The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  Mr Coppin was quite distraught. If he behaved a little like the leading player in a sentimental tragedy, that is both understandable and forgivable. The pity of it was that just prior to this catastrophic dénouement, he and his good lady had announced their retirement from the stage, though none of us doubted but that Billy Barlow would make an occasional appearance, ‘by special invitation’.

  He had been turning his attention instead to his hostelry; and entering into public life. Now, without a hostess, he has been throwing open his doors to public breakfasts and dinners, and when the dining room is not being used that way his premises are as usual available for auctions. He has started to import delicacies from the other colonies. He brought the first shipment of ice here and distributed it from his hotel; and now he is importing live deer and turtles so that we may dine very well in South Australia, providing of course that we dine at the Auction Mart Tavern. Coppin keeps a very superior table, and anyone may partake. Though curiously it is almost entirely monopolised by the wealthy and important. The company of turtles would be just as lively.

  For Coppin, I am afraid, has been chasing after the right sort of connections, and working hard at promoting his public presence. He seems to know everyone, and especially those who matter. Those who have money and those who have influence. He would do well to remember that he started out playing the fiddle in a playhouse pit.

  He began this kind of pursuit, this professional geniality I mean, not his finger-stopping exercises, soon after gaining his licence. The affair of most moment at about the time of his wife’s passing away had been the government’s proposal to impose a royalty tax upon all that mineral wealth being dug out of the copper mines. The budding magnates of the colony were most displeased. Their objection was very much like that of the Americans years ago; they were being required to pay a tax and yet they had no voice in government, no say in what those taxes were to be put towards. Astonishingly, or perhaps not, those who had no vested interest in the matter showed as much interest in it as the speculators. They too seemed to look upon it as a kind of personal grievance.

  Coppin threw himself headlong into the local agitation, and organised a grand protest breakfast at which impassioned speeches were made and motions were put and carried with cheers and table thumping. A petition was drawn up to be sent to Her Majesty the Queen, with much facetious emphasis on the word ‘royalty’, as well as loyalty, and then everyone fell upon Mr Coppin’s refreshments. There was excitement out in the street too, where a jostling throng had been assembling all through the day, stirring themselves up about matters they understood no better than I. They had heard that Britain proposed to take money out of the colony, and that was outrage enough for them. In the evening, those whose focus had not been too intent upon the kegs of ale he had provided bent their unsteady gaze upon Coppin’s splendid illuminations. He had really done himself and the settlement proud. Although his was just one among the many signatures, his name and his ale was on everyone’s lips.

  The upshot was that the citizens of South Australia had their way once more. They had already seen off one governor, and now another. They come and they go, like leaves on the tree. Not a local tree, evidently. I do not understand why Captain Strutt should so seek to emulate them. Governor Robe was recalled, disrobed you might say, departing this side of the world just before Mrs Coppin made her untimely exit from it. With the Adelaide Mining Company refusing to pay the odious tax, and successfully challenging in the Supreme Court for the removal of the tax, and as it turned out for the removal of the apparent instigator, the new Governor has showed the better part of valour by supporting that decision. He has, however, not been so obliging about representative government. The citizenry at large were not much disturbed by that, as they imagined themselves having achieved a significant reform, but the Nobs and Snobs alike knew different. And some of those have very powerful connections back in London.

  You do not have to be a philosopher to work out that Coppin’s involvement was about more than the principle at stake. He has shares in several copper mining ventures. Among his important dining companions are magnates who are directors of more than one of the mining companies, John Morphett, for example, son-in-law of the old colonist himself, James Hurtle Fisher, and like Fisher much interested in racing and breeding horses. As now Coppin is. But then, all Adelaide is mad about horses. I follow the horses myself.

  While Coppin has been pursuing his own career, he has not entirely forsaken his old friends and acquaintances. He and his good lady had encouraged me after my disappointment to find a way of making my paintings more readily available to the public at large. He has made his Tavern available to me to display my work, and recommended that I should try selling them by raffle. A raffle, dear boy, says he, is nothing other than an auction in slow motion. He talks up my work to his new important acquaintances, and makes an ostentatious point of always buying a ticket himself.

  Poor Mrs Coppin, who had taken an interest in hearing of my earlier career, suggested that I should try my hand once more at portraits, not in colour but in black and white. Coppin heartily endorsed this, and that is how I have come to draw directly on to stone some visages of eminent public people, with an eye to hinting at certain distinctive little vagaries in their character. Coppin not only lent his premises to display the first set of these, but was so obliging as to lend his own visage to the occasion. He is one of my subjects. He is in exact profile, just like my silhouettes in former days but with the mask of obscurity withdrawn.

  We are calling the series Heads of the People, borrowing the title from a recent book of amusing prose sketches. I am well pleased with what I have achieved, not just in terms of the revealing likenesses, but also by the public’s ready appreciation of them. My former friend Mr Hailes, who has recently returned to Adelaide from some years of exile in the wilderness, as he likes to represent it, has supplied pert ironic mottoes for each of these images, lending them an additional nudge. He too has sat for me, and for a joke wears Coppin’s shiny oversized topper.

  How pleasant to have him back amongst us again. It begins to feel like old times once more. Coppin, looking at my first set of portraits judicially and with his head tipped to one side, gave as his opinion that they would do well enough. The truth, said he, looking whimsically at his own portrait, and with his hands in his pockets as he does when he is being judgemental (that is in the portrait too), the truth dear Dibble will always hurt a little. He may well have been looking at the signs of plumpness I have hinted at in him, and the weak chin; or the bland gaze that all but conceals his astuteness. All well and good for Billy Barlow, but not for one intent on becoming a leading light in the community.

  With these portraits prepared on stone, I could print off on proof paper as many copies as were required, and the first set was so successful as to warrant a further two series. Coppin was right of course, but in the further respect as well, that my name began to spread more widely throughout the community. This, however, was a mixed blessing, as I became publicly embroiled in quite another matter. I was summonsed to court.

  This is quite a discomfiting affair to write about, but I will set it down as best I can. Truthfully. In the midst of all those public excitements, and just as I was settling down to work on the portraits, drawing directly on to the stone, a new and anxious process for me, in the midst of all that, I say, I had a further distress to cope with. A charge was laid against me, as the owner of a vicious dog which had rushed upon and attacked a native woman in one of the less reputable side streets of Adelaide; and I was required to present myself at the Police Court. That in itself was enough to fright me, for I have always been particularly careful to avoid law courts at large and lawyers in particular. The law I suppose is a necessary thing, in the abstract. In practice, however, you do well to give it a wide berth. Whoever would invite a lawyer to a dinner party, for example? Or a judge? My case rests.

  Anyway, my first step was to consult with my friends in the back room o
f the Auction Mart Tavern. To a man they were absolutely insistent that I should find a lawyer to represent me. They were kindly, but they made it clear that in their opinion I would not speak up well enough for myself. I suppose that is true enough, given what the world seems to expect. On their stern recommendation, and after a careful interview, a very confident young man (I could not afford his senior) accompanied me to court, his instruction to me being to leave the entire proceedings to him.

  The tactical difficulty seemed to be that as I had not been present at the alleged assault, I could not say definitively that it was not my dog. At best, I could say that it was unlikely to have been my dog. I readily acknowledged that I owned a dog, indeed two dogs, both of more than common size. I was more than ready to attest to the character of my dogs, but as the lawyer for the plaintiff slyly remarked, the dogs were not in the box, I was; and so I could say very little more along those lines. I had no doubt that the woman had been snarled at and barked at and bitten by some unsavoury cur, and the magistrate had the same view of the matter. But she was remarkably imprecise in her description, and really it could have been any dog at all.

  Only in court I learned her name was Noongar Nammin, or something like that. It seemed to increase the seriousness of the complaint; she was a more substantial person with her real name. She was more commonly known as Mary, and as my legal counsel put it, he was afraid that she had learned vicious ways from the less salubrious portion of our society. And as could easily be attested, and was, I was a respectable gentleman. To which the opposing lawyer wondered out loud why, if I were so very respectable, I would take up my lodging in such a street. Some tittering from the spectators. And if I were so respectable, how was it that on occasion I had had to be escorted back to my rooms rather the worse for wear. More tittering. Just what was my attraction to the street in question? Louder sniggering.

  This was not going at all well. My lawyer had to be careful not to make too much of Mary’s connection with a particular nefarious address, because my own was rather too close by. And furthermore, it would not do to pass reflections upon her character, as that could rebound upon me; but in any case I would not agree to that kind of unfair humiliation. I think the law is all too ready to proceed by humiliation. Which the press then translates into vilification. I insisted that I was a good friend to the natives in this colony. Ah, says the other lawyer, but does your dog share your broad humanity?

  The magistrate, who had been listening impassively to all this, sat up with more interest and paid more heed when the names of those who could attest to my character were read out. Ignoring the plaintiff’s spokesman, he asked more searchingly about the nature and disposition of my dogs, and he asked the woman to describe carefully and in more detail the dog that had assailed her, taking her through the attack step by step. Then he asked me whether I thought the woman had described either of my dogs; which I confidently denied. I was quite sure that from her description I was not the owner of the dog in question. In which case, he pronounced, as it was not established that the dog was my dog, and as the plaintiff had not brought her assailant into the court for identification, the case was dismissed.

  Which was a relief to me, but I felt I had been shamed in the process, as well as by being caught up in the process. And I thought the woman had not been fairly treated by the outcome either. That is what these cases do, they contaminate you even if you are innocent. The law is a spreading blight. If the case was settled, it was settled only as dust eventually does. My lawyer whispered, as we walked away from the court, that it was his view the woman may have trumped up the charge to win whatever damages she might from me. Which I thought was contemptible, and only reinforced my view of the profession. His, that is.

  And to rub salt into my wounded soul, there was still his fee to be paid.

  None of this was in any way agreeable, especially with the trial being reported in the press; all and sundry knew about the case then. It was therefore some kind of comfort to turn back to my sketches and absorb myself in mastering the new lithographic process. I could hide myself away in my studio for the time being, though with the courtroom sniggers ringing in my head I resolved to shift lodgings once more, to the other end of Adelaide. But not too far, on reflection, from the Tavern.

  Which itself has undergone a transformation. Coppin has had it enlarged, and the building faced with brick, and very handsome it looks; and he has renamed it Coppin’s Royal Exchange Hotel, reviving and improving upon its original title. He has brought in new fittings, to support his claim that it is a superior establishment. But the same groups of friends and acquaintances continue to meet there. I am not sure whether the new name refers to the exchange of gossip, or the presence of so many who are buying and selling shares. Either explanation will do.

  Like a swing, my fortunes have fluctuated first one way, and then the other, and my spirits likewise. The next blow has been something like a repetition of a year or two ago. Captain Strutt’s book on his explorations into the interior has now appeared, with its illustrations. He acknowledges that I assisted in working up three of his sketches, though just like Eyre he reverses my initials, as though he does not really know me. On reflection, perhaps they were both misled by my friends addressing me as Ethan. More offensive is his complete lack of acknowledgement for four other sketches, two of which he intimates are his own and two of which he is utterly silent about. What hurts most of all is not the cheating but the complete disregard of who I am and what I have done in this town. His careless indifference to his inferiors, as I suppose I am being shown I am. I am beneath his notice. An artist relies on his reputation; I do not know what an explorer relies on. Providence I suppose.

  And then I learned that my former patron from Prospect House, Mr Graham, has left the colony and returned to England, or perhaps Europe, to enjoy his exceptional wealth. He has cut and run just like all the others. He has made his pile from the mines, as they say, and shaken off the dust of this country from his feet. Curious revolutions in this too—revolution is everywhere in the air it seems—as his mother, who remarried recently, has now taken up residence in the grand mansion.

  It is not clear whether the one event triggered the other; but for me those changes contain disturbing reminders of my father and his sudden remarriage. I am fairly confident that my patron would have belonged to one of the nonconformist denominations, the Methodists or Congregationalists or Baptists. Just about everybody here does. However, in her new incarnation the lady of the house has thrown open her gardens for a fête to commemorate the consecration of a church in North Adelaide by the Bishop. That suggests to me that, like the unfortunate Mr H., she seeks to inveigle her way into the Establishment. Everyone who is important, a good many of them among Coppin’s circle of acquaintance, especially those with allegiances to the Nobs, has made an appearance. The Governor was likewise there, but I doubt he has ever helped himself to the turtle soup at the Royal Exchange Hotel. He is very keen to promote the Church of England as the established church here, and that is enough to ensure the opposition of the majority of the population. It would be absurd to contemplate yet another vice-regal withdrawal, but this is not the way to make friends or win popular support.

  My part in all these festivities was in being asked to draw a lithograph celebrating the celebration; and you may be sure I remembered to dedicate my picture to the Lord Bishop and the clergy of South Australia as their obedient and humble servant, which flourishes made me feel like a bit player in one of Coppin’s Shakespearean dramas. More to the point, I completed and published my drawing within a week, using as my basis a previous picture of Prospect House. My promptness, as well as the picture itself, so impressed the good lady that in very short order her son relayed through her a request for additional watercolours of his antipodean estate, alas, perhaps as a way of keeping his eye on it in his absence; and more interestingly for me, another set of paintings of the workings at Burra Burra, which of course will require me to make a return visit
there. My immediate anxiety about money is now somewhat allayed.

  For amusement I have taken to attending race meetings, especially at this season of the year. By now Adelaide can boast some crack gallopers and steeplechasers. There are cups to compete for, with an attached purse. Even Coppin has provided a cup, the Royal Exchange Cup, and a handsome purse, which he was unable to win for himself as it happened. His horse was disqualified because the rider dropped his weights somewhere along the course. Quite accidentally, without doubt.

  And Coppin’s run of bad luck continued, because his grandstand, in pride of place just next to the winning post, collapsed under the weight of its accumulating patrons, not all of whom were being attentive to the races. The scaffolding gave way, putting paid to Coppin’s hopes of entertaining the Governor there. A number of persons—some say thirty, some say forty, some say fifty—were precipitated into the booth below the stand, where a rather larger group was making good use of the facilities, and who one may suppose received with open arms those making their descent from above. At least the means to speedy revival was close to hand, but several gentlemen received quite severe injuries.