第3章

THE KELPY

The invasion of Australia-An unfortunate misunderstanding-Barrels of black heads-The King & I-The error of Jean-Babeuf Audubon-Birds as burghers-Captain Pinchbeck & the French Revolution-Black War-Clucas the banditto-His perfidy-The Cockchafer-Tragic death of the machine breaker-Bonfires of words.

I

MY OWN SMALL part in the great invasion of Van Diemen's Land as we then knew it-Tasmania, as its native-born now prefer it, shameful of stories of the type I tell-has hitherto not been recorded, but I believe my role one worthy both of record & reflection.

Ever since that moment in 1803 when as a boy I first leapt off the whale boat with Mr Banks' pistol sticking in my back, just in case my resolve might falter, & fell face first into the choppy waters of Risdon Cove, both me & this country seem to have been in trouble.

I half-swam, half-staggered ashore with what I thought was the red ensign of the Union, & planted it most firmly on the beach & claimed the soil of the vast nation that spread out before me in the name of the glorious union that the ensign above me signified. But when I dropped my salute & proudly looked upwards, I saw fluttering what proved to be a yellowed sheet soiled with long clouds from Lieutenant Bowen's languid afternoons with the Samoan princess Lalla-Rookh.

I received seven years for theft of personal property, a further fourteen years for insubordination & twenty-eight years on top of that for mockery of the crown. It wasn't, it is true, the term of my natural life, which would have only been a kindness, but imprisonment forever.

And that's more or less how it's turned out. I did manage to go on the lam & escape the following year on a whaler to the Americas & from there finally back to England-where I lived the life of a rat under different names for the next twenty years, until I once more was apprehended & transported back here. Really the only thing that keeps me battling on now is not the thought that I will one day be released, but that they are finally going to do the decent thing & kill me like they should have done all those years ago.

Lieutenant Bowen, in his fury, took the subsequent arrival of a few hundred blacks out with their families hunting kangaroo as a declaration of war, & immediately ordered our cannons to be opened upon their clustering mob on the seashore, leaving some forty-five dead men, women & children on the sand, & who knows how many more whom their countrymen dragged off with them to die in their distant camps.

Mr Banks was delighted to find most of their black bodies still intact, as well as a good measure of artifacts-spears, fine shell necklaces, reed baskets, skins & the like-& while I was shackled to a tree to await my sentencing, my fellow convicts got on with the severing & pickling of the heads of the blacks. Mr Banks was well pleased with the half-dozen barrels of bobbing heads when they were finally presented to him, feeling, said he, that they could only greatly enhance our understanding of such misbegotten issue of the human race.

When the seawater laps up again at my festering ankles, I think back on those wallowing black heads with their milky eyes curding up in disbelief, & neither they nor I can see then just how much trouble black heads would later get me into. When I once more feel that sharp smarting around the scabby sores that cluster like so many oysters on my ankles beneath my chained iron basils, I know that the tide has turned. Then this cell, built at the base of sandstone cliffs below the high water mark-one of those infamous fish cells you have no doubt read about in those lying street pamphlets that circulate about the bushranger Matt Brady's cruel incarceration & subsequent villainous career-will fill to above my head.

Not that I will drown: I will, as others before me have, hang onto the bars above my head for several hours, holding myself up in the foot of air space that remains at the top of the cell at high tide. Sometimes I let go & allow myself to drift around my small kingdom, hoping I might die as I do so. Sometimes I count my blessings as I float: this twice-daily bath lately seems to have rid me of my lice, & the cell, while damp & prone to a briny, seaweedy odour, is not redolent of the dreadful stench of shit & rancid he-goat that normally prevails.

Two blessings: that's a sufficient challenge for my powers of mental arithmetic. And floating in the cold water, shivering & shuddering as if I were already in rehearsal for the old diddly-back-step off the gallows that awaits me, my mind sometimes breaks loose, & I am back happily painting the fish once more.

Call me what you will: others do, & it is of no matter to me; I am not what I am. A man's story is of little consequence in this life, a pointless carapace which he carries, in which he grows, in which he dies. Or so the porcupine fish said, & he is, as ever, already sticking his bloated head in where it's not wanted. What follows may or may not be my true story: either way it is of no great importance. Nevertheless with the porcupine fish dead & the old Dane now gone, I simply want to tell the tale of my paltry paintings, before I too join them.

It's not because I think the future is like this darkened, wet cell, on the damp sandstone walls of which you might scratch your name alongside so many others before you too disappear like the last tide, vanished; that vanity of thinking such words as these might at least remain as evidence, a flotsam of freedom dashed, that might endear my memory to posterity. I am, in any case, too far gone to place hope in such games. The truth is that at first I had a queer desire to confess something of it, & later it had simply become a bad habit, as inescapable & as wretched as scratching my licy balls.

Not that I would want you to think that I am not well looked after. Far from it. Sometimes they bring me a taj of skilly & rancid pickled pork fat in a cup or a bowl, & they throw it at me. Sometimes I smile back, & if & when I am feeling especially energetic, I'll lob a turd I've kept especially for the occasion in return. Sometimes after such a happy exchange they give me a good walloping as well, & I thank them for that too, because it shows they still care a little. Thank you very much, dearies, I say, thank you thank you thank you. They laugh about that too, & between the beatings & the turd-tossing I can tell you we really do all get along splendidly. 'That's the good thing about an island prison colony,' I whisper to my cell door, 'we are all in this shit together, all the turnkeys & redcoats & even the Commandant himself. Aren't we? Aren't we?'

'No!' yells the turnkey Pobjoy from the other side as he slides the latch, but I won't hear him, because he's not allowed into the story yet, & once he is, like me, I promise you he won't escape either.

I know I ought make it clear from the beginning why I have come to be painting fish, & why the fish paintings came to be of such importance to me, but really, nothing is clear to me any more, & the whole matter seems beyond comprehension, far less explanation. I can tell you that there are no pictures of convicts ever made at this settlement, & that the very making of such pictures is forbidden upon the pain of the severest punishment.

It is, if you ponder it only for a moment, a curious fact that no visual record will survive this time & place, not one single painting of the maimed, of the broken, even of the Commandant. There are, it is true, the written records of the settlement contained in its great Registry-a mysterious archive whose location is kept secret from the convicts lest they try to tamper with their records. In this reputedly labyrinthine repository, it is said the details of every convict & every event of the island's past are meticulously recorded, no detail too insignificant to elude cataloguing & chronicling.

But I won't pretend that my fish are some alternative, upside-down Registry. My ambitions are neither gargantuan nor comprehensive.

At best a picture, a book are only open doors inviting you into an empty house, & once inside you just have to make the rest up as well as you can. All I can show you with any conviction is a little of what happened to me here-the whys & the wherefores, that's so much waffle for the judges with their black caps & powdered wigs, for the criticasters & their like: guilt, sin, motivation, inspiration, what is good, what is bad-who knows? Who cares? All I can say is that between the beatings & the high tides the turnkey Pobjoy has brought me some cheap parchment stolen from the Registry on which he has instructed me to paint Constable-like scenes of bucolick bliss: all happy haymaking & rustick idiots like Pobjoy himself, & wagons crossing sun-dappled English streams, which he can then sell or trade with others.

The gawky Pobjoy stands on the frontier between men & giraffes; he is so tall that when he comes into the cell he has to bend over nearly double, so that it seems it is he prostrating himself to me, rather than-as it must be in our situation-the other way around. I have to bow so low to get beneath Pobjoy that I am almost blowing bubbles in the slimy rock pools at our feet, disturbing my friends that cluster in the darkness there, the crabs & periwinkles & mussels that share this demimonde with me.

'Thank you thank you thank you,' I say to all those who like me live in the sea slime, & set to work as quick as buggery before the water rises, because each day I have to complete not one painting but three tasks: first, a painting of pastoral pieties for Pobjoy; second, a painting of a fish for me; & third-the job with which I am always running behind time, & ever failing to say all the things I need & wish-these notes that are to accompany my fish.

II

GIVEN THE KEEPING of any private accounts of the island by a convict is an offence for which even more savage punishment than that meted out for painting is reserved, I have to proceed carefully. Each day Pobjoy takes my paints & paper away with his newly completed Constable fake, checks that not too much paint seems to have disappeared, & that the amount of paper left equates with what I tell him I have wasted on rough cartoons & then used to wipe my bum-a rare privilege Pobjoy in his infinite generosity occasionally affords a craggy-arsed convict such as me, on the grounds that as an Artist my delicate orifices are unaccustomed to indignity.

Each day I purloin a few more sheets for the purposes of my book of fish which I carefully hide, & each day I rearrange prominently in the cell corner where the light hits as the cell door opens the same single crumpled sheet of paper kept specially for the purpose, which I have streaked artfully with some particularly strong greens & browns. In its moist colourings it serves as corroboration of my tale of personal hygiene & is, I believe, consistent with both the facts of my diet & my complaints to Pobjoy of bad gripe in the guts. Mercifully, Pobjoy has not yet been tempted to investigate the matter further.

Having paint but no ink I have to use whatever is at hand to write-today, for example, I have knocked a few scabs off my elbow & am dipping my quill carved from a shark's rib into the blood that oozes slowly forth to write what you are now reading. Blood's thicker than water, as they say, but then so too is porridge, & I don't attach any more symbolic significance to what I am doing than I do to rolled oats. If I had a bottle of good Indian ink, I'd be a hell of a lot happier, & in somewhat less pain. On the other hand, mine is far from a black & white story, so perhaps putting it down in a scarlet fashion is not so inappropriate. Please don't be appalled, compared to most of the vile crap that comes out of my body these days, the mossy mucus & yellow pus & runny shit, my blood really is quite pure & beautiful, & it reminds me that something is always pure & beautiful, if you will just look beneath the scabs & sores.

In any case, colour is a tragedy that should not be taken seriously: 'That God is Colouring Newton does show,' wrote Ackermann's woolly cobber Billy Blake. Even Billy Blake's wife never knew him to wash & his opinions could sometimes be as ripe as his presence. As far as I am concerned, ever since Newton broke white light with his prism into multifarious colours, the rainbow's divided light is for me nothing other than this ridiculous fallen world.

When the water rises to my belly, I hide my fish & these bloody thoughts, then yell at the door until Pobjoy comes to fetch his convict-Constable. And what a splendid spot I have for my book of fish! I hide it in a niche at the top of the cell that opens out from a thin crack behind the first row of sandstone blocks into a space as wide as three loaves of bread. Sometimes when I am floating around my cell at high tide, my pointy honker nearly bumping on the ceiling rafters, I try to imagine I am in that niche with my book of fish, imagine it as a home closed off from the world, a home into which I have escaped. I think Pobjoy knows but chooses not to: it is my one recompense for the convict-Constable he takes from me each day. Or maybe he's just worried about hitting his head if he raises it to look.

But Pobjoy knows I am painting fish, I am sure of it.

III

THE KING, WITH whom I share my cell, betrays nothing to Pobjoy. In truth the King betrays next to nothing about anything, says nothing, is next to nothing, & devotes his time to silent communion with the angels. For which I am grateful.

He is a most remarkable man, the King. His presence is large, inescapable. You can feel him all over you. Sometimes I think of him only as a creeping slime rising up the walls. At other times I feel an odd fondness & my admiration for his very considerable achievements is unquestioned. He grows daily not only in my estimation, but also, it has to be admitted, in his very being, becoming more & more corpulent, yet remaining in his movements gentle & poetick: the King rolls, the King bobs, the King moves in waves. How he does it, this growth, this dignity, I can't say. The rest of us shrivel & waste like weevil-hollowed husks on what little they feed us, but the King just inflates. As a companion I find him sage-like, inscrutable. I sometimes think his increasingly buoyant dimensions may indicate there is more of the Occidental Divine about him than I have previously suspected.

In argument the King sets an admittedly wide compass, allowing his opponent-me-to play out my own line of reasoning so far it unravels & snags on its own impossibilities & contradictions. It may be objected that he says nothing new, but he communicates it wonderful well.

An example: one day, admittedly as a needle, I put it to him that Scottish Presbyterians had produced numerous works of great theological worth. Typically he was some time replying, but I knew he was thinking, There is not one work of theology worthy of the name produced by those non-conforming oat-eaters. I myself had no idea whatsoever, but by a lucky coincidence I had noticed in one of the Surgeon's catalogues sent him from London bookshops, the title Aberdeen on the Sumerians. Armed with this slight, possibly irrelevant knowledge, I stuck the knife full in: 'Perchance you have read Aberdeen's magnificent discourse on the Sumerians?'

He said nothing, admitted nothing. It was an accusation, all the more telling for remaining unspoken. I felt a heat rising & then went full red in the chops, & it was all over, we both knew it, I was exposed as a fraud, yet typically he spoke not a jot more on the subject, & has never raised it since.

There is about him something majestick which produces effects of great regality. I have seen even Pobjoy stunned by the mere sense of the King's presence, though Pobjoy of course fails to see what I do; still he wrenches his nose & lemons his face & I am sure he shrivels his arsehole, as you do only on two occasions: when in the presence of a great power or of a terrible stench.

I would, it is true, like the King more if he were a little more outgoing, more easy with others. He makes no effort with Pobjoy, & though I urge him on about the obvious benefits of a social life, he has no desire to be part of either my turd-tossings or Pobjoy's beatings. Still, such is his choice, & I know he has his reasons. An oak cannot bend like a willow. It is things other than hail-fellow-well-met falsely fawning that mark the King out as remarkable.

Another example: his complexion. Most of us go paler than the Surgeon's white lead in these cells. But the King, manifesting some regal hereditary disorder, some Hapsburgian pigmentation perhaps, grows daily darker, his skin blacker, & more recently, disturbingly greener. But he suffers not to suffer: no word of complaint or distress passes his lips.

As I drift around our wretched cell, I sometimes look back with-well let's just admit it-an envy of my life at that time I arrived here. Because I have come to believe that trajectory is everything in this life, & though at the time it felt anything other than promising, the trajectory of my life was that of a cannon ball fired into a sewer-hurtling through shit, but hurtling nevertheless.

In Pobjoy's dull dog-like eyes I can see he knows it's the second time around for me on the fish; he can see that I paint from my memory of my first book of fish that was so cruelly taken from me. But what Pobjoy doesn't know is why I paint them. What Pobjoy doesn't know is what I am about to write here, an annal of a life etched in blood.

IV

BEFORE I BEGAN writing, I asked the King:

'How might I commence such a mighty chronicle? By singing a new genesis? By singing of fish & of the man, fated to be an exile, who long since left the land of the English & came to Van Diemen's Land to this island gaol; & how great was his suffering by land & by sea at the hands of gods thought long dead because his crimes demanded that he suffer retribution in the same coin?'

No. I could see the King thought it better to cack your dacks & smear it over the page than to write such rubbish, for who would ever wish to sing this country anew?

The King knows as well as I-indeed better-that this place & its pathetick people will be far happier being eaten up over & over again by the same dreary songs & pictures of the Old World, telling them the same dreary story I have been hearing ever since I went the fall at the Bristol Assizes-you are guilty & you are to blame & you are less-& you will hear all the new singers & all the new painters saying the same nonsense as the black-wigg'd judge. Long after these bars have fallen away, they'll sing & paint the bars anew & imprison you & yours forever after, gleefully singing & painting: Less! Less! Less!

'Artists! Ha! Turnkeys of the heart!' I roared at the King. 'Poets! Ha! Dobbing dogs of the soul!-what here I write, & what here I paint are Experiment & Prophecy-do not judge any of it by the shorten'd yardstick of what they call Literature & Art, those sick & broken compasses.'

To clarify my point a little further, I threatened the King in the manner I had found to be so effective with Pobjoy, & seeing what I had in my hand ready to lob should he say a word in criticism, he ventured no folly of comment. Still, as always, he had a point, so instead of singing a new country & noble race into being, I began with the dirty truth as follows:

I am William Buelow Gould-convicted murderer, painter & numerous other unimportant things. I am compelled by my lack of virtue to tell you that I am the most untrustworthy guide you will ever trust, a man dead before his time, a forger convicted in the gloomy recesses of the Bristol Assizes on that muggy afternoon of 10 July 1825-, the judge noting, if nothing, else, my name was good for the Newgate Calendar along with all the other condemned men, before doffing his black cap & sentencing me to death by hanging.

In that courtroom there was a lot of dark wood trying to take itself seriously. In order to lighten all that sorry timber up I should have told it the story I am telling you now, of how life is best appreciated as a joke when you discover all Heaven & all Hell are implicit in the most insignificant: a soiled sheet, a kangaroo hunt, the eyes of a fish. But I said nothing, grossly overestimating the power of silence. The judge, believing me penitent, commuted my sentence to transportation to Van Diemen's Land.

Quarter-flash, half-hopeless, not quite the full bob Billy Gould, who was once pompously ordered to depict the great sea god Proteus who can-as the Surgeon with his dog-Latin was wont to remind me-miraculously assume the form of any aquatic creature. I was to paint fish, you see, all manner of sea life: sharks, crabs, octopuses, squid & penguins. But when I finished this work of my life, I stood back & to my horror saw all those images merge together into the outline of my own face.

Was I Proteus or was Proteus only another mug like me? Was I immortal or merely incompetent?

Because you see I was born not an evil man, but simply the bastard issue of a fair day's passion, a folly, a three-thimble trick like my present name, & beneath whichever one you lift there is… nothing!

A fate that leads a French Jewish weaver to an Irish fair is curious, but it is nevertheless Fate that then saw the weaver-'father' seems to me rather too generous a description-struck down with apoplexy at the height of his rude passion in that barn, thinking he was going to ride a cock-horse all day long. But you see there he was, suddenly struck dead in the saddle, beyond life & gone from this tale as soon as he had come. The woman whom he had met no more than half an hour before, laughing in the furmity tent over the rum-laced porridge she had there partaken of liberally, was now too frightened to scream, to curse or cry. She just pushed him off & wiped herself on his fine fustian waistcoat which had first so impressed her, such a dandy-o he had seemed, what with his clothes & long come-hither eyelashes & Frenchie accent, & she ran out to wander morose until she came upon a large crowd in a field.

Being short as a spud (&, or so I was told, of similar demeanour, with a mouth like a spinning jenny) she could not see what it was that had caught the mob's attention, & being suddenly curious, perhaps as some sort of diversion from what she had just experienced, she pushed & shoved until she burst out of the crowd to see the front of a makeshift wooden stage.

The babble of the crowd unexpectedly died away & she turned back around to see what it was-to see whether it was indeed her-that had quietened them so. She saw the gaze of all the people behind her focused not on her at all, but looking over her & up much higher, & she twisted back around & following their line of sight upwards saw that the stage was in fact a temporary gallows.

At that very moment she heard the quick creak of the trap door open & saw a skinny man in a long dirty smock with a noose around his neck & a limp cod in his hands fall from the sky in front of her. As his body reached the bottom of the drop, taut rope conspiring with the sudden weight of the falling body to break his neck, she heard the small but undeniable sound of bone snapping. Afterwards she dreamt the skinny man opened his mouth as he fell, & what came forth was not a cry but a shimmering shaft of blue light. She watched the blue light fly across the field & leap into her mouth, open in astonishment.

The wretched woman became convinced that she had been taken possession of by the condemned man's evil spirit, & gave up on life, surviving only long enough to deliver me into the world & then to the poorhouse, believing that as I was born blue I must needs be the very embodiment of that evil spirit.

I grew up in the poorhouse full of old women, some mad, some loving, some neither, & all as full of tales of the dead & the living as the slops clothing was of lice, for that was all they had in that dark, dank poorhouse-lice & stories, & both left me with a bad itch & scabs that turned into dirty little scars. I grew up with these tales (including their favourite of the weaver dying on the job & the gallows man, his limp cod, the blue light & me) & little else to sustain me.

The old poorhouse priest for a time mistook me for a scholar. He used to read to me from a Calendar of the Saints, in which for every day there was a saint whose life was an exemplary tale of suffering, torture & original punishments; a fabulous catalogue of virgin martyrs whose voluptuous but eternally pure breasts were smote off by lecherous Roman prefects; medieval monks whose levitating became so annoying they were tied down so as not to disturb the mealtimes of their fellow brothers; anchorites who became famous for flagellating themselves for forty days & nights merely for farting. Really, nothing could have prepared me better for the reality of Van Diemen's Land.

The priest supported me with his teaching like the rope had supported the gallows man. He taught me the 26 letters of the alphabet & would have me read aloud the Bible & Prayer Book as he washed the soles of my feet, my skinny calves, all the while whispering, 'Tell me when your seed is about to spill, tell me, please.'

I would just reply, 'A-B-C-D-E-' etc, etc, & imagine all God's words were to be had in these letters, & He could just muddle them up into whatever Perfect Prayer & Holy Scripture he wished, if I could just send up those 26 letters each day to Him, A-B-C-D-E, etc, etc, but then when the priest ran his chapped hand like broken chalk sticks up the inside of my thigh I kicked him with my washed foot fair in his gummy gob.

The old priest cried out in pain & hissed, 'God may have your letters but the Devil has your tongue-you are no scholar but Beelzebub himself!' & would have not a bar of me or my feet ever after.

One of the old women was so impressed, she hated that priest so, she showed me her library of a dozen 65-penny pamphlets she was allowed to keep as a special privilege, & she thereafter lent me first one then another.

I began to worry that each night as I slept the letters in the 6-penny pamphlets might rearrange themselves into new shapes & meanings within the blue covers, for in them I discovered that God did indeed mix those 26 letters to mean whatever He wished, & that therefore all books were holy. If God did indeed have a Mystery as the priest had insisted, then perhaps it was in the ongoing itch of all those stories.

Such 6-penny books can be had at any market stall, yet I loved them no less, but more for belonging to all. Everything from Old Widow Hickathrift's Nursery Rhymes to Aesop's Fables did so delight me that long before I knew of the Bard & Pope & Frenchie Enlightenment, they were all Literature & all Art for me. Even now oranges & lemons & the bells of Saint Clements riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross are to me true poetry that has cast a spell I cannot escape.

Then the priest conspired with the beadle to have me sold off to a stonemason, for whose heavy work my wretched body was unfit, & when I ran away across the water the stonemason must have thought himself well rid of such a clawscrunted rascal, for he made no attempt to get me back.

At first I survived in London by selling myself to those who I thought ought pay to wash my feet & giving myself to those for whom I felt pity. Deciding who should pay & who shouldn't made me feel I had some power, but I had nothing really, nothing but rotten inconsolable itches covering my heart ever more & more dirty little scars that kept multiplying to cover such nameless shame as was mine.

For a time I roamed & robbed, feeling with these ventures that the dirty little scars had been covered over by bigger feelings of excitement & fear & pleasure. Then I was a Villain, you see, a truly haughty Bad Man, most proud of myself. I went hither & thither, at first in search of gold & glory, & then in search of an explanation, & I was greedy for all, but only because the capture of any might prove I lived & was not a nameless man born of a nameless woman in a nameless town whose only sustenance was itchy stories that had to be teased by gummy old women out of oakum & scabby songs stolen from God out of 6-penny pamphlets.

I saw all this & that & much else besides in the morning of my life & many things shocking, near as fabulous, but of an evening there was not one among my new-found world of blue-gin riders & gaberlunzie men & pimps & swing-swang girls & their hanky thieves who could answer my insistent Why? which I came to know as the most stupid & pointless & destructive of questions. Deciding that nothing benefits a man other than his own earthly endeavours, I abandoned my uncertain search for an answer to a question that made no sense. I grew Old World-weary & late one evening in a grog shop with some Spitalfields girls with whom I was extolling the virtues of 6-penny pamphlets I found myself agreeing-after a few hard cuffs around the ears & reasonable threats of far worse injury from a press gang, the cream of the English nation-that in truth I had actually all along wanted to join Lieutenant Bowen's mission as a deckhand to assist in civilising Van Diemen's Land. In this way I was persuaded to venture to the New World where Progress & the Future are said to reside.

v

AT FIRST MY painting was an accident & later it came to be the only thing I could do half well. I reckoned it easy work, & by the time I realised it wasn't, it was too late to learn any other trade. It was in the New World, while on my surreptitious return from my successful if misunderstood invasion of Australia, that I met up in the swamps of Louisiana with a Creole who in his own way was responsible for my passion for fish. His name was Jean-Babeuf Audubon & he was a plain-looking man, short, whose most distinctive feature was the large lace cuffs he insisted on wearing everywhere, & which were in consequence always frayed & filthy.

Jean-Babeuf Audubon persuaded me that being in my twenties, I was obviously a man in the prime of his life who would wish to secure his lot against a hostile future by investing the small capital I had brought with me in a business venture he was pursuing with an Englishman called George Keats-running a steamboat in a tiny Kentucky hamlet. His purchase of some very fine frock coats immediately after I handed over my money did nothing to lessen my belief in the dreams of this bedraggled quail of a man, for like all true villains I was credulous in the face of any idea larger than obvious & immediate theft.

Though we all wanted to be Capitalists, it was through Audubon that I was to learn about painting, for Audubon's business was as implausible as his stories of his father-like mine, supposedly French-his purportedly the Dauphin, who under an alias fought with Washington at Valley Forge. We saw ourselves as hardheads & roundly laughed at Keats' story of his dreamy brother John who wished to be a poet in the Old World & who, unlike us, was never going to amount to anything. But no measure of hardheading, of Capitalist Desire, could help when the steamboat's boiler blew up, & the local farmers preferred to use the traditional poled & horse-pulled barges to Audubon & Keats' folly, & the itinerant niggers & backwoodsmen preferred to walk than pay the money we had to charge not to go under.

But the lack of interest in the boat & its consequent lack of movement did at least enable time for other things, mainly outings into the woods where we'd shoot birds & bring them back. I'd watch as Audubon wired their bloodied corpses up to form dramatick shapes of ascent & descent, stretching wings this way & that, & then sketched & painted these bedraggled tormented forms as beautiful birds.

I thought him an exceptional painter & said so, but he was ungracious in the face of compliments & in his heavy Creole accent berated me. He disliked art. It was, said he, the name given to paintings after they had been stolen & sold. He was only a painter of birds.

I learnt also-though more from the birds Jean-Babeuf Audubon failed to shoot than from Jean-Babeuf Audubon himself-the importance of always being a moving target in this life, for there is nothing that people love more than their opposite. Thus in America I learnt the value of being an underworld Englishman, while later, when back in underworld England, I played upon being an American adventurer, & here in Van Diemen's Land they seem to like nothing more than the Artist From Elsewhere-by which, of course, I mean Europe-no matter how mediocre. If I ever get back to Europe I will, I suppose, feel compelled to play the part of the wronged, wide-eyed rustick colonial.

Audubon knew a great deal about birds & their customs & society, & very neat & hard & not fuzzy or soft at all were his bird pictures. As if from under the feathered wings of their mother, Audubon's birds would emerge from beneath his dirty lace cuffs, fully formed, beautiful, sorrowful, alive. From Audubon I learnt to search the animal being painted for its essential humours, its pride or its earnestness or its savagery, its idiocy or its madness. Because to him nothing was ever simply a specimen: all life presented him with an encyclopaedia of subjects, & the only troublesome task-and he conceded it sometimes came less than easy-was to understand the truth that the subject represented & then get it down, as honestly & accurately as possible. To do this-to distil into a single image the spirit of a whole life-he needed stories, & his stroke of genius was to find his stories not in the trees or forests or bayous, but in the new American towns & cities erupting like a fatal attack of pellagra all over that land, in the dreams & hopes of those around him.

Audubon painted marriages, courting, all the vain pretence of polite society, & all of it was birds & all of his birds sold & it was all up a very clever thing that he was doing, a natural history of the new burghers. I could, I suppose, paint the fish in some similar imitation of the schools in which the local free settlers swim. But the fish come to me in the true condition of this life: alone, fearful, with no home, nowhere to run & hide. And if I were to place two of my fish together would I then have a school? Would I have the appearance of the ocean beneath the waves which only the native women diving for crayfish see?

No.

I would only have two fish: each alone, fearful, united solely in the terror of death I see in their eyes. Audubon painted the dreams of a new country for which there is always a prospective purchaser; my fish are the nightmare of the past for which there is no market. What I am painting is not clever like the work of Jean-Babeuf Audubon, nor will it ever prove popular: it is a natural history of the dead.

In the end the boat was burnt, we said by angry creditors, they said by us: whatever, we were all ruined, & the last I saw of Jean-Babeuf Audubon was him waving a sooty lace cuff out of a slit in the local lockup where he had been incarcerated as a debtor. But this time no birds magically appeared. Keats, who was sitting outside, was reading aloud for Audubon's benefit some of his brother's lamentable verse on the treacherous promise of the New World-verse I did not think much inclined to cheer Jean-Babeuf Audubon, who in his cell was pleading with his captors, yelling in his deplorable Creole accent: 'I ham Eenglesh caportlist. I ham.'

Outside, Keats paid no heed to such argument, declaiming: 'Their bad flowers have no scent, their birds no sweet song.'

'A men of the on-ore,' the aggrieved Audubon was shouting, 'and shell pay-if cursed.'

'And great unerring Nature,' continued Keats, 'for once seems wrong.'

VI

TWENTY YEARS PASSED.

There ought be a full reckoning of my life through that time, but I have just read to the King what I have so far written. Tellingly, chillingly, he has offered no comment. His natural courtesy forbids open criticism, but I caught his opaque eye & his contempt is transparent, his wisdom-as always-instructive.

I can see he is saving me from the folly of recording what he &, I suspect, you have no interest whatsoever in hearing-what happened to Billy Gould in those years. You may think every moment of Billy Gould's life has equal weight, but the King knows that to be untrue. Most of it passed as in a miserable dream that dissolves upon waking, because it is too immemorable to recall, beyond its ending in arrest for forgery in Bristol in 1825.

I wasn't a forger, & I wasn't happy being accused as such. I was a Villain on the lam who had once painted, & I was insulted that anyone would accuse me of stooping so low as counterfeiting Bank of Bristol notes. Still, haying always maintained that the best way of battling power is to agree, upon being sentenced to be transported to Van Diemen's Land for forgery, I became a forger. After all, what else could I do?

Claiming to be an Artist seemed consistent with the lie of my conviction, & offered the prospect of a better billet than labouring in a chain gang & made me look like something other than the common criminal I was, & that is the only forgery I was until then ever guilty of-forging myself anew as an Artist.

But it didn't begin so well.

My first attempt at a painting, admittedly somewhat derivative of a lithograph of Robespierre I chanced across in a pamphlet illustrating the horrors of the French Terror, was of Captain Pinchbeck, the commander of the convict transport, who had requested his own portrait upon discovering my trade. My picture so angered the captain that he had me clapped back in chains for the rest of the boat's six-month journey to Australia. I tried to make it up by then rendering him as the more manly Danton, but all up it seemed to the captain only a further, & in this case, unforgivable insult.

Too late, as I was being brought up from the stinking hold, did I discover from the mate that the captain had for some time suffered the ignominy of being cuckolded by a French whaler.

I began condemning the pandering ponces of other races to Captain Pinchbeck, only to be told by him to shut up, whilst he lectured me on the horrors of the French-most particularly their dreaded noyades. These had taken place at the height of the Terror in the hulks of old slave ships that were filled with rebels from the Vendée & sunk of an evening in the harbour of Nantes, to be each morning ingeniously refloated, emptied of their watery corpses, & refilled with more rebels of whom there was an inexhaustible supply, because, as Captain Pinchbeck put it, tyranny will always bring forth its opponents as the rain does grass.

When finally finished with telling this interminable tale he had me taken to what he called his petite noyade, the perforated coffin-like box in which men were locked then dragged behind the boat's wake, so that I could discover what it really felt like to be French.

I would like to say that when I was then dropped for a full minute into the Pacific Ocean inside that bubbling black wet box of slimy oak, I had the first intimation of what the true consequence of Art for my future was going to be. But that would be untrue. I merely resolved to look for templates other than those of Frenchie troublemakers & pants-men, & held my breath until I reckoned I was about to burst.

When I was pulled back out of the water the captain told me that if I ever painted him again he would personally feed me to those he called the sea-lawyers-the sharks that trailed our boat. As I was dragged out of the petite noyade, a convict constable gave me a good kicking in full view of the captain. Curling up into a ball, it occurred to me that Captain Pinchbeck might just be wrong on the matter of tyranny, that for every tyrant born, so too are a thousand men willing to be enslaved, & that whoever the rebels of the Vendée were, they deserved to be drowned for entirely misunderstanding this truth of human nature.

I don't want you to think because of this that my reinvention of myself as a painter was a total lie. After all, I had watched Jean-Babeuf Audubon work, & had once even finished off for him a pair of bald eagles that he had to get done in a hurry to honour a pressing debt. There was my time spent with the engraver Shuggy Ackermann, but that didn't seem to count for anything more than the possibility of further criminal charges. As well, I suppose I could mention my half-year of Potteries experience, but I don't feel like going into that just now, because it makes me all sad thinking of how I had once danced the Old Enlightenment with such gusto, & now have only Widow Thumb & her Four Daughters to play with.

Elsewhere there may have been other prospects with both work & women, & frankly I would have welcomed them. But I had to take work as it came, to learn the rules of my art as best I could from such bad experience.

Upon arrival in that grotty modern world of Van Diemen's Land in the stinking late summer heat, all hideous new sandstone warehouses & customs houses & chain gangs & redcoats, I was assigned to Palmer the coachbuilder in Launceston, what passes as the capital of the island's north. For him I painted shiny family crests on coaches, inventing coats of arms for the bastard issue of the New World that wished to dress up in the absurd livery of the Old. Lions rampant & oaks evergreen & red hands & swords ever erect mixed with no good reason & little need for explanation on our coach doors, underlined with absurd Latin mottos provided by an Irish cleric doing time for bestiality: Luae fuerent vitia, mores sunt (What were once vices are now manners); Vedi Hobarti e poi muouri (See Hobart & die); Ver non semper viret (Spring does not always flourish). It was my first great artistick lesson: colonial art is the comic knack of rendering the new as the old, the unknown as the known, the antipodean as the European, the contemptible as the respectable.

VII

I ABSCONDED AFTER six months. I made my way south, heading back to Hobart Town by shanks's pony, with the hope of escaping by boat from there as I had two decades previously. The long weary war with the savages was still far from over, the savages showing such a craftiness in their attacks that many colonists-their dwellings at the edge of great black forests where fear naturally engenders suspicion-believed them sorcerers. The back country was their country, but upon it was a plague of escapees & bushranger gangs that shot redcoats & redcoat patrols that shot bushrangers & vigilantes out for the pleasure of shooting up some savages or, failing that, anyone.

The occasional armed compound that passed for a homestead was even more fearful. I approached one in the hope of a night's shelter & was only saved from the wild dogs set on me by the warning musket shots fired from slits in the great outer wall.

I resolved that rather than continue making my way by skirting the highway through the midlands, I would take the longer but far safer route down the coastline of the east. I walked to where green sea broke light into a shrapnel of silver & scattered it over glistening white beaches, along which I often came upon the bleaching bones & skulls of savages slaughtered by sealers in their raids for black women. Such a sight was a peculiar comfort, for it meant the beaches were safe for me to travel, for except in the remote west the savages now tended to avoid the coast. Still of a night I made no fire for fear of the savages finding & killing me, though it was early spring & the frost bitter & hard.

Four days out of Launceston & hopelessly lost I fell in with a man who said his name was Roaring Tom Weaver. He tried to interfere with me on our first night but seemed not put out when I told him to leave me alone, him replying I wasn't really his sort of molly-boy anyway.

Upon being shot at by a whaling party foraging for water the next afternoon, we headed inland. We followed the stars into the night but then it clouded over & we finally halted on a rocky outcrop. It was thick with flies, but we were lost & too tired to continue. We slept like dead men. When the sun rose it was to reveal that the flies had as their home the sloughing corpse of a black woman who lay not a hundred yards down from where we had stopped the night.

She had been staked out on the ground, abused in a most dreadful fashion & then left to die. Parts of her shimmered white with the light of the sun playing on moving maggots. Roaring Tom began to wail & screech. He was a wild animal & it was a long time before I could have him halt his awful keening.

That night, by a miserable fire we were too afraid to feed with anything other than the smallest of sticks, we said nothing. The following day we hit on open country, a delightful parkland beneath a sky so perfect a china blue-a sky the likes of which I never saw in the Old World-that it seemed brittle, as though it might at any moment break apart & reveal something awful behind all that glorious light.

We smelt the smoke of the burning shepherd's hut long afore we saw that bark & daub hut's smouldering ruins & the charred corpse of its tenant being pulled out of the ash on a long piece of bark by his mate, who could not stop weeping. The weeping man was an emancipist who had a backblock in the next valley & sometimes came over to see his cobber the shepherd, both being Roscommon men. He had arrived too late: the savages had speared his friend in the hut & then set it alight, leaving him there to be burnt alive. Upon him firing on them the savages scattered. The emancipist pointed to a fallen tree, behind which lay a savage he had shot. He had never killed a man before & it was unclear what upset him more, the death of his friend or this killing of the savage.

Seven days out from Launceston we fell in with Clucas, a barbarous man who had been doing work for the free settler Batman, helping round up the savages. He could, said he, talk their cant from his time sealing & knew something of their ways. We were defenceless, hungry & again lost. Clucas carried a pistol & a musket he could flourish, wallaby meat & flour he was willing to share, & he knew the way to Hobart. He dressed like so many of the Diemenese banditti: coarse-cut kangaroo & tiger skins roughly stitched together, a tiger-skin cap on his long-haired head. He happily talked of bursting in on the camp fires of the savages on Batman's instructions & shooting up to a dozen or more & then cooking them on their own fire. He said he was no beast like some sealers he had met on the islands in Bass Strait, such as Munro, who sliced off part of the thigh & the ears of his woman, Jumbo, & made her eat them as punishment for trying to escape. When we told him of the staked woman he was for a moment reflective, & then laughing said some gins were right Amazons & had it coming.

Camping just down from Black Charlie's Opening there was a wild thunderstorm, we could see the plains of Pittwater & beyond Hobart's snowcapped Mount Wellington lit by great lightning strikes. Wet through & miserable we struck out before dawn. A little after sunrise we came upon what was once a great peppermint gum tree, a good two yards in diameter at its base. Broken by the violence of a white lightning strike, the rest of the tree-its trunk & all its branches-were shattered in to a great mess of white & black fragments thrown up to two hundred yards away. Everywhere broken timber, woodchips & sticks, great boughs & tiny shavings. There was no way of telling how big & wonderful that tree of Van Diemen's Land once was, now broken into a million splinters.

VIII

UPON MAKING IT to Hobart under cover of a chill night, the banditto Clucas arranged us a hideout in a sly-grog shop in the wharf area of Wapping run by a Liverpool maroon called Capois Death. He promised to find a place for us both on a departing whaler within the month.

Two days later we were picked up by the wallopers on Clucas' information. Roaring Tom Weaver turned out to be a runaway catamite & was sentenced to fourteen years retransportation to Sarah Island. I was nabbed in the Shades taproom painting a mural of bald eagles garlanded with wisteria to pay off a considerable rum tab. I was sentenced to three months on the chain gang at the falsely named Bridgewater, dragging boulders in wooden sleds to create a causeway across the Derwent River. Within a week Lieutenant Perisher, the officer in charge of the causeway, had me taken out of irons & hired me out to paint portraits of officers' & free settlers' wives & other prey freshly killed-weird kangaroos & emus with a pheasant drawn from memory draped scarf-like over tables.

In those days the muddy streets & stinking rookeries of Hobart Town almost seemed something of an artist's colony with more than a few working there under government patronage: there was Bock the abortionist, whose hands had once administered mercury draughts to young fearful women, now painting the colony's complacent rulers; there was Wainewright the murderer, who was as adept at pencilling sketches of virginal maidens as he had once been with poisoning his wife with strychnine-laced laudanum; & Savery the forger, who wrote mannered trash about the colony that flattered its audience with so many imitations of their own stupidity. One day you might see one or another of these artists on a chain gang, breaking rocks with a napping hammer down the Salamanca wharves; the next week they were bustling out of an upper Macquarie Street parlour with pad & paints, trying to look oh-so-very much the Professional Aesthete, but-in rotten old twill trousers & coarse old canary coats, with mangy hair rough-hacked & poxed skin stubbly-inevitably failing.

I, to the contrary, playing the part of the jobbing journeyman, doffed my cap & never pretended to be other than where I was on the Van Diemonian ladder-at the bottom. Competition wasn't so fierce, my manner was not so threatening, & a few holes in the market opened for me.

IX

I BEGAN TO find my services in demand: the painting of portraits of milky-eyed patriarchs on their deathbed; of infant corpses for grieving free-settler families, in which I shared with the undertaker that most hopeless of tasks, trying to discover the shape of a soft smile on those pallid faces; prize stallions, boars & quick sketches of naked women in the manner of melting love pictures-luridly welcoming a young-man-as-bull entering them, trying for a stylised rather than honest line.

The rate of pay was not entirely favourable: Lieutenant Perisher took nine-tenths of every commission. Still, it was easier & warmer work than dragging boulders, barefooted & chained, through the icy mud & hoarfrost & mist of Bridgewater. And, whatever Lieutenant Perisher's sins, he turned a blind eye to my nightly outings.

My subsequent time in Hobart Town I now can recall only as a tedious repetition of lockups & breakouts: sometimes nabbed by the Crown, generally for absconding or some minor misdemeanour, more often by irate publicans & sly-grog shop owners demanding some form of painting work to recompense them for the bill run up by me during one binge or another. It was, in the main, a pattern of drink, debt, imprisonment & incarceration in cellars & barrel sheds where I had to paint in exchange for my liberty, a clean slate, & a fresh opportunity for me to mollynog with some of the ladies-fine or less fine, I was never that fussed-I perchance might meet around the traps. And in the main, it was fine. Did I say tedious? Well yes, that too, but it had the virtue of rhythm & the pleasure of certainty. It was like a child's spinning top that sooner or later cracks.

As my artistick production had to be maintained at an equivalent rate to my drinking, my paintings quickly became as much a feature of Hobart Town taprooms as their tobacco & whale-oil smoke stained walls. At the Hope & Anchor, for example, I was not let out of the woodshed until I had completed a painting of some dead meat in the Dutch style in payment for my rum tab there. I composed an original picture full of the old rustick favourites-a dead hare strung up by its back legs, a few pheasants, a musket or two, a brown demijohn for domestick effect, & a bald eagle on a perch.

There was if not a certain progress in my art over the next year, then at least a slow alteration, & what began as bricolage ended as a style. At the Repent & Drink I painted a mural of flowers in the Potteries manner to recompense that publican, Augusto Traverso, for the supposed passing of a false note. The flowers entwined with some of the patrons, looking admittedly more like a pastoral tribute to the Revolution's Committee of Public Safety-so many elegant, reasoned floralled Marats & Robespierres-than an accurate rendering of dishevelled, unreasonable Hobart Town drunks. Still the old lags-bless their rancid souls-were flattered enough to be happy.

Undoubtedly the high point of my short Hobart Town career was my dramatick canvas for the Iron Duke depicting the depravity of circus life after that good publican's woman ran off with the Great Valerio, a Sicilian high-rope walker & seller of aphrodisiac powders. I did a terrifying mural of a soft naked woman being dragged into a Hell of flaming acrobats & tumblers by a rather nasty looking bald eagle, beneath which was inscribed the motto: Ex Australis semper aliquid novi (There's always something new out of Australia).

'The only taproom in Hobart without a Gould on the wall,' remarked the sly-grog shop owner Mr Capois Death, upon seeing this much celebrated marvel, 'is the one with Gould in the gutter.'

He slapped me heartily on the back &, for once being square with me, offered to pay should I do a special job for him. It only took a morning's painting to knock up the sign on a square Huon pine board. It showed an exasperated white woman (model: Mrs Arthur, wife of the Governor of the island colony, Lieutenant George Arthur) scrubbing as hard as she could a black baby in a wooden tub who smiles back at her, below which sat the logo of the establishment this advertised-the Labour In Vain, such sign celebrating Mr Capois Death's establishment near the Old Wharf going legal.

Along with the knowledge that I was, after all, only acting on his instructions, I these days console myself with the thought that Mr Capois Death was, one way or another, always destined for disaster. His reputation was as a flash man, gained from his passion for molly-boys, his stable of fast women & slow horses, & a similarly unreliable taste made alcohol in his notorious Larrikin Soup, a violently strong purl-ale flavoured with wormwood, a poor man's absinthe. Then, though, destiny seemed as fresh & promising as the summer sea breeze into which the sign was hoisted & hung flapping above a delighted Mr Capois Death.

It was, if you will allow me the compliment, a grand thing that pub sign, gently rocking back & forth, so light & laughing it brought a smile to the face of one & all who passed beneath it in Barracouta Row. They would have laughed all the more over their pots of purl-ale if they had seen the future it truly signposted, rather than the Larrikin Soup we foolishly thought it advertised. It is hard to believe the power such a painting had, that its effect on me & Capois Death was to prove as decisive as if it were not a sign board but Madame Guillotine herself hovering over our heads. But before it destroyed us the Labour In Vain was going to bring us together.

We of course saw none of this. Capois Death was himself a man of colour, a maroon from Liverpool, & he found the picture amusing & instructive. He said that I had caught the spirit of the island precisely. I was allowed back into his taproom with a clean slate.

The following day Mr Capois Death was closed down on Governor Arthur's direct orders, on the grounds of promoting subversion. Our splendid sign was burnt & Mr Capois Death & myself were sentenced to fourteen days on the treadwheel, he for the inadvertent poisoning of a ship's surgeon, me for absconding without notice from Palmer the coachbuilder.

That would have been if not tolerable then at least survivable, if it hadn't been for the unexpected return of Captain Pinchbeck to Hobart Town. He was now working as a whaling skipper, in the hope, it was said, of one day accidentally harpooning his French rival, but his desire for vengeance was, as I was to discover, even larger than the leviathans he pursued through the southern oceans. In the course of a night's carousing he had cause to visit several local establishments, including the Iron Duke & the Repent & Drink, from whose paintings he deduced that I was pursuing a vendetta through a series of cleverly coded paintings depicting his cuckolding & slow strangulation by Gallic adulterers. This was my second lesson in colonial art: you discover the true nature of your subject at the same time as you discover your audience, but it is an added disappointment.

By chance Captain Pinchbeck had dinner with the Governor & his still aggrieved wife the evening following our arraignment for the Labour In Vain clapboard. That much I know-what was said through long candles & over the wombat consommé can only be guessed at.

The following morning I was informed that an order signed by Governor Arthur himself had just arrived, in which it was commanded that myself & Mr Death, whose complicity seemed to lie only in his folly of keeping company with me on the treadwheel, were to be transported to Sarah Island for seven years, he upon several new charges of sedition, me-an escapee who had been at large for twenty years-for having conspired to pervert the course of justice through the use of a false name.

Various mentions were made of mutinous & rebellious behaviour, desecration of national flag, etc, etc, at the time of the colony's founding by a person whose name I recognised as one to which I had once answered. But now condemned to Sarah Island, I felt like only answering to myself. When asked if I had anything to say in regard to my sentence, I replied:

'I am William Buelow Gould, & my name is a song that will be sung.'

On the grounds of insolence my sentence was doubled to fourteen years.

X

THE COCKCHAFER WAS a wondrous cruel machine. It left your body feeling as if it were composed of pain rather than flesh. This was not only from the sheer physical fatigue or the rasping effects even a few hours stepping up & down in coarse government slops would have upon one's groin, leaving it a mass of raw red flesh, but from the monstrous brilliance of its utter pointlessness, knowing at the end of the day that your cruel labour was entirely for no other purpose than to propel that monstrous treadwheel.

The Cockchafer took the form of a gigantic, stretched waterwheel suspended slightly above floor level, like some grotesque rolling pin clad in wooden slats that formed steps. It stood the height of two men & was a good two dozen yards long, so that up to thirty men could be punished simultaneously.

We climbed a short stepladder to shoulder height, grasped a fixed handle of sweat & blood-burnished gum wood that ran the length of the treadwheel at elbow height, then stepped onto that rotating waterwheel in which we had to become as water. For the next ten hours we climbed that circle of Hell, never going any higher than the next falling step, trying not to hear the groaning of each other, the thrum of the spindle, the clock-clock-clocking of our chains. In the torturous summer heat we ran rivers of sweat, making the steps slimy & slippery & us maddened with thirst.

Near the evening of the second day a machine breaker from Glasgow became beset by terrible cramping & was only able to lift his legs with the greatest agony. Despite his pleas, the guards refused to stand him down. Unable to climb, he finally fell & became stuck between the treadwheel & the stepladder. The slats ground past his jammed body, but still that huge wheel, as if answering to laws other than those of this earth, rolled on as we yelled to the guards to allow us to halt. Even after the order was given to step down, it was not immediately possible to stop the great momentum of the wheel, so it further pounded the poor man until coming to rest jammed.

Some didn't care, were grateful only for the break his suffering gave us, saying if he was lucky he would perish. Others clawed like mad men for a time, trying to roll the wheel back & pull him out. We talked to the machine breaker & he a little to us. In dark words dribbling with bloody gobs from his mouth he admitted that he wished he was a real Villain. We roared our approval & finally managed to drag his broken body, so inexplicably unmarked, onto the dust of the muster floor in front of the wheel.

'My father was a weaver,' he continued, '& I am sorry to have shamed my father, but weaving is no fit business now, in fact it is no business at all.' Then he stopped saying anything for a long time, & we wondered, is he thinking or is he dying?

Then his voice sounded once more, though this time it was much more distant & muffled, as if all the machine-spun cotton in the world was wadding up into his bloody mouth. 'My father was a weaver,' he repeated, 'but it is better for a man in such times to steal silk than weave cotton on the steam… ' But he couldn't say the word 'machine', only rucked a further spew of blood onto the floor.

Later he began raving how the kelpy was coming to take him. He was screeching, thin & harsh, like an ungreased treadle no longer used. Another Scot from the wheel said the kelpy was a spirit of the waters in the shape of a horse, & that this kelpy drowned those who travelled too far from their home.

We were ordered back to the wheel & left the weaver where he lay until a doctor could be found. His screeching dimmed to an odd gobby scream, as if he were trying to vomit all those steam spinning machines out of his mouth, & failing.

Capois Death began to talk loudly to the weaver, which was strictly forbidden while one was on the wheel but the guards chose to ignore him for it seemed to calm the weaver & stop him screaming. Capois Death told his mother's tales of her country & of the many fabulous things she had seen & known before the slavers had come & her chiefs had sold her. As we went down & back up on the Cockchafer, I too listened & tried to imagine how it might be possible to fly as Capois Death's ancestors once had; to levitate then fly far from Van Diemen's Land's chains & cockchafers by eating fish eyes & smearing a bird's blood over my arms & leaping off a certain magic mountain, then diving into the sea & swimming as one with the fish until one was a fish.

Occasionally, as Capois Death talked, he twisted around to grab a glance of the machine breaker now broken by a machine, to see if he was yet dead, but always his eyes were clear, brighter than fire coals, & those eyes were always following us, as if we should not have allowed such a thing as the Cockchafer & our subjugation by it, as though we were somehow culpable for a greater crime than the tawdry offences listed in our convict records.

XI

ON THE FORTNIGHT-LONG journey in a small packet around the uninhabited south coast of Van Diemen's Land to Macquarie Harbour the seas grew so violent that we were forced to take safe anchorage in the expanse of Port Davey.

It transpired that the captain's Cape Town mistress, under the influence of an innumerate Kabbalist to whom she had recourse for divining her future, believed that truth was to be found in threes. As emissaries of his love the captain had thus sent three rings made of gold teeth wrenched with a cruel urgency from several formerly rich convicts' mouths; then three live emus, which had all died in transit; & in a more exotic mood three white-pointer sharks' mouths, though this latter gift was more in memory of the pleasures she had given him than a present to please her. The captain had heard nothing for eighteen months; he worried his gifts needed to be more subtle & enigmatic, & for this reason the presence in his boat of a painter with whose work he was, as a patron of Hobart Town hotelries, passing familiar, suggested to him the idea of a painted triptych of weird Van Diemonian creatures.

I was brought up on deck along with Mr Death, the captain having in former times drunk in his establishments & made use of his women. My first suggestion of three bald eagles he hastily rejected, as he did the idea of three wisteria garlands. He warned me that he wanted nothing provocative in the manner of Mrs Arthur & the black baby, but something that seemed innocent & only of itself yet which could be read in an entirely different manner. Capois Death suggested that the triptych contain an animal, a bird & a fish, & the captain seemed to think this a splendid idea. What truth this added up to, an admonishment or an encouragement, was entirely beyond me, but the subtle messages of my work were, I decided, not for me to decode. 'You are the fish,' said Capois Death, whose opinion I had not solicited, 'not the net.'

The following afternoon I was summoned to the captain's presence & presented with a watercolour set & instructions to paint the outcome of his morning's hunting onshore: an orange-bellied parrot before it was plucked & thrown into the parrot pie the captain was to have for his tea, & a small kangaroo of the type the Van Diemonians call a wallaby, which was also to be cooked into a stew when I had finished with it.

The pictures did not end up the most truthful. The orange-bellied parrot, a small, rather sweet & colourful bird in the flesh, bulked larger on paper than in life. It was unavoidable: half the poor creature's head had been blown apart by the captain's shot & much of its body was matted in dried blood. I drew on experience to fill the hole the captain had made, & the bird took on a regal splendour, its posture one of a brooding aggression, its beak &-well, to be honest-its entire body more bald eagle than Van Diemonian parrot. The kangaroo was worse: this handsome animal on paper evolved a suspicious rodent-face rather than its own gentle physiognomy, to which was coupled a body suffering severe posture problems, the whole absurdity capped off with a long ropy tail more suited to a kite.

My body was, as you might expect after the horrors visited upon it by Captain Pinchbeck when he had been unhappy with my work, a prickly sweat. I couldn't swallow, my tongue rolled around my mouth like a lolling smoked cod. I tried to touch up the pictures, then gave up & started all over again, but the results only worsened each time-the kangaroo ever more some deer with the dropsy & an impossible anatomy; the parrot with each redoubled attempt increasingly a warrior of the wind, an aggressive North American spirit in an ill-fitting, garishly coloured jacket.

When the captain came shortly before dusk to inspect my handiwork, memories of the petite noyade flooded my mind as surely as water had that awful box. I was unable to speak, gulped & felt seawater already filling my throat, & meekly placed the pictures before him on the deck without comment. But unlike Captain Pinchbeck, this captain seemed pleased by the element of the unreal that had accidentally crept in. It suggested, said he, a world at once more fantastick & yet bizarrely more familiar than the one we lived in, & all up he felt it would do him only good with his mistress.

To complete the triptych he had the following day brought me a fish that the sailors liked to catch with hook & line off the reefs of the harbour, & then smoke & eat. The fish was large-scaled & coloured pretty enough; perhaps it was this latter feature that made the captain think it might appeal to his mistress. I was told that in consequence of its favoured food, the great aquatic forests of bull-kelp that occur in the oceans off Van Diemen's Land, the fish was known to the convicts as a kelpy.

XII

IT LOOKED NOTHING like a horse. It looked like a two-pound pretty fish that might, if you were hungry enough, be worth smoking & eating. But that didn't make me feel any better. Was a kelpy a kelpy or just a fish? Was a fish just a fish? & then I looked into that damn kelpy's eyes & though I did not wish it they were taking me back, quicker than Mr Banks scalping a blackfella, to the Cockchafer & us sitting around that evening waiting for the machine breaker to die, wondering whether he would last the night, & trying to work out a way of persuading the cook to give us some lard with which we might grease our raw thighs, when Capois Death began once more to talk.

He had an authority about him that is impossible to explain & which was entirely at odds with the bald facts of his physical presence. A portrait would show a short black man with a slightly weak chin, & a twist to his right shoulder that gave him a curious nature, at once intimidatory & suspicious, for he always seemed to be glancing behind himself & would corkscrew his whole body around to listen to you as though he were about to hit you.

Capois Death was originally from San Domingo, his wrinkled prune face as circuitous as his history. Like some other former slaves I had met he carried with him everywhere a spirit bottle. It was a dull, scratched earthenware pitcher & contained, said he, his own invincible memory of himself as a self-liberated man encased for protection in his once-celebrated Larrikin Soup. He had, when taken to Bermuda from Jamaica to be sold there by his master, succeeded in bribing a soldier with fellatio to forge his certificate of freedom & thereupon fled to England where he found work first in the north Atlantic as a harpooner & later in Liverpool as a footman, a position he lost along with his freedom upon being caught stealing silverware from his employer.

He had a crooked mouth constantly in motion, & when night came & we were ordered back to our quarters, taking the machine breaker with us as no doctor had yet arrived, he told us, as we lay on our old damp straw palliasses, in a form so epic & so open as to be never-ending, the story of the great slave revolt of San Domingo in which half a million slaves overthrew in turn the local whites, the soldiers of the French monarchy, a Spanish invasion, an English expedition of sixty thousand men, & a second French expedition led by Bonaparte's brother-in-law.

And he told it just like that, like he was an infantryman firing, loading, & refiring his musket, brickfaced without pause & without emphasis, & the horror & the glory & the wonder of it all were in the accumulation of endless detail, of how as a child he had witnessed the ferocity of the revolt; of Bonaparte's brother-in-law's attempt to quell it; of seeing Negroes being publicly fed to dogs & being burnt alive; of their leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the black Napoleon, betrayed by the white Napoleon; of L'Ouverture's cultured black general Maurepas, having to watch his wife & children being drowned before his eyes as the French soldiers nailed a pair of wooden epaulettes into his naked shoulders, taunting him, laughing as they hammered so: A real Bonaparte now! And yet it was also another Frenchman, the sea-captain Mazard, to whom he owed his life, who had refused to drown the one hundred & fifty slaves given him for that express purpose & instead took them to Jamaica. There he sold them to the English planters, something for which the captain was reviled by both white & black for the former wanted the blacks' death as punishment for their rebellion, & the latter would rather die in any manner than continue to live as slaves, because to die as a free man meant the revolt never ended.

Capois Death fell silent. For a moment it seemed that we were back on the wheel & there was only the sound of our irons as we stepped, clock-clock-clocking, the slow rolling thrum of the wheel, as though there was no escape except in stories. Then the Glasgow machine breaker once more spoke, but his voice was now a wretched rasping croak, & he asked us to kill him.

At first we dismissed his pleadings, reassuring him that at some point the doctor would arrive & he would be treated.

But he was gasping repeatedly, as if he was bound to a new wheel & could only reprise its rhythm:

'I am dying!'

Over & over & over, clock-clock-clocking.

As though we doubted it.

XIII

CAPOIS DEATH PICKED up his palliasse & walked over to where the machine breaker lay. He knelt down & looked away from the man's eyes. He seemed to be looking at his thick black hair, which he pushed into a side part with gentle sweeps of his hand. He ran the side of his hand down onto the machine breaker's cheek, holding it there for a moment. Then he stood up, dropped the palliasse over the machine breaker's head & kneeling, straddled the man's covered head, stretching the palliasse taut between his knees.

In this manner he held the machine breaker tight & began to sing in a soft voice the songs he had learnt from his mother. The smothered man's body bolted & bucked, but his thrashing seemed to all too quickly grow subdued & then halt altogether. Capois Death stayed sitting on the man for a good minute more, then stopped his singing & stood up & dragged his palliasse off.

No-one moved. All eyes were fixed on the machine breaker for a sign of life. There was none. Capois Death rifled his pockets & finding half a garnet ring, dropped it in his spirit bottle. Then he lay back down on his palliasse, closed his eyes, & on the deck of the convict ship I opened mine & saw around me the low rolling wild-lands of Port Davey, & knew that was all now behind me, that the most frightful task before me was only to paint the fish the captain had given me as the subject of the third part of his lover's triptych.

The kelpy which he had presented to me to paint was not one that seemed to be cognisant of its fate as an ambassador of romance. Curled in a bucket of seawater, it was still alive &, it seemed, somehow faintly contemptuous of its new role. I took the kelpy out of the bucket for half a minute or so, arranging it on the table in front of me, working quickly, then placing it back in the water so it might breathe & not yet die. This dry table, I realised, was the kelpy's petite noyade, & I his Captain Pinchbeck. Like me, the kelpy was guilty. Like me, it had no idea why.

I found it not so hard to paint a reasonably accurate picture, but the kelpy's eyes followed me as if it knew all our true crimes, just like the machine breaker's eyes had followed me until the moment of his death, but that was not exactly how I painted the fish-as an accusing, horrified eye in a dying body. No, emboldened by the oddities the captain had so unexpectedly sanctioned with the first two paintings, I must confess I began taking liberties with that fish's face, so it was both the fish's knowing eye & the horror of the machine breaker's eye watching us on the tread wheel; so it was both that & so many other things. It was Capois Death's stare & buck teeth & his half-horrified, half-fascinated look forever backwards over his shoulder at his own past as the machine breaker bucked beneath him. It was all that blood-of fish eyes & revolting slaves being torn apart & Maurepas' nailed shoulders haemorrhaging & the blood in the machine breaker's eyes after we drew the palliasse away-and it was my own fear at this cracked world in which I & they & everything was trapped. It was a funny thing but then it didn't seem so funny that all these things were bound together for a moment & all existed as a single dying kelpy.

They were stupid thoughts, & I was glad when the captain took the picture away for his mistress & gave the sailors the kelpy to smoke & eat.

XIV

HOW COULD I then-as I was painting my first fish-have known I was setting out on a venture as quixotic as it was infinite? I have read the lives of the artists &, like the lives of the saints, greatness seems imprinted upon them from the beginning. At birth their fingers are recorded making painterly flourishes, merely waiting for a loaded brush & a canvas to fill with the images they seem to have been born with, so many immaculate conceptions.

But art is a punitive sentence, not a birthright, & there is nothing in my early life that suggests artistick aptitude or even interest, my pastimes & fascinations nearly all being what may-& were-deemed the merely villainous. And though I am, of course, the hero of this, my own tale, if only because I can't really imagine anyone else wanting to be, my story is no remade myth of Orpheus, but the story of a sewer rat made worse.

I am William Buelow Gould, sloe-souled, green-eyed, gap-toothed, shaggy-haired & grizzle-gutted, & though my pictures will be even poorer than my looks, my paintings lacking the majesty of a Girtin, the command of a Turner, believe me when I tell you that I will try to show you everything, mad & cracked & bad as it was.

I'll make the mark my way, be buggered if I won't & I know I'll be damned if I do, for it may not be Lake poetry or Ovid or that damned dwarf Pope but it will be the best I can do & like no other has. Rough work with a soul will always be open to all, including condemnation & reviling, while fine work housing emptiness is closed to all insults & is easily ivied over with paid praises. They say the storyteller is the man who would let the wick of his life be consumed by the flame of his story. But like good Trim Shandy I shall confine myself to no man's rule. Next to my paintings I intend to make a bonfire of words, say anything if it illuminates a paltry moment of truth in my poor pictures.

I am William Buelow Gould & I mean to paint for you as best I can, which is but poorly, which is but a rude man's art, the sound of water on stone, the fool's dream of the hard giving way to the soft, & I hope you will come to see reflected in my translucent watercolours not patches of the white cartridge paper beneath, but the very opacity of the souls themselves.

And is that not enough for a struggling deckhand to have from a wild sea hauled into his boat? Answer me-is it not? Or do you desire evidence of the sublime? Of the Artist in control-indeed at the peak-of his powers?

You'll get none of that poppycock from me. For I am out of control here, badly & I hope dangerously so, & when my brush starts to attack Pobjoy's paper in small stipples-rat-a-ta-tat-rat-a-ta-tat-tat-I am shooting for freedom, nothing less, liberty, & my aim is untrue & my weapons a sorry paintbox I'd be ashamed to hock, a few poor brushes, some pots of poorer paint & a bruised talent for nothing more than reproduction. But my sight is level & I will make the best of it I can.

What?

Where, I hear the criticasters ask, is the fineness of approach? The evidence of anything other than a poor provinciaI mind relentlessly on the make?

They diminish me with their definitions, but I am William Buelow Gould, not a small or mean man. I am not bound to any idea of who I will be. I am not contained between my toes & my turf but am infinite as sand.

Come closer, listen: I will tell you why I crawl close to the ground: because I choose to. Because I care not to live above it like they may fancy is the way to live, the place to be, so that they in their eyries & guard towers might look down on the earth & us & judge it all as wanting.

I care not to paint pretend pictures of long views which blur the particular & insult the living, those landscapes so beloved of the Pobjoys, those landscapes that trash the truth as they reach ever upwards into the sky, as though we only know somewhere or somebody from a distance-that's the lie of the land while the truth is never far away but up close in the dirt, in the vile details of slime & scale & filth along with the Devil, along with the angels, & all snared within the earth & us, all embodied in a single pulse of a heart-mine, yours, ours-& all my subject as I take aim & make of the fish flesh incarnate.

The criticasters will say I am this small thing & my pictures that irrelevant thing. They will beat a bedlam outside & inside my poor head & then I cannot keep time with the drum of my stippling. They will waken me screaming from my necessary dream. They will try to define me like the Surgeon does his sorry species, those cursed Linnaeans of the soul, trying to trap me in some new tribe of their own invention & definition.

But I am William Buelow Gould, party of one, undefinable, & my fish will free me & I shall flee with them.

And you?

-well mark the great Shelley-

Ye were injured, & that means memory.

And you are just going to have to begin as I did: by looking long enough into the fish's eye to see what I must now describe, to commence that long dive down, down into the world of the ocean where the only bars are those of descending light.

Hush!

Pobjoy is coming, the sea is rising, my wound is clotting, so just sit back & agree with the Russian convict that it's all better in a book, that life is better observed than lived. Nod like the lucky bastards you are, like nobby Hobart Town clerks who breakfast on the upper storey of the Colonial Secretary's office watching early morning public executions, fat arses flapping on padded seats, enjoying in comfort & company with the jolly pissy taste of fried kidneys still sweet in their gob the spectacle directly across Murray Street at the gaol entrance of a good gibbet.

In that brief moment before the gallows' trap door opens its own gaping, insatiable mouth, let me continue now-like all good confessions of a condemned man-with the immediate events that have led me to such a sorry pass as this.