while we yearn for the impossible, to continue the character we left behind us. We are taken up with nostalgia when we might be better served by attending to what is in fact before us. We name places quite inappropriately after the familiar towns and villages of our past; though I have to admit those offer a better resonance than the baldly functional, like Mount Lofty, or Mount Distance, or Prospect, or the highly ludicrous Dry Creek.

  Port Lincoln honours where Captain Flinders had come from; there is no point of actual resemblance that I know of, and it marks as far away in the world as he had come from his birthplace. The name marks his separation from his home. So in another way does Burnside, hardly a romantic construction by the resident Scot. It is a combination of guarded sentiment and pragmatism, for that name is in fact a kind of signpost. Though of course it is nothing of the sort, as it could be claimed of pretty much anywhere. The Greenhill road is a misnomer, or was when I saw it. These names all tend to tell us what we don’t have, rather than what we can celebrate.

  And contrariwise, still thinking about the naming of things, in what was promoted as a land of opportunity there is much that is inopportune. The naming of Adelaide was in honour of the queen, as it was then thought. But King William having died untimely, and before the colony had been officially proclaimed, a new queen came to the throne, and you might have thought the appropriate change could have been made. Alas, not so: the as then non-existent town was already being carved up and sold off from a sheet of paper, long before anybody actually sailed to settle it, and all those privileged with both the information and the money had a title with a place name already on it.

  In any case, at her ascendancy the young queen shifted her own name from Alexandrina to Victoria. Captain Strutt as I like to think him (contributing my own mite towards the renovation of names) unluckily named the large lake at the end of his discovered river after her previous name. Again, you might think that could have been tidied up too. The large swamp which has recently been found adjacent to it has been named Lake Albert, which is appropriately companionable though not in the least flattering. Time will reveal whether there is an accidental aptness.

  And for all these changes and uncertainties, the land itself is utterly oblivious to it all, absolutely indifferent to such quaint enthusiasms, and hugely unchanging.

  While the naming of villages about Adelaide seemingly announces expanding settlement, the little German settlement has already been largely abandoned. Those people have decamped, to form a new village, another new village when the previous one was not much more than four years old. That hardly meets the sentimental requirements of Goldsmith’s poem, yet there is our history in the making, the beginning of associations, the question of departures. If the first beginning is abandoned so swiftly to make way for another, does that not in effect cancel out the very notion of a beginning? Whatever was begun has been stopped short in its tracks. It seems to me that with all these commencements and recommencements we see a repetition of my own ridiculous sequence of deferred arrivals. And the profound question of where we are keeps on being disrupted by the more fractious, are we there yet?

  In such a place, we grow sensitive to signs that this settlement may not succeed. On the one hand, all the tedium that the long hot season and the broad baking plains breeds sets afoot nickering doubts and anxieties about our circumstances, and makes us feel all the more poignantly our distance from our original homeland. On the other, we have been finding it an irritation to be so dependent on the older colonies to supply us with our essential foodstuffs, with grain and livestock, though little by little we start to stand on our own feet. In the last year or two those colonies have struggled through bad seasons of their own, and the cost to us has been prodigious. At the same time the rate of immigration here has been dropping, and with fewer land sales there has been a consequent decline in our incoming economy.

  Governor Gawler tried to sustain the people with a flurry of public building programs. He put men to work, constructing not just his brave new residence, and a disconcertingly capacious new prison and a police barracks and a hospital—what must he be an
ticipating?—but substantial new government offices, wharves and main roads leading out of town, to encourage those others without either the means or the will to shift for themselves, and still skulking about the township, to head into the interior; and there are new bridges too, to make it easier for them to start out. The trouble is that they have already heard what it is like further out, and the reports are not encouraging.

  To pay for all this and for the imported provender, he presented bills to the Colonial Office in London; and disaster! His drafts were dishonoured, the government could not pay any of its bills to the local community and Governor Gawler was recalled, which presumably constitutes a disgrace. The colony was now in fact officially bankrupt, and of course there was and still is a rush of unpayable claims, pointless litigation, forced sales, absconding tenants, and indeed some few shameful instances of absconding husbands.

  Nobody knew which way to turn. So much for the triumph of planned settlement.

  In short order we have another governor, and yet another commencement. Indeed, this settlement is not very different in its operations from some sort of thirty-day clock. It keeps on having to be wound up. The new Governor is Captain Grey, ominously named. He had visited here previously, armed with a new young wife, and like the surging tide he has come again—though our tides are actually only little tiddlers. Mrs Grey appears to be every bit as ambitious as he is, but does not find sufficient competition here in Adelaide to require any exertion on her part to meet the challenge. My good friend Nathaniel Hailes, one of the lower lights of the colony but a light nevertheless, an auctioneer and man about town and one with a special fondness for a poetical turn of phrase, reports that when he was introduced to her at a reception hosted by Governor Gawler, at the time the Greys first visited Adelaide, her laughter had the precise sharp tinkle of icicles. Not, he hastened to add, on account of the introduction; though he is such a short-legged bouncing little man that she may well have found the look of him frostily amusing. His taste in poetry must run towards Byron. Mrs Grey does not appear prepared to like Adelaide. She mistakes fastidiousness for elegance, and trusts to condescension to protect her self-esteem. I doubt that O.G. will have to endure another vice-regal ball.