Wanting

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘Some even believe she cast a Satanic spell over the previous Governor,’ said Montague, as the new Governor scanned the memorandum recommending Mathinna be sent back to what remained of her exiled people on Flinders Island.

  ‘I am an Anglican,’ said the new Governor, throwing sand over his quickly scrawled signature, ‘and thus I am relieved of the burden of having to believe in anything.’

  Since so many others had left them forever, the Wybalenna natives were excited to have one child return. The arrival of Mathinna was an event. They posted lookouts on Flagstaff Hill, they rushed to the beach waving when the sloop berthed, and they began shouting when they saw the ship’s tender being lowered with a skinny black child sitting in its bow. They put their arms around her when Mathinna stepped out of the boat. It was like being the black princess of Hobart all over again. It was like the theatre plays that sometimes came to Hobart and to which Lady Jane had taken her. Only now she was both the actor and the audience.

  Mathinna showed neither joy nor happiness till she realised no one would make her wear clogs on the pain of beating if she didn’t. She took off the heavy pine slippers. The skin of her feet was soft and white and flaky. The ends of her toes looked as if they had been wrapped with wet dough. She scrunched them back and forth in the wet sand of the Wybalenna beach. Behind her, waves roared. The air smelt of tea-tree and salt and life. In front of her, fairy wrens darted in the flotsam, brilliant blue in the glistening bull kelp.

  She threw the clogs into a tea-tree grove.

  The crowd laughed and roared approval. But she was outside of their excitement and squealing and questions. She had not returned with the albino possum that shat musket balls. She had not come back to them with laughter. She dug her toes further into the sand. She was aware of the gritty rub and rasp of life. But she was a blind woman staring. Shoving her feet deeper and deeper, she knew it was true: she could feel nothing.

  After a short time, the excitement of the Wybalenna natives evaporated. They found Mathinna strange. She saw the whites as her kin, not them.

  ‘Mathinna left us,’ said Gooseberry, ‘and she still gone.’

  The girl found the few Aborigines she met on her return dirty, ignorant and indolent. She showed no sign of shock when she discovered the rest were dead, all buried in Robinson’s cemetery, and Robinson himself gone to Australia with his tame blacks to bring his protection to the Port Phillip Aborigines.

  ‘Them strangers to me,’ she told Dr Bryant, the man who now ran the settlement, in front of several of those she so maligned. ‘Just filthy strangers.’

  She simply did what she always now did: cast her mind adrift, and very soon it was floating above the cemetery, looking down at the other Aborigines who had taken her there, looking at herself—no longer a beautiful child in beautiful clothes, but now a broken bough of a girl clad in a grubby brown petticoat and ripped blue pullover.

  Occasionally the spindly girl said something because she had to, and, floating above, she could understand that she spoke in a manner that was neither white nor black, but in a strange way with strange words that made no sense to anyone. Who was this girl? Why did she talk this way, why this strange wavering voice?

  One of the Aborigines, a young man called Walter Talba Bruney, was angry. He was saying he did not understand why this was happening, all this death. He pointed at the graves and yelled into her face, as though it were her fault, as though she might have returned to Wybalenna with some answer. Some message, some explanation, some hope. But she had only a red dress that no longer fitted and that she had taken to wearing as a scarf.

  She did not know that Walter Talba Bruney’s passion impressed some, and that he thought it might impress her. She didn’t move. She didn’t care. She understood that none of it meant anything.

  ‘Kill me too, then,’ she said.

  He had no power over such a girl.

  Those not dead numbered fewer than a hundred and were in despair, and still they kept dying. Of a morning the women would walk to the top of Flagstaff Hill and sit there all day, looking at an outline sixty miles south, the distant coastline of their homeland. There, their villages of rotting cupola huts awaited a return that would never happen; their forest glades were filling with saplings, their tracks with scrub, and their hunting plains were being fenced and filled with sheep. They would call to their abandoned ancestors who kept trying to sing them home, so that their own souls would not be lost forever, but there was no answer.

  Mathinna did not go to Flagstaff Hill. At first she spent much of her time with the Catechist, Robert McMahon. He was so dirty that Dr Bryant told his wife that if the island ever ran out of provisions, McMahon’s shirt could be boiled for the food preserved in its black larded recesses.

  ‘I don’t plead laxity and I don’t plead stupidity,’ McMahon had said to Dr Bryant, in explanation of why he was there. ‘I only ask forgiveness.’ He kept saying it, as though his original intention of a peaceful, if mediocre, colonial sinecure had given way to complicity in some strange, unseeable crime. It was true that McMahon faced, with Dr Bryant, the grim task of maintaining some sort of order in what the Protector’s son had described as a charnel house he was glad to be leaving.

  At first McMahon was curious and caring, learnt something of the natives’ language and translated some of Scripture into it, but that didn’t stop anyone dying and it didn’t stop the government cutting and cutting again the annual outlay for the settlement. There was always less food, less clothing, less of everything. In time, Bryant and McMahon resorted to withholding food and contemplated the possibility of shooting some natives to keep them peaceable, but still they provocatively went on dying.

  McMahon was dirtier than any black, with an enormous capacity to misquote Scripture at great length, and he seemed at once to side with the blacks as well as to despise them. For Mathinna, he had the added virtue of being unpopular with the natives, which she felt must mean he was a good man. To impress him, she made notes in a diary in his presence, as she had often seen Lady Jane do.

  McMahon demanded to see what Mathinna was writing. She showed him, thinking it might raise his opinion of her above that of the other blacks, with whom she had regrettably been lumped. Though she made a great show of writing much, he discovered she in fact wrote very little. He did not know that she saw writing in equal measure as a reward, a show of good behaviour—like washing with soap—and a form of power. If he had, he would have laughed.

  Sometimes she copied out Scripture, sometimes advertisements for cottons, horses, soaps or medicines from old Hobart Town Chronicles. Taking up her diary, Robert McMahon read aloud:

  They should not throw about the soap they have too much the soap is fine thing to wash yourselves with and yet they don’t care for it, no they would sooner put on that there red clayey stuff what they have being always used and they like it better than soap to their faces.

  Halting only between words slimy with the spittle spume his lips wore along with a corncob pipe, he read on.

  Now you see there is none of the good people alive Walter Talba Bruney says that is a good thing Gods thing and them all go to Glory No, I think they dead and gone Walter Talba Bruney say If that when I die let me wake back up in the hunt with plenty kangaroo and emu and no questions No I cannot see my fathers face I dream the trees know everything and tell me everything No I cannot see him the trees I dream know everything.

  Robert McMahon threw her diary into the fire.

  Three years passed. Then came the summer of fire. Stories of its never-ending nature, of how it was destroying vast tracts of the far distant Australian mainland interior, arrived with a brig that emerged out of a December sunrise with Robinson’s tame blacks, returned from their time with the Protector on the mainland. They had broken free of Robinson and run with the Australian Aborigines, telling them to kill the white man or be killed. They had shot stock-keepers, looted shepherds’ huts, burnt houses, killed two whalers. The white men had caught and h
anged Timmy, they had caught and hanged Pevay, but the other six natives—three women and three men—had, through the Protector’s intervention, been saved and returned to Wybalenna.

  These women were different from the women who sat on Flagstaff Hill. They taught the other women a new dance, the devil dance. Of a day Mathinna kept on with a new diary, but of an evening she watched the devil dance around the big campfire. For a time she sought to persuade the returned women that their ways were uncouth and uncivilised, but at night she listened in wonder as the old women told their stories of all that they had seen—at the hands of the sealers and whalers, the government men and the missionary men. For they had discovered something remarkable: the world was not run by God but by the Devil.

  The world was hennaed by a smoke haze that never ended, that brought the sky low and softened every view of the bleak and fantastic hills into something uncertain. The sun was no longer solid and sure but red and shaking. By day the air was full of the acrid smell of fires hundreds of miles distant, but the nights filled with the sound and shrieks of devil dancing. The evening she finally stood up to join in, Mathinna was speckled with charred leaves and blackened fronds that had been carried by the wind from the Australian mainland, to finally eddy and drift to earth at Wybalenna.

  She had grown friendly with Walter Talba Bruney, whom she found odder than herself. He was twenty-two, yet to run to fat, still handsome, and regarded by the few Aborigines as one of their big men. Walter Talba Bruney was certain of many things, having been educated by the Protector, of whom he had once been a favourite, and was seemingly at ease with both the whites and his own people. Son of a Ben Lomond chieftain, he had magical powers. He could, for example, write.

  His writing was so powerful that it had come to be regarded as a form of sorcery. He had threatened, for a time, to put the names of those old people who would not take to the Protector’s ways in the Flinders Island Chronicle, a single handwritten sheet of which he was editor, writer, draftsman, proprietor and promoter, a threat that brought on terror and, with it, a short-lived compliance.

  The day after she first devil-danced, Mathinna had swum for crayfish and abalone, and Walter Talba Bruney and she had cooked them on a small fire on the beach and, after, had lain in the sand. Then came a dusk of stories, of what she had seen, the madness and strangeness of white people.

  Walter Talba Bruney told her how he was not scared of the whitefellas and he had ideas, and his ideas, once those of his white teachers, were now changing. He would get land back. They would live on their own wheat and potatoes, their own muttonbirds and eggs and sheep. They did not need whitefellas ruling them. He would write to the Queen. It was the hour before midnight that Robert McMahon discovered Mathinna on the moonlit beach giving to Walter Talba Bruney what had been taken from her by another.

  Enraged, he thrashed them both with a thin tea-tree cane he kept specially for the purpose. He wanted Walter Talba Bruney to think about God and Hell and punishment, and to help, he imprisoned him for seventeen days. To rescue her otherwise lost and damned soul, McMahon made Mathinna his maid.

  In his home he spoke in voices. He told Mathinna she was Chosen. He beat her on an almost daily basis. He flogged her at every opportunity for her failings, the one activity that seemed to bring him pleasure. When blood at last ran down her black back, he would begin talking, his speech as measured as his stroke.

  ‘You understand,’ he said, as he diligently continued to flog her, ‘she was in her nineteenth year and with child. She lived in the practice of every Christian and womanly virtue and died in the full assurance of a better life beyond the grave.’

  It was, Mathinna understood, another form of the catechism.

  The women who had brought back the devil dance had also brought back fresh supplies of red ochre for ceremony. They refused to work in the gardens unless they were paid, or to clean their houses unless they got better clothes. They urged the men to stand up. They told the women they must fight back.

  Jesus was a trick of the Devil, they said. The Devil ran the world. There was no light at the end, no redemption, no justice. God, heaven, whitefella talk—all tricks of the Devil. There was no black dreaming, no white heaven, only that bugger, the Devil, buggering everything.

  They had lived it, they had seen it; there was no argument that they could not shoot down with the terrible argument of their wretched lives. Maybe up there in the stars was the hunt that never ended, which the old fellas talked about. But you would have to fight to get there. Go with the Devil, enjoy the Devil—what else is there? You think the Devil lose? When the Devil ever lose? You tell me. You tell me when the Devil not ruin your life? You dance with him, you enjoy the Devil. Because he going to take us all soon, no matter. No matter what.

  And then they would laugh: a terrible laugh that joined with the quickening scent of bull kelp, an overwhelming smell of wet sex that arose from the thick leathery horns of serpentine green, hundreds of feet long, which washed up everywhere along the coast. The scent was blowing up from the beach on the westerly wind the night Mathinna silently laid out long, thin blades of dead grass-tree along the windward side of the Catechist’s house, as patiently as if she were stitching petticoats at the orphanage.

  She remembered the pages of her diary yellowing, her dreams of trees curling and transforming into ash in the Catechist’s fire, and she knew what she must do. She laid one layer horizontally, so the fire would bed and be harder to extinguish, and over it she thatched vertically, so the flames would catch the wind and rise speedily. Then she went away and devil-danced, and when the campfire had ebbed to little more than coals and all the blackfellas were weary and all the whites asleep, she made a firebrand out of a tea-tree stick and bound bracken.

  When Robert McMahon ran from the burning conflagration, alive and unscorched and wearing only a filthy shirt, to catch Mathinna throwing a pile of bracken on the burning house, he did not ask if she was guilty and she did not pretend she wasn’t. He made her kneel, bound her hands and flogged her with his tea-tree stick.

  The few men left with magic cursed him. It did no good. He thrashed Mathinna all the more. He was as imperishable as ants, and no matter how much you stamped on him he always came back. He survived flames. He survived curses, incantations, the pointed bones of the dead. He did not survive being thrown overboard a mile out from Big Dog Island by his native boatman, but still the Aborigines kept dying. Robinson’s cemetery filled with ever more Aboriginal corpses.

  Some whites worried about the possible extinction of the race, others fervently prayed for it; but all concurred as to the melancholy and listlessness that now prevailed amongst the formerly warlike and active people. Mathinna would awake screaming. The old people asked her to tell them what her nightmares were. There was nothing to tell.

  ‘No good dreams any more,’ she said, her one solace from her time in Hobart Town vanished. She did not like to say her father never came to see her, because she did not wish to shame him and understood there must be a reason and that she must be it. She did not say she could no longer remember her father’s face.

  Finally, when there were only forty-seven Van Diemonian natives left, when it was apparent that they no longer posed any threat, when it was clear it was costing too much money to keep the last remnants of their race in the misery to which they had grown accustomed, the new Governor decreed they could finally be returned and live in worse misery in their home country. They were interred at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart Town, in some crumbling slab huts once used as convict barracks. There they subsisted on rum and a government ration of two pounds of meat a day.

  The six surviving native children, Mathinna among them, were sent to St John’s Orphanage. They arrived there in the evening. She held her face in her hands, as if she were unsure that both it and she were still there, and looked skywards. Through the cracks between her fingers a silver light fell.

  ‘Towterer,’ she whispered.

  There is a crack in all t
hings, she thought. She was fifteen years old and she had survived by clinging to the smallest things.

  After six months at the orphanage, Mathinna was sent to work for a seamstress, Mrs Dellacorte, in a street off Salamanca. The black princess was, for a short time, an attraction in her own right, a celebrity Mrs Dellacorte recognised for its commercial worth from the beginning. The seamstress, a faded beauty who favoured red wigs, and whose looks had retreated behind a veil of white lead powder to form a ghost mask, made her money not from dress repair of a day, but a sly grog shop of a night. It was here that Mathinna was expected to work, fetching jugs of rum and lemon, of gin and sugar for American whalers and Maori sealers, for redcoats off for a night and the occasional old lag who had somehow scrounged enough for another drink.

  ‘You can take whatever you want,’ said the seamstress. ‘Just don’t take me down.’

  Mathinna understood that meant she, too, could indulge in the hot pleasure of rum and tea spiced with cinnamon, for which she quickly acquired a strong appetite.

  Mrs Dellacorte and her black pug dog, Beatrice, ruled the taproom with an icy ruthlessness. Whoever irritated the mistress or her dog were no longer spoken of or with, and a second offence saw you thrown out. Beatrice, when not in the lap of Mrs Dellacorte or wandering around tabletops licking food off plates with a hideous tongue of reptilian length and dexterity, sat on a filthy lambskin at the entrance of a long dark hall, wheezing worse than a dying consumptive.

  In a darkened parlour was Mrs Dellacorte’s prize possession, set on a rammed dirt floor: a billiard table with one broken leg resting on a butcher’s old chopping block. Hung above the fireplace, a portrait of Mrs Dellacorte as a young woman of some beauty looked across at the table, as if in a final plea—for the hope of something better? forgiveness? love? For Mrs Dellacorte lived in a loveless universe, the horror of which she kept at bay with what lay strewn over the billiard table’s worn felt: mementos and keepsakes of her late lover, a womanising spendthrift who claimed to be of Hapsburgian lineage.