This was not the only untoward event on that day. A man fell from another booth and was killed, the crowd began milling about, the police started pushing and shoving as they do, and in a very short time there was something like a riot. If the races continued nobody paid them any heed. The excitement was all on our side of the rails. I imagine the Governor found some other engagement that demanded his attention; he decamped.
Coppin’s afternoon was quite spoiled.
Mine however continued to be widely interesting. I kept my eye on the human comedy, you may be well assured. But I also made my way to Mr Vansittart’s stables, and admired his beautifully groomed horses, with the idea of working up a set of their portraits in my studio. When I finished them, with the great horses standing at their ease, at least seventeen hands high I would say, towering over the human figures nearby, these paintings aroused much interest, and perhaps I should have known where the real market for my work lay. I don’t think that implies I have a better competence in these equine studies than with my landscapes, or my depictions of people. I mean rather that I should have known what the squatters would willingly pay for. Horses. And maybe pigs and cows. Mr Vansittart—how aptly is he named, a name a novelist might have invented, Smollett for example—bought the whole set at ten guineas apiece. Which is in telling contrast to the value the directors of the South Australian Mining Company, and my patron, put on their acquisitions.
There is however an adjustment which gives me pause for thought. My preference has always been to show horses galloping down the home stretch, or soaring over a difficult fence; but I chanced to overhear a remark at a display of my paintings that my horses always look as though they are flying (which I did not mind too much) or like rocking horses with the rockers cut off (which I did—and resolved that in future they shall have at least one hoof on the ground, if not all four). That asks for a change in my way of representing them, as I like the figures in my pictures to express movement, and effort, and activity. So I tried an alteration in this set, and posed them. With my standing horses I have concentrated on their alertness and on their muscles, to show that they can move brilliantly when they are put to it.
Just as matters appeared to be turning a little for the better, and my brush with the law was beginning to sink from everyone’s mind, including my own, just as I seemed to be getting back on to an even keel, my big faithful Darkie, loyal companion on so many of my excursions, whether I was shooting or fishing or sketching, my big Newfoundland dog Darkie was poisoned. There could be no sense in this. He was not an aggressive beast, unless in defence of my belongings. He was well behaved. He did not run with the pack, as do so many of those that are not properly cared for. He was not a nuisance. He certainly was not the native woman’s assailant. He was my good friend, my familiar. So you can imagine my deep shock, and dismay at discovering his limp body just outside my lodging one morning.
I was horrified at such a dastardly act, and at the agonies he must have suffered, and at the same time felt somewhat threatened myself. There was no warrant for this, it was just the jumble of my emotions at the event. I made enquiries wherever I could, but to no avail. I posted a notice in the newspapers, offering a substantial reward for information, but nothing came of it. In my vexation I even wondered about my landlord, with whom I admit I have a somewhat difficult connection, but I do not think he would stoop to such a dirty trick to lever me out of my rooms. I wondered whether someone had wanted to break into my place and so had removed my guardian. But there was no reason why that should have been the case, especially as there was so little of any value to attract that kind of attention.
I had another more secret thought which, once it had occurred to me, I dismissed and put away altogether. Until this moment, as I write it down. Among my paintings is one of a corroboree at night, the one that sold at the exhibition in Glasgow. I remember well the circumstances it records, the strange light upon the bodies of the native dancers, so many silhouettes against the light of their big fires, and then the moonlight suddenly coming through thin cloud and picking out the white designs painted on their bodies, and repeating that detail in the ghostly whiteness of tree trunks and branches—an eerie as well as a dramatic scene. A friend and I, he an artist too, had stood witness to this scene, and we had each painted our own study of it. In the foreground of his painting he had four spectators looking upon the spectacle, two men and two women sitting on horseback. With his frizzy hair, one of the gents looked not a little like me. He even added in my dog, Gyp that is. And a native close by, our passport to this scene. All well and good.
However in mine, I reduced the spectators to just two, the lady easily identifiable by the horse she is seated on together with her particular plaid shawl, and alone with a gentleman who would not be readily identified as her husband, giving rise to a concealed hint to those who knew the circumstance. Patently he was not her lawful, because her lawful would have been identified by his uniform and his own customary escort. There was no uniform, no escort, no chaperone in my picture. And in that connection you look again at the wild excesses of the dancers’ gestures. The calmness of the moonlight embraces other passions. Or that was what I was thinking as I painted my version. The secret thought I had at the poisoning of Darkie, then, was that it might have to do with my painting. I still had my own draft of it. But as I have said, I set that thought to one side, as too disturbing and far-reaching to be probable. You see how our troubles loosen our reins and set our imaginations racing.
Gyp, of course, is enigmatic as ever. He spends so much of his time slipping off down the alley way or around corners that you can rarely count on his presence when you most need it. He and I will inevitably be closer friends after this, poor old Gyp. That will cramp his style considerably.
And mine. Gyp is more an act of penance than a familiar.
What with one thing and another, the very last stroke of bad luck I needed came at the worst possible time. I had been noticing for some time a soreness in my hand and fingers, which increased in intensity and slowly spread to my wrist as well, and soon it became an agony to hold a pencil or a brush. It was so excruciating that the pain persisted even when I was not drawing or painting. I could only with great difficulty dress myself, and I could not use a knife to cut my meat or even a piece of cheese. Everything had to be done with one hand, my left hand, holding whatever it might be with my knuckles, or the back of my aching dominant hand.
For three months I was unable to paint or sketch or draw; for three months I was without any means of supporting myself. Of course I carried completed pictures with me wherever I went, trying to sell them in hotels and taverns, then pot houses and shanties, but not with much success. Or rather, not at the kind of price I needed in order to survive. Selling at a much lower rate ensured I made a sale, but that also ensured I soon used up my stock, and there was very little I could do about it other than to rest my hand and let the inflammation subside.
Which, slowly, it did, and I placed a notice in the paper that I was now once more available for commissions and any other kind of illustrative work; with very little better outcome than my previous attempt at advertising myself. However, once more my coterie of friends came to my aid, and arranged for me to attend a vast public dinner to celebrate the anniversary of the first sale of land in the colony. This was in fact a celebration of old James Hurtle Fisher, who as the South Australian Company’s agent had presided over the original occasion, and who still represented a lasting resistance to the claimed powers of the governor. The old Company men have not gone away, and given a chance make matters as difficult for the government as they can; and there can be no reconciliation until there is elected representative government.
That was one of the interesting undercurrents at this gala event, with the Governor, at the official table, making a droning forgettable speech of the kind that is expected of these occasions, seated amidst the old Company colonists, and trying to conceal his offence at the excessive enthusiasm shown
when not-so-loyal toasts were being proposed. It was intended to be an occasion that exhibited just how far the colony had come in just fourteen years.
Six hundred guests sat down to the dinner, in a huge marquee—which in itself reminded me, as no doubt others too, of the kind of accommodation we had when we first arrived here. There were tables for some and trestles for most, proper chairs for the select to sit on and wooden benches for the rest, and decorations of greenery all the way up each of the supports; and while the Governor carried on, so did the diners, toasting each other and trying to catch the waiter’s eye to bring another bottle. In the distance a band of amateurs provided some kind of musical background.
Much more entertaining were the two kangaroos and the emu which looked distinctly uncomfortable in the midst of this invasive horde. They moved up and down the aisles sometimes sedately and sometimes scuttling whenever a small dog or two started barking at them from beneath the benches. Fortunately the chase did not quite provoke a hullabaloo, but it was a close thing. The noise of corks popping when the waiters had successfully strained to remove them from the bottles, the raising of voices as the guests tried to talk across each other about the latest news from San Francisco about the goldrush, the scraping of chairs and benches as people moved about … it was all a wonderful pandemonium. An occasion wholly lacking the dignity and decorum the committee may have hoped for.
My depiction of this, which I thoroughly enjoyed devising, was like a large-scale Heads of the People, with disproportionate space given to the unruly lesser mortals, the Nobs and Snobs all pushed to one side. You can see how orderly the celebration was intended to be, and how disorderly it was threatening to become. The guests are not yet staggering. They have got to the stage of waving their glasses and bottles about, and some are standing unsteadily and singing, whereas at the official table everyone is sitting very prim and proper. I did not sight old O.G. Once more, I drew all this on stone so that prints could be run off and sold at a few shillings each, and as with my previous lithographs I had this ready within a matter of days of the event itself, while it was still topical.
The sale of these prints and paintings largely went towards my medical costs, but made little inroad into the debts I had run up over the last several months, when I was not able to draw. Doctoring is only just less expensive than legal work. The remorseless fist of debt has lifted up against me. I don’t know how it is, but I just cannot quite make ends meet even when I seem to have as many commissions as I can manage. And especially after this last year, try as I may, I have not been able to meet all my expenses.
I doubt that I am alone in this; but it is galling to find a public announcement in the newspaper, nominally directed to me, but in fact my landlord telling the world that I am £48 in arrears for my board and lodging, and that if I do not call by and pay my dues and remove my paintings and drawings, these will be seized and sold to repay that debt as well as to pay for his advertisements. In which you can interpret the true state of my affairs, that I have been so much in his debt that I have been avoiding my own lodgings. That is what it has come to for me.
Although I have tried my luck once more with some prints of views of Adelaide, I just have not been able to get together return enough to pay down what I owe. There is an untoward current beginning to run through the community. Even the affluent Coppin is having to make adjustments. He has sold the Royal Exchange—everyone still refers to it as Coppin’s hotel, even though the new licensee, Schmidt, who used to own the Old Spot Tavern at Gawler Town, has painted his name along the verandah. Coppin had shifted his attention to Port Adelaide, as it is now known, though enough of us remember why it was called Port Misery. He built another theatre there, and set up a semaphore station, and opened a grand hotel along the beachfront; and now his affairs are in disarray. He has had to close the theatre, and put the new hotel on the market.
As with many others, his shares in copper mining have declined in value quite sharply, for there is a rival excitement, the news that gold has been found not only in New South Wales but also, closer to home, in Victoria. The Cornish miners have stopped working for the companies, reckoning they can work as well for themselves in the new fields. Already men are closing their shops or walking away from their contracted work to take a passage to the eastern provinces. Banks are calling in their loans, businessmen are seeking repayment of bills, and the circulation of money is drying up. It is just like the old days, a decade ago. We seem to have learned nothing. I wonder what the word decadent really means?
The old Colonists held their celebration just in time. There is too much anxiety for self-congratulation right now. And with available cash shrinking into fewer and fewer vaults, there is no avoiding the issue for me. I have had to present myself in court once more, and declare myself bankrupt. My mother would have been horrified. I doubt that my father would have found any joy in it either. I am none too happy about it myself. It seems like an indelible stain upon me.
And so it has all come to this. I thought now might be my turn to toss a penny; but the issue has in fact been decided for me. Not only have I been unable to support myself in this colony, but now evidently the colony can hardly support itself. Again. I shall not wait for such another summer blast as last year, when the air was as hot and parching as if it had come from a furnace, and the fruit cooked on the trees, and the leaves fell apart to the touch, and fires raged all along the Tiers.
There is nothing for it but to gather together whatever I can, dispose of whatever I can, and join with the throng that is heading for the diggings, to wherever the latest big lucky strike is; and leaving the Nobs and Snobs back here to pick over the scraps of whatever is left. They are welcome to it. Everything is coming to a standstill, and with amazing speed. Even as I have been settling what little remained of my effects, I have heard that Coppin has met with his creditors, offered them all fifteen per cent, and quietly disappeared on to a ship heading for Melbourne. If he with all his connections has not been able to make a go of it, should I feel so bad?
Adieu, adieu, Port Misery.
Sketch 9
In which all that glitters is not gold
PORT PHILLIP, when you get to it, is so vast as to have become, from an artistic point of view, impossible. Either that, or vapid. When you are in the middle of it—and you wallow about in that extensive basin for quite some time—you cannot see the edges. You cannot see anything other than broad flat water. You may as well be in the middle of the ocean. Which in a manner of speaking you are. Here is emptiness. Only the large sky, and a strangely cold pale light slicing through the thin sea haze.
An expanse, in and of itself, is nothing. In the absence of anything to look at, it is well to have something to look forward to.
The coastline had been low and uninteresting both at our setting out and our coming in; in the midst of the bay it sinks quite out of sight. Only at the notorious entrance did we see landfall close at hand, much too close—a long barely submerged spit stretches almost right across the mouth, with a narrow entrance where the sea tumbles through, a strong choppy current, and then a channel along the inside of the spit that had to be followed right across to the other side before we could free ourselves from the difficulties of sandbars. It would be a dangerous manoeuvre on a dark and stormy night. The wreckage of several unsuccessful craft is gaunt testimony to that.
We knew when we had at long last reached the far end of the vast broadwater by the jumble of masts and yardarms, a very forest of them, at Williamstown and Hobsons Bay, ships of all nations jostling to get a mooring as close as they could to the mouth of the Yarra Yarra. That spoke of the many who had crossed the bar safely. That spoke too of the universal excitement consequent on news of the gold strikes. All those bare masts were like so many exclamation marks. Those vessels had all carried passengers like us, every man and his dog intent on making their way to the goldfields as fast as possible. Every man jack of them resolved to lose no time, seeing that everyone else had exact
ly the same idea. The very idea of gold creates a foment of restless excitement, and jostling competition. They speak of a gold rush; the Californians call it, more colourfully and more correctly, a stampede.
But first things first. As seems to happen everywhere in Australian waters, there is of course no convenient anchorage. You cannot quite get to where you want, and your destination remains tantalisingly just beyond reach. Here we could not sail into the river itself, for the crowding of all the vessels, a good many of which appeared unmanned. Once again, most unsatisfactory. We had to anchor out from landfall, the captain anxious not to end up on a mudbank when the tide went out. Which meant, as you can imagine, a scramble to get into the boats taking us ashore, unseemly pushing and shoving, and the devil take the hindmost.
All the luggage had to be lightered in. Those with least to carry were off and away before those who had thought to provide more carefully for themselves. The spreading sense of urgency soon started to affect people’s priorities, however, and unwieldy items were thrown to one side. Everyone wanted to be up and doing, their ardour not much dampened by the drifting rain, though the sagging wet ti-tree scrub on the shores worked against the grain of their resolve.
And yet, having conceded the discouraging aspect that faced us, almost as soon as we stepped ashore you could feel a different spirit was abroad, and that this was a different kind of place, a different kind of community, from the one I had just left. One very obvious mark of that change was that, once through the sheds where the customs officers kept themselves dry, at every step porters and carters and chandlers and ironmongers and general storekeepers were all clamouring for business, shouting out their wares, and touts to badger you as well. Friends and acquaintances were calling out to find each other in the throng tramping up towards the township, their dogs running around and barking, delighted to be free of the confines of the ship. What a contrast to Port Misery! But the banks across the river here were similarly low and muddy, and scrub grew down towards it.
The Profilist Page 14
