Night Fishing

by Vicki Hastrich

  Scholars are careful to say the captions of the prints were ‘probably’ penned by the artist, but only because they are being strict with themselves. Only because they have no definitive proof. But there’s really no need for such fussy legalese. Any writer looking at those illustrations and those words would tell you without hesitation that the same sensibility authored both—not for the way each caption suits its illustration, but for the way the plates and their captions work together, building sequentially into a narrative of despair. It’s a narrative that contains complex internal rhythms; the lament of the captions is no monotone—it surges and pulls back, surges and pulls back, and the series as a whole is all the more devastating for this modulation.

  Plate 44 is by no means the most disturbing. In many ways it’s the least explicit. It depicts a stream of fleeing people. In the foreground are two startled men and a mother, carrying a baby, who tugs at the arm of a child falling behind. They are frozen in a moment of horror. Their hurried glances are to the right of frame, from where an unseen storm of violence is about to descend. It’s clear the violence will overtake them. Will any survive? Looking at the illustration alone it’s hard to judge. Perhaps, in the confusion of the chaos to come, some will escape. But then we must take the caption into account, and its plain, flat tone.

  Yo lo vi.

  I saw it.

  It’s a statement. A statement that leaves nowhere to go. The aftermath of the out-of-frame violence may be as unseen as the violence itself, but now it is surely not unknown. No one in the foreground will survive.

  We must pay Goya’s unembellished declaration the respect it is due.

  ‘I saw it’ can have the power of a red-hot brand.

  What did Uncle Ev see?

  •

  Some art stares at death; some art seeks to ameliorate the fact of death by making death artful—a pretty dream concocted to distract us as the light switches off and we step into the ditch. To date, my custom has been to make art of the latter variety. It’s white and middle class of me, a lucky girl brought up without strife in an affluent country in the second half of the twentieth century. The deaths I have seen have been isolated, the causes natural. But I want now, in my life and in my art, to look at everything more straight on. Not to duck from, or shirk, whatever is at hand. Probably ageing has caused this. The Romantic loses its appeal: the nub of a thing is what matters.

  I think I am getting better at looking. My list has been good practice. Just by its existence it reminds me to stay watching for longer than might ordinarily be comfortable; to aim for a next level of noticing.

  At first I wanted my list to be a pure thing; for it to have no other purpose than itself. I wanted to need nothing from it. But the items on my list are experiences and will not, I have discovered, stay locked away as isolated visions, as if in a museum. Unbidden, they are wont to put themselves to work to become part of something else.

  My list, for instance, has offered up a way to extend the experience of Uncle Ev’s story.

  Given what we now know about neuroplasticity, it is more than possible that the brain might be retrained by feeding it with wholesome images to even up the balance of light and dark. Of course, only very intense, very concentrated images could do that. These new Things Seen must be just as inerasable, in their own way, as the old. Fresh witness is required, of almost equal power.

  I suppose it’s inevitable that over time the entries in my list of Things Seen have become slightly more expansive, especially where a circumstance is perhaps more noteworthy than the creature it features. For example:

  The raven that comes down out of the banksias to the sand at the quiet end of the beach. Picks at the wrack.

  Sometimes the creature of the entry is absent:

  The boat and underwater feet.

  In the days before I saw that, I had been thinking about Ev.

  I was setting off to go fishing. The water is very shallow where I keep my boat. I wait for the tide to come in over the flats, a silty mixture of sand and mud. The dinghy is flat-bottomed and floats in only a few centimetres of water, but I must wade out a long way—to nearly thigh level—before I can put the motor down and jump in. Sometimes, when I am early on the tide, I feel like I could walk the whole way to my fishing spot.

  I trekked this day in shin-deep water, very clear. The sand was lunar, pocked all over with small crab holes, and I was watching my feet so as not to step on one of the dinner-plate-sized stingrays which often lie there. I was absorbed, concentrating on the footprints I was making. And then I came across the unexpected line of yesterday’s footsteps leading out. I was surprised. The tidal movement of the past 24 hours had made them sloughed at the edges and clumsy, but they were not erased, as I would have presumed. Abominable snowman tracks, in a straight line, but stumbling. Effortful. For Ev, taking his boat out at Rileys Bay and seeing the same, they might have been a reminder of muddy steps on battlefields.

  I held the boat beside me, gentled it along. I walked my new footsteps beside the old, head down, the shallow moonscape and the yeti steps my whole field of view. In this hyper-focused state I walked the crystal water. Thought-less. And then, in turn, this picture plane was suddenly interrupted, this time by the intersecting tracks of a large bird. The three stick lines of each foot were so fine and sharply etched, so seemingly fresh, that at first I couldn’t understand how they could be laid underwater. I laughed, in a kind of delighted shock. They crossed my old prints on a determined diagonal. They were going somewhere too. They were alive.

  It was the kind of new memory capable of turning some other dark one back to the wall.

  And then, a metre away, a ray I hadn’t seen shot off.

  My Life and the Frame

  I.

  I used to be a television camera operator. The only thing I ever liked about it was the frame.

  Don’t get me wrong: I wanted to be a television camera operator. I trained for it, and it was my first proper job, but I wasn’t interested in any of the technical stuff I had to master. I only liked it because I was putting a frame around things. What I liked was selection and composition, I suppose, especially when I worked on outside broadcasts. The tension and excitement of wielding my frame, this halo of attention, for as long as I possibly could until the subject moved beyond where I could follow—thereby destroying the picture I was making—was thrilling. It involved a deep level of concentration, of unthinking (the same sort from which the best writing comes), and letting the body be, to do what it needs to do, what it knows to do, without instruction.

  Let me explain with an example. I’m at the football. I’m about 23 years of age. I’ve been allocated the ground camera for the season. Every week, at whatever ground we happen to be, my spot is right on the fence line at the midway point on the belly of the oval, equidistant from the goals. I’m working for the ABC in Perth and we’re covering the local Aussie Rules league, which in those days, with a national competition still years away, was closely followed.

  To cover the game we use four cameras. Two cameras are positioned side by side way up in the grandstand: the wide-shot camera, which provides the go-to safety shot keeping all the main action in view; and the close-up camera, with its formidable snout of a lens. The close-up camera is operated by old Ray, who has a special genius for this task alone. He’s revered for it, but on other types of broadcasts is relegated to a do-nothing camera where his lack of interest in any other aesthetic or finesse can do no harm. On the close-up camera, Ray can hold a tight shot of a far distant kicker, then whip-pan unerringly to the catcher before the ball arrives, somehow divining not just the intended destination, but the actual. To appreciate the skill in this, you have to understand that during the pan the viewfinder is no assistance: at that speed, on that lens, all vision is blurred.

  The third camera is mine, used to take the viewer down to ground level and in among the action. The fourth is the boundary camera, a portable affair, handheld, though still cabled back to the v
an. The boundary camera is rarely in the right place at the right time, so the drama it is capable of catching is only sporadically added to the coverage, but it’s also handy for the less glamorous jobs of showing players coming on and off the field and post-match interviews.

  Hours before the game begins, our trucks pull up, disgorging boxes of equipment. Many trips are required to cart gear to each of the places it needs to go. Two people to a lens box, two to the body of the camera, two to the accessories box, two to lug the canvas bag which holds the head of the tripod, one seriously fit fellow to shoulder the tripod itself.

  There is something satisfying about the communal, repetitive task of carrying the equipment. There is not much thought involved; one thing patiently brought then the next, backwards and forwards. Then there is the job of putting the camera together in its big building blocks. As we work, the Colt and Reserve grade games are played, and spectators drift into the stands—the nutters and the diehards first.

  Along with the increase in surrounding activity comes a rising level of tension in me, barely discernible at first, but ratcheting up whenever play in the early games comes close to my position. The sound of the smack of body on body is particular and confronting. It goes unheard in the main game, where the general hullabaloo masks the impact of collisions. The Colts players rarely call out or make much other noise themselves beyond the odd grunt of effort, so, like mime actors in a dumb show who suddenly come together and clap hands, the slap of bodies is startling, seems somehow against the laws of the game. In that sound, the animal work of sport is exposed.

  With my camera set up and tests and practice over, I lean against the scaffold railing of my low camera platform, waiting for the game to begin. How will I go? I don’t indulge my nerves but let them buzz in the background. There is nothing to be done now that can affect the fate of the day. My job, after all, is to react.

  Finally the siren sounds, the whistle blows, the first ball is bounced: the time has arrived for me to work with my travelling frame.

  Come into my viewfinder. See what a glorious thing it is to move with this young man as he runs, swooping with him as he scoops the ball one-handed from the ground. (In the dark corner of my viewfinder the red light pings on. We’re on air.) He spins out of a tackle, bounces the ball, accelerates and bounces again. He’s travelling left to right; we give him running room, or looking room as it’s called in the trade, keeping him back near the left-hand edge so he’s got open space ahead, otherwise he’ll seem in danger of banging up against the wall of the right-hand edge, the frame suddenly turned into a prison cell.

  He sprints, every muscle straining, glances over his shoulder to check on unseen pursuers gaining; we’re keeping up, I’m keeping up, in all my movements fluid, pulling focus while panning, zooming. In one ear of my headset the van people are talking, commentators blurt into the other, but I’m hearing nothing, I’m in the beautiful blank zone of the picture for as long as it keeps going. Don’t think, don’t think, as soon as I think I’ll throw focus forward instead of back and all that swift joy will dissolve into shameful blur; the worst of it will be the rock back and forth, the panic to find sharpness again, Which way?, the indecision. Don’t think, stay in the blank, it can’t last forever, it’s already been too good for too long.

  He veers, the chasing pack steers him towards us. The red light’s still steady. I won’t be able to hold him, or them. Get off my shot, I want to yell to the van, I can’t hold them.

  With a tumble of bodies the frame overfills (somewhere in there my boy must be smashed), they explode towards me, it’s going, it’s going … The red light blinks out. It goes. In a million tiny pieces of action that cannot be contained, the composition in my frame flies apart.

  I swing my lens to begin again, hunt down a new shot. Next time, if it’s not the movement of the players that wrecks my composition, it will be the ball. More than once in a game, its erratic bounce makes fools of us all.

  •

  At half-time the van gets us to look for shots to cover the commentators’ chat, or as background for the scores or stats. I like this too. Now I have the chance to go off looking on my own. The camera is my dancing partner, though it’s anchored to the spot. I take it by its two arms and sweep it around. I rove and select. It has started to rain. A close-up profile of a man in the crowd, a transparent drip forming on the rim of his cap and falling; pull focus to the rabbity-faced boy beside.

  Sometimes the frame puts a little dignity around something that ordinarily manages without.

  I offer up a shot of fence pickets curving pleasingly away. It’s ignored. A seagull next to a puddle. They take that. Rain pincushions the surface of the water. The snowy white breast of the bird. So pure it’s taking me over. I could fall right into that patch of white and live there for a while. Intensifications of vision like this are not uncommon for me, probably because my viewfinder makes for tunnel vision. And the picture is black and white, so to my eye something like the red beak of the bird is only a darker grey contrast, not the bright modifier it would be to the people at home watching in colour.

  The rest of the game will be hard. With the arrival of the rain there’s a drop in light and the depth of field is drastically reduced, meaning nothing will stay in focus long. Tweaking will be constant. I have no choice but to trust the unseen wire between my eye and my right hand. Let my body do its best. Whatever picture my frame finds to make won’t be long possessed.

  •

  In those moments, moment by moment, so long ago, what was it I really framed? Perhaps it was endeavour.

  II.

  For some years now I have been writing an Australian colonial baroque novel. Oh really? I hear you say with a false note of cheer. Unsaid, but loud and clear, are the follow-up comments: How the heck do those two things go together? And: How will you pull it off?

  I didn’t go looking for the baroque in my story. A little element of it jumped into my imagination and then, inevitably, more pushed and shoved to come in. Because that’s just how the baroque is. It became my unshakeable, indispensable, difficult friend: the sort that takes over a party, is hilarious, then wrecks it, but without whom the party wasn’t worth going to anyway.

  The hangover came later, but in the first flush of acquaintance I wanted to find out all I could about the period.

  I started by refamiliarising myself with much that was half remembered from high school art history classes, commencing with the Council of Trent (1545–63). This was the rather long meeting of Catholic clerics dedicated to reinvigorating the Church to meet the threat of Protestantism. Spreading out of the north, Protestantism, with its insistence on personal responsibility and pointed preference for plainness and economy, offered an alternative to the overbearing authority of Catholicism.

  As part of its counterattack, the Council of Trent commanded Catholic artists to enthral the commonfolk: to win, for keeps, their hearts and minds through art, using whatever dramatic or emotional means necessary. Go big, go grand, they said. Turn our weaknesses into strengths. Make visible the glory of God. Make beautiful the power of the Church.

  And so began the baroque period of art production, which lasted from around 1600, with the emergence of Caravaggio and friends, through to its late or rococo phase in the mid-1700s.

  As I studied the preoccupations and stylistic characteristics of the period and the great practitioners, my heart rate quickened. Across the centuries, just as the old priests at Trent intended, I felt charged.

  Who could resist the baroque’s V8 throb, its largesse and exuberance, its struggle with light and dark? Its willingness to slum it while depicting the divine? Its love of risk? (Think of Bernini’s sculptures, some so twisted and buffeted by the forces of nature and God, the artwork itself seems bound to crack. Put that hammer and chisel down, Bernini; not one more tap!)

  So much about the baroque is modern: the mixing of media to achieve maximum effect; its kinetic desire; its interactivity—the way it sometimes
bursts out of the frame to claim attention, pouring itself forth, playing also with the idea of witnesses, viewers, participants, peeking in and climbing out. With its widespread use of trompe l’oeil, the baroque seeks to extend reality, and perhaps ecstatically warp it, too.

  My baroque homework drew me on through the period until, eventually, I was led to Tiepolo. In particular, to the Würzburg Residence in Bavaria and the ceiling fresco he painted there, above a stone staircase so big it occupies a hall of its own.

  Perhaps this sounds like I visited in person. I did not. I first encountered the place on TV, then via unsatisfactory pictures on the internet (too small), then, for a while, via quite a good book I borrowed from the library—although a few vital plates were missing, cut out by an image-greedy previous borrower.

  In Tiepolo, in Würzburg—in the biggest fresco in the world—I finally found validation for my novel.

  •

  The Würzburg fresco was painted by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in 1750–53. Already recognised as the master painter and decorator of his age, the artist was summoned from Venice for the commission. Civilisation and colonisation are the subjects of the work. Called Allegory of the Planets and Continents, the central part of the ceiling depicts the overseeing activities of the classical gods in heaven, around which the four continents are arrayed: Europe, Asia, Africa, America. The fresco is dynamic with the turmoil of change. Allegorical and mythic figures mix with the strange and sometimes fantastical creatures of each land; indigenous cultures and economies clash with the invading.

  My amateur art education is so hit and miss I didn’t realise this was a common topic of the day, though I should have twigged. It was the Age of Discovery and art everywhere made a point of showing off new goods and pillaged riches, while also confirming the fitness of Europe to rule and take the lot. In return, the so-called primitive continents got some of the trappings of Western civilisation, and the Word of God; not a bargain they had much say in.