The Profilist

by Adrian Mitchell

  At George’s prompting, I shifted quarters for the time being, from the challenging backstreets to a hotel. He helped me move my few possessions, and we adjourned to the bar and drank to happier times, and my new way of life.

  Well, not entirely new, of course. Here, all I have to do is get myself up and down the staircases, easier said than accomplished. Especially at the end of the day. I am out of the wind and the rain that seem such a constant in Melbourne’s weather, and when the heavens are better disposed I walk slowly up and down the length of Bourke Street, and rest whenever I need to.

  There are days when I can hardly drag one foot after the other. I can stop and sit in the sun, if there is any, on the ledges at the General Post Office, and talk to all the other loiterers there, or watch the comings and goings of the passing parade. Just as I have always done. On better days I walk further afield; but here I am centrally placed, and yet living inexpensively enough. If or when it should become necessary, I can always remove to a cheaper room, and a cheaper hotel.

  I have to say it suits me. I am well placed to visit the offices of those I think might purchase my scenes of Melbourne streets, in which I now pay rather more attention to the buildings themselves, thinking that for example architects might like some of these for their business offices. Other businesses likewise.

  In one of my scenes I have drawn the carriage waiting outside the booking office of Cobb and co., and as insurance I made sure that the Albion Hotel next door is much in evidence. I paid particular care to the lettering of the proprietor’s name; and I succeeded in selling to each of them a print—hand-coloured. It is to my advantage that steel engravings look as though the pictures may have been cut from a newspaper. They wanted something better.

  The proprietors of the various hotels are kindly disposed, and will often take two or three of the prints I arrive with, on the understanding that with the purchase price I buy my drinks in their bar; and that suits me very well too. I am not disposed to go anywhere else. I am happy to settle down for a few hours, out of the cold.

  You might think this a lonely life. No; it is solitary, which is what I have learned to prefer, but not lonely. All those patrons pushing up to the bar, braying at each other, talking up the chances of the sure certainty at next week’s races, snuffling and sometimes guffawing at each other’s long tedious yarns. I do not see the point of those meandering stories; or perhaps I see their meagre point far too early. They fill in the time, they fill up the void; they are empty.

  What interests me rather are the different ways people laugh. Some people cannot get started. They quake, and go red in the face but make not a sound until after a vast long breath is drawn in, and then they bellow, or roar, or laugh like a hacking cough. Some people laugh inwards, not outwards, and the note of their laughter goes higher and higher. And some of course have a strident chippy kind of laugh that hurts your ears. They all laugh to show they are laughing, and to earn the right to tell the next joke. The company of clowns.

  Or they drone on and on, too loud, standing up too close to each other. Former diggers, many of them, with vulgar rings cutting into their pudgy fingers. These are the kind of loud speakers who never end their sentences but stitch them together with a relentless ‘and’, so that there is no time for any of their drinking companions to break in with a comment of their own. That means that the unfortunate circle is put into the place of an audience. There is no conversation.

  All these fine fellows compete against all the other groups of talkers and drinkers, and little by little lift their voice to make themselves heard; and all too soon everyone is shouting. The noise is all but intolerable. It is just like I remember back in Portsmouth, all those silhouettes jerking and waving their arms about, and nobody can make any sense of anything.

  The lonelier soaks look incapable of finding any kind of amusement in anything. They lean on the bar counter and twist their glass round and round, staring all the while into a void just over the top of it, and only come back to the present with an involuntary start.

  I like to keep my distance; which is not the same thing as keeping my own company. And my pictures are full of voices, or at least they are so to me. Not always saying the kind of things that people might expect.

  Somewhat at odds with my earlier principles, I have lately taken to drawing cartoons too, where the fun is more obvious. Those are quick to accomplish and easy to sell. That is their chief point. They are at least good for a drink or two. Needs must, that the devil drives.

  For example, one was a figure of a carter in his leather jacket, leaning at his ease against the wheel of his cart, with his hands in his pockets and smirking in a superior way. His wideawake has seen enough of the weather. I called him a Melbourne conveyancer. A quick sketch, just for the fun of it. The line does not have to be too precise; I don’t worry overmuch about holding my hand steady. In a companion sketch, a blind man in a threadbare coat is playing his accordion, with his cane hanging from his arm and his dog alongside looking dejected. In the imprecise background, on the other side of the street, an expensive barouche is passing by in one direction, a gentleman in a silk hat in the other. Which of the two is the Melbourne solicitor?

  And another, of an ageing man leaning back against a wall, with a newspaper across his lap and likewise with a disreputable hat, a taller hat this time, and again with his arms folded to suggest he is keeping out the cold, and one leg cocked across his knee, and a bull terrier sitting alongside him, watching the world walk past. They are hoping for a charitable penny or two but not actively seeking it, not expecting it.

  Perhaps I should allow it to be a portrait. I put something of myself into it.

  I make friends of dogs very easily. They are the kind of company I like to keep. I miss my old dogs. I wonder where Gyp is now. He will have more grey hairs about his muzzle than I do.

  And I drew a rather large and imposing cabdriver leading with his fist, demanding his fare from his customer. Who is a dapper young gent in a long coat and silk top hat, and a collar just slightly awry, evidently after a long session at his club, given that disarray and the moon high in the night sky. He is having trouble extracting his purse from his pocket; a well-known type. A fare dispute.

  That is the kind of thing that I can turn out readily, as I need to. It does not require careful pencil work. Bold strokes are what is required, and strong lines. A message that comes straight to the point. Unlike those endless stories unreeling in the saloons. A passing joke. Faces from the street.

  And with the profits of these very quick sketches, dashed off some of them right there in the bar, I buy myself a little more time, and a little more comfort, until it is time to attempt the staircase. Step by unsteady step.

  Unreeling.

  Sketch 17

  The finishing touches

  WHERE TO this morning? What does the day hold?

  Easy does it. All the day, and indeed all the world before me.

  If I had a penny I could toss it, to decide my way. If I had a penny then I wouldn’t have kept it in my pocket. I would see what I might buy with it. I need wine or brandy to lift my spirits.

  I am too tired to make a joke of that.

  It is spring. A woman is selling sprigs of wattle from her basket. She is no Primavera. This country has lost the bloom of youth. It has become middle-aged already. And I have doddered on beyond that. I don’t think I can face another spring.

  I need more than a penny or two. If you haven’t got a half-penny then God bless you. I have my hat. I have a hat, and let the law seize it from me if it will.

  Melbourne tires me. It does not like my feet. Yet while I drift about this way and that, it neglects to take in that I am watching it. And forming, always forming my own view.

  A penny for my thoughts, perhaps?

  There is the St James Cathedral, where Bishop Moorhouse is hiding, and perhaps God too, leaving the public pulpit to Marcus Clarke and the Melbourne Review. Father, forgive me. But it was a most amusing
debate, in which the bishop’s Christian forbearance was strained beyond its limit. It won’t have done Clarke’s modesty much benefit, to have routed the bishop on his own field. On a good day I sometimes venture in there, the cathedral of course but also the field of doubtful belief, and sit and rest in the quiet, and think of nothing. I wouldn’t expect to encounter Clarke in the pews.

  It is not true that the meek shall inherit the earth. Or not in the sense that we are led to expect.

  I have just finished a street scene for an architect who has been a steady friend to me over recent years. Well, one who has bought more of my sketches than he needed, to help me earn a pittance. There is no longer any demand for my old goldfields scenes, but the worthies of the business quarter have an unlimited fascination with the city’s commercial success; and their own contribution to it of course. Marvellous Melbourne, they call it.

  They don’t want to know about the colourful diggers, and their rough and ready ways. They want only the triumphs that rest on that. They want to see what all that gold has bought. They don’t want to see anything of the clay from which it was washed, or the gullies where it was gouged out. That is much like Sydney, glorying in its elegant sandstone structures but not wanting to remember the clink of the convicts’ picks or the jangle of their chains.

  My scene is of a narrow street of banks and business buildings, and in the midst of them the old Mitre Tavern, where I used sometimes to refresh myself. Back when I was considered sufficiently respectable. I sold sketches there for two and sixpence, and even on occasion for five shillings. That would set me up for the day right enough. The last time I was there, the publican suggested I might use some of my available funds to go to one of the public baths. I could take a hint. I left, and didn’t look back.

  I didn’t go to the baths either. I found another watering hole.

  It is a scene of straight lines everywhere, up and down and backwards and forwards. Everything is paved or faced with stone. In this scene, Melbourne has solidified. It has closed in. The lines of perspective all converge, but their point of convergence is blocked off by a building. It looks very dignified, but those who know my work will observe the absence of space and greenery. Not a tree in sight. Anything that grows has been cut down and grubbed out. That is the point. It is now a dead city. Where I live.

  I am sure my patron will admire the view, though he will probably not understand my point of view. To accomplish this sketch, I have had to steady my shaking hand. Like a young woman playing something intricate on a piano, I rest one wrist across the other. And if in one or two places I have used a ruler, where’s the harm in that? It is what an architect turns to all the time.

  Because I still mistrust the possibility of more Flutes, I have made sure to sign my sketch with my initials, as I always do. Q.E.D. To point the obvious. None of them will understand it though. They think no further than to congratulate themselves on where they have arrived.

  The architect had another piece of work for me, to embellish a perspective drawing of a building; but thought better of it when he saw my hand shaking, and suggested I come back another day, when I was in better shape. Which is a further point I hope to prove by this current work.

  And now I believe I will amble down to George’s yard. He has been kind to me again, as on a number of occasions. He too has bought some of my sketches from time to time. He buys sketches from a number of the painters who wander about the city, and keeps them in a wide drawer, almost a tray really. The sketches I mean. The painters—well he keeps me in a somewhat bigger tray, my truckle bed.

  George found me in the streets once more, after I had spent the night in the city watchhouse, as a vagrant. Meaning, to sober up. I had been evicted from my hotel room, not that this was an unusual occurrence, and most of my possessions had long since found another home, with a pawnbroker. George led me back to my crib, my bed, a kind of drawer on little wheels. I take to the irony of that, me reduced to a drawer who is trundled out of the way during the day.

  I wetted my finger, and traced in the dust above my head, ‘Port Misery’. The writing on the wall.

  Sometimes I stay with him for a week or more at a time, until my head clears. I can come and go as I please, he says. He has never asked me to leave. Nor has he suggested I need to wash. He is patient when I cannot think of the words I want. The bed is always there, and a plate of food; and he has his cache of wine. There is so much dust on the bottles I do not know how long they have been stored, but the wine tastes like nectar to me. Whatever nectar might taste like. It makes me feel like the gods, then. Uplifts me. And afterwards, lets me down once more.

  George too is dusted in white powder, like one of his bottles. Whereas I take cover in my black humour. And my blue boluses. Dr Neild’s salves and potions are no better than Doyle’s. It feels as if he too is poisoning me, rather than my disease. That’s a new kind of medicining. Both have rather taken the attitude that I brought it upon myself. George’s bottles hold out much more sympathetic comfort.

  Most of us do not belong here. We have come here, and we look about us, and see what we see from a distant standpoint. Whereas, says George, poor Kendall, who ought to feel more at home than any of us, was a disconsolate soul, colonial bred and to all intents and purposes utterly lost. He never knew England, and by George’s report, did not see the need. His world was all about him. And yet he yearned for some other world, and drank to find it. Or, as I also suspect, to lose it.

  We wonder between us whether the new young generation of colonial born bushrangers are likewise lost. Their lives are mostly short and reckless, sorties from one mail coach to another, one bush hotel to another. What does that say about the coming Australian? That young Ned Kelly and his gang, who have been all the news for the last month or two—desperate men you would say. Those of his comrades in arms who were shot at Glenrowan could not have expected a much longer life. It is yet to be determined what will happen to their leader, under heavy guard in Melbourne gaol. His trial is about to begin, and the public interest is intense.

  On the other hand, we notice how often the pattern for the arriving immigrant is of some kind of failure. As though in this country you cannot live up to your expectations, for one reason or another. Which is not a story Melbourne likes to tell itself.

  I think of Mr H. from time to time, and his vindictive camel; or the endless procession of defeated governors, and the explorers who have perished in the interior. I think of Marcus Clarke. He persists with that kind of stammer you often hear in the superior classes, and indeed there are touches of the Nob about him. But not quite strong enough I fancy, for I remember that he was blackballed from the Melbourne Club, perhaps when he was declared insolvent. The one black object in amongst the white.

  Insolvency has snared so many of us, Coppin included. Coppin of course is more buoyant than the rest of us. He bobs up when we sink.

  Think of Adam Lindsay Gordon, another who came down in the world. He had not left behind his European airs either. And yet when all is said and done, he was one of those who rode other men’s horses too.

  My wandering steps, and slow, lead me towards the Post Office. There is always a small gathering of people on the steps, and inside the colonnade. A gathering of thoughts.

  I am puffed. My breath races ahead of me, I cannot catch it.

  They are talking about tomorrow’s trial. Sir Redmond Barry will not be sending out polite rejections to aspiring artists for some little while. He will be attending to a higher duty. And all the world will be attending to him, and to Kelly. You can hear the arguing already, about what the outcome should be. Though neither the case for nor against has been opened yet. The businessmen are delighted Kelly has been caught, and will not mind in the least if he is hanged. He has shot policemen, hasn’t he? Our glorious police, the disgraceful bullies of the goldfields. What really troubles the nay-sayers is that he has trespassed against the authority of the respectable classes, the Nobs and the Snobs.

  A b
ushranger, of course. But that is not so very different, maybe only in degree, from all those who sneaked others’ nuggets and horses. He will not survive. He will not be permitted to. He has offended against vested interest.

  I cannot imagine the general public getting so excited about art. No surging throng arguing that Flute should have stood trial for stealing a man’s pictures.

  Hor hor hor.

  No, not Trumble. Myself. Hawking up phlegm. The weight on my chest.

  Ah, there he is. I have been expecting this. And afraid. I see him waiting now, a towering silhouette looming at the end of the colonnade. Side on, and sinister. He does not see me.

  The King of Terrors, with his glass and his crown, and his dart and his chains, his blotches and his sores. Hor hor hor.

  It cannot be.

  Postscript

  The Coroner’s Court

  At about five o’clock last Tuesday I was on duty at the Post Office. I saw the deceased Dibble, unknown to me at the time, he staggered against one of the Pillars and fell down the steps. I picked him up apparently dead. I got him into a cab to the Hospital, when he was pronounced recently dead. His name was unknown. He was 5 ft 8 ins tall and had dark hair and a reddish beard turning grey. He was pale and sickly in appearance and appeared to be about 40 years old. He was of thin build and was dressed in an old brown sack coat, white striped vest, dark grey trousers, striped shirt, elastic-side shoes and wore a soft white hat. He was in a most filthy state and crawled with vermin.