In my darkness I sensed them coming, felt the thrum of the earth beneath their heavy tramping feet & began in my mind writing a book, my very own 6-penny chapbook, which began like all good confessions of a condemned man at the beginning, like this—My mother is a fish; & which ends like that: click-clack, rat-a-tat, silly Billy Gould, riding a seahorse to Banbury Cross. This book of fish which I wrote in its entirety in my mind, word for word, which I painted brush stroke for brush stroke, in that instant between when I was of this flesh & when I was not, & which ended most unexpectedly with—
But just then a cry went up. I did not turn & run but faced them full on, to better focus all my senses upon my fate.
When they saw redcoats approaching with bayoneted muskets levelled, the small, formerly apprehensive & now terrified guards who were to hang me panicked. They fired at the approaching soldiers, who in turn dropped to their knees behind a slipped whale boat & made ready to join combat. No shot was meant for me, of course, I know that now—these advancing soldiers were meant to rescue & free me, were they not?
But my guard took up positions using the gibbet as a barricade, & muskets, even at the best of times, are woefully inaccurate, & I, head still thrust through the loose hangman’s noose, was the only body left exposed.
It was I who smelt the fiery scent of exploding gunpowder before the others had even seen their opponents’ muskets levelled, aimed & fired; I alone who felt the slight ripple of breeze made by the motion of the musket ball rolling inexorably from the side of the whale boat through the air toward the gibbet as I calmly waited several lifetimes for the inevitable explosion in my chest.
So you see, it was both my fate which I accepted & against which I rebelled, that it was my destiny to willingly catch the bullet with my body but use its impetus to help topple myself backward & jerk my head out of that shoddily tied noose, to drive my sudden jackknife out of servitude & off the gibbet & onto the jetty. I knew my body to be bowing backwards, a sail bellying slowly outward when the wind first slaps & the journey into the unknown begins, filling & billowing I was as I rolled off the jetty & flopped into the ochre-red sea, & it was then my blindfold washed off & my dull eyes began once more to see & I knew my confessions were almost ended & my punishment just begun.
My body burnt with an immeasurable pain of penance. My balance was so badly affected by having been so long out of the water that at first I was floating side-on &, until I had taken a few deep breaths of water, I had no power to move whatsoever.
I heard the leader of the soldiers behind the whale boat yell:
‘It’s him we want, no-one else. It’s Gould the painter whom we must bring back!’
I felt the trample of redcoats & crawlers rushing along the jetty to see & dispute the miracle that had just taken place.
I heard the shouts of confusion, though as queer low vibrations from above & not as shrill cries of disbelief. I felt the arguments of those who had seen with those who never would as a tepid pointless rackety rumble. With my restored sight I saw the musket balls fall slowly, the force of their explosion lost upon impact with the water, & only the weight of gravity dragging them downwards, a small drizzle of sluggish black hail, followed by oars futilely thwacking at the surface of the water, presumably trying to crown me, & then, a little more cunningly, a landing net swept close by.
Then I saw the gaffer hooks come down toward me & knew that they were trying to gaff me back up into slavery. With an agony that no human can ever understand & no fish can ever describe, I forced my body down, far, far, far from the light.
II
I WAS FLOATING, breathing water, falling, rising, my weight as nothing compared to what I had once known, I was flying through water, dropping & soaring through dancing forests of bull-kelp, touching sea lettuce, coral, all the people I had known, pot-bellied seahorses, kelpies, porcupine fish, stargazers, leatherjackets, serpent eels, sawtooth sharks, crested weedfishes, silver dories & the sea was an infinite love that encompassed not only those I had loved but those I had not, the Commandant as well as Capois Death, the blacks who had killed Capois Death as well as Tracker Marks, the Surgeon as well as the machine breaker, & they were all touching me & I them as Tracker Marks had a lifetime ago reached out & touched me.
Who could be afraid of the sweetness of it?
Near the reef I came on the striped cowfish, & she told me her true name & I parted the fold between her buttock & thigh & licked her there, in search of the fulfilment of the promise of her scent, & then ran my tongue down her thigh & licked the muscles of her calves, the glorious arch of her insteps, the roly joy of her toes & in all of it tasted the thousand components of her scent that were yet not her scent & I gave tongue to her name & it was all water, I tasted the dried salt pan of her back, & she ever so slowly rolled over & looked away but I had eyes only for her wondrous breasts puddling & I felt the burden of their weight with my lips & I tasted her shoulders, I nuzzled the glorious hollow of her armpits & I found her movements which had at first been willing but stiff, grow long & languid & then she looked at me & close, her eyes closed & then her limbs blossomed out & I licked the part that was a little salt & a little sour & altogether something else again & her breath was coming in hot hard rasps & I rolled her buttocks around & around & my nostrils began to flare on & on & I began to know the promise of the fulfilment of her scent & I recalled the story of the Astomi who lived on scent alone & how was I to know that for near two hundred years I too had lived so?—as Pliny had so long ago described, & as Amado the Reckless had searched the southern seas in vain for?—subsisting on nothing more than the smell of woman & then I was no longer licking or looking or smelling & I was riding her scent & she mine & then I was her scent & we were beyond her scent, & we were making our revolt our own way, & I thought,
Oh! My sweet how I have lived for this! & I thought,
How will I die knowing this?
—all this that is beyond us, all this that goes on & on, ever outwards, world without end, this, our third circle.
III
THAT WAS LONG, long ago.
I live now in a perfect solitude. We fish keep company it is true, but our thoughts are our own & utterly incommunicable. Our thoughts deepen & we understand each other with a complete profundity only those unburdened by speech & its complications could understand. It is then untrue that we neither think nor feel. Indeed, apart from eating & swimming, it is all we have to occupy our minds.
I like my fellow fish. They do not whinge about small matters of no import, do not express guilt for their actions, nor do they seek to convey the diseases of kneeling to others, or of getting ahead, or of owning things. They do not make me sick with their discussions about their duties to society or science or whatever God. Their violences to one another—murder, cannibalism—are honest & without evil.
Some things become less clear to me though, the more I dwell upon them.
For a long time before I was a fish the only thing that mattered to me was that my pictures might speak to others, might express a feeling beyond the grave. To those who needed comfort. To those who were terrified.
Sometimes I must admit I long once more to have the power of human speech, if only for a few moments, so that I might explain how I once wanted to live as a rainbow of colour exploding, hard sun falling apart in soft rain, but had to be content instead with making grubby marks on cheap cartridge paper. So that I might say how I once wanted to rise into the sky & shake the heavens, sink into the sea & move the earth; know the beauty & wonder of this world, the beauty & wonder which I now realise is as limitless as its opposite, & how I wanted others to know it with me, & how it was all to no avail.
I wanted my pictures to speak, but was anyone listening? I lost my life to it, you see, my reason foundered owing to it. That’s all right, I am not complaining—but what was the use? My feelings never ended their journey as a meaning others might as bread break & share. My pictures were so many mutes.
I opened myself up
to everything. The more I felt & the more I poured that feeling into my fish, the more feeling I saw all around me. All that pain & all that sadness & all that hopeless love in every fractured life & in every hidden heart, & then one day I couldn’t bear to see all that feeling & pain & love any longer & I burnt my book of fish, wished it farewell & good riddance hey-ho-the-diddly-o! I disguised myself so that I looked like the others, grew seaweed leaves around my torso & neck so that as I swam I would be indistinguishable from the kelp & seagrass forests where divers occasionally now search me out.
Some have nets & wish to catch me & sell me to Chinese apothecaries, those men of mystical medicine who, in the manner of their forebears with whom the Commandant once-upon-a-time did such a very fine trade, would place my dried husk into a mortar & grind my remaining essence to a dust to which they would then attribute powers of fabled libido & a correspondingly high price. They say it’s nice to be wanted, but I am not so sure. Any ambition, I was once told by Capois Death, is good as long as it is realised, but in my more aspiring moods I had hoped to amount to something more than a passing erection.
Others have underwater cameras. They film & photograph me, for as a weedy seadragon I am regarded as a primitive throwback whose species is on the verge of extinction, & I, who was the Artist, have instead become the subject; I, whose role was to assist with classification, have now become the classified. My small filmy fins flutter like those of a fairy, & I stare at them & they at me, awed by my colours wondrous, by my movements serene, & I wonder.
The question that haunts me as they chase me & as I chase brine-shrimp & lurk around the fish-rich reefs off Bruny Island that I have made my home, is this: is it easier for a man to live his life as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human?
So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to. Between the dead & the living—what?
And in the rolling diagonal pillars of light & dark that stripe my watery world, I wanted to ask these & other questions of those divers: Why is it that I am possessed of two entirely opposite emotions? Explain that to me? Because it can’t be explained, but still I want to know why—why when all the evidence of my life tells me this world smells worse than the old Dane’s bobbing corpse, why is it that I still can’t help believing that the world is good & that without love I am nothing?
Sometimes I even want to tap with my long snout on those divers’ goggles & say: You want to know what this country will become? Ask me—after all, if you can’t trust a liar & a forger, a whore & an informer, a convicted murderer & a thief, you’ll never understand this country. Because we all make our accommodations with power, & the mass of us would sell our brother or sister for a bit of peace & quiet. We’ve been trained to live a life of moral cowardice while all the time comforting ourselves that we are Nature’s rebels. But in truth we’ve never got upset & excited about anything; we’re like the sheep we shot the Aborigines to make way for, docile until slaughter.
Everything that’s wrong about this country begins in my story: they’ve all been making the place up, ever since the Commandant tried to reinvent Sarah Island as a New Venice, as the island of forgetting, because anything is easier than remembering. They’ll forget what happened here for a hundred years or more, then they’ll reimagine it like the old Dane reimagined it, because any story will be better than the sorry truth that it wasn’t the English who did this to us but ourselves, that convicts flogged convicts & pissed on blackfellas & spied on each other, that blackfellas sold black women for dogs & speared escaping convicts, that white sealers killed & raped black women, & black women killed the children that resulted.
So there you have it: two things & I can’t bring them together & they are wrenching me apart. These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary—how am I to resolve them? Can a man become a fish? All you divers who have come so far to fathom my mystery, these questions, this torment, this good & this evil, this love & this hate, this life, resolve them & it for me, make sense of my story, unite me with this life, tell me it is not an inextricable part of my nature—I am begging you …
For I am not reconciled to this world.
I wished to be & I was not & so I tried to rewrite this world as a book of fish & set it to rights in the only manner I knew how.
But my way was meaningless, my cries unheard, my pictures spat on before they were lost for all eternity. Now I just watch & think the ridiculous, the improbable: the world is good, I think, & the world is good & the world is good.
None of it does anything, I know.
It is, at best, a thought of heresy for which punishment is inevitable & long overdue. Matt Brady’s book of dreams was right: to love is not safe.
Behind the face mask of the diver coming toward me now with a net, I recognise the unmistakable visage of Mr Hung, out diving for more specimens for his aquarium, & I know it is only a matter of time before I am gazing out of that neon-lit tank that I once so intently stared into; that while the Conga & Mr Hung plot another scam, in which they will forge a convict’s journal of two centuries ago & try to flog it off as authentic history, occasionally staring in at me, perhaps wondering what it would be like to be a fish, I will stare out at them wondering what it would be like to be like them, knowing that a scam is just a dream, & that a dream is a dangerous thing if you believe in it too much.
For out there, only just beyond our vision, the net is waiting for us all, ever ready to trap & then rise with us tangled within, fins flailing, bodies futilely thrashing, heading to who knows what chaotic destiny. Love & water. Sid Hammet stares at me for too long. I am not afraid, never have I been afraid. I shall be you. I am ascending from the night, rising, rolling, passing through glass & air into his sad eyes. Who am I? he can no longer ask & I—my punishment perfect for one who has taken a life but not gained another in return—can only wish for the certainty to answer: I am William Buelow Gould & my name is a song which will be sung, click-clack—rat-a-tat-a-tat, a penny a painting, silly Billy Gould riding a seahorse to Banbury Cross …
AFTERWORD
From the Colonial Secretary’s correspondence file, 5 April 1831
(ARCHIVES OFFICE OF TASMANIA)
GOULD, William Buelow, prisoner number 873645; aliases Sid Hammet, ‘the Surgeon’, Jorgen Jorgensen, Capois Death, Pobjoy, ‘the Commandant’; identifying marks tattoo above left breast, red anchor with blue wings, legend ‘Love & Liberty’; absconded Sarah Island, 29 February 1831. Drowned attempting escape.
Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting have received numerous honours and are published in twenty-six countries. He directed a feature-film version of The Sound of One Hand Clapping and co-wrote Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. A collection of his essays is published as And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?.
ALSO BY RICHARD FLANAGAN AND AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE
Death of a River Guide
Beneath a waterfall on the Franklin, Aljaz Cosini, river guide, lies drowning. Beset by visions at once horrible and fabulous, he relives not just his own life but that of his family and forebears. In the rainforest waters that rush over him he sees those lives stripped of their surface realities, and finds a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking. As the river rises, his visions grow more turbulent, and in the flood of his past Aljaz discovers the soul history of his country.
Richard Flanagan’s stunning 1994 debut about a mythical Tasmania dazzled readers around the world, and is now recognised as one of the most powerful and original Australian novels of recent decades.
Praise for Death of a River Guide
‘Marks one of the most auspicious debuts in Australian writing.’ —The Times Literary Supplement
‘Death of a River Guide is the birth of a daring talent. The mythos here is wholly Australia, but Flanagan uses rafting as effectively as Hemingway us
ed bullfighting to explore the existential struggle to act nobly in the face of death.’ —The Christian Science Monitor
‘Makes good on a truly soaring ambition and flirts with literary greatness.’ —Chicago Tribune
‘Beautiful and lyrical.’ —The Washington Post
‘Haunting and ambitious … realistic and biting.’ —The New York Times Book Review
‘Superb … a richly layered narrative … a work of considerable originality. Flanagan’s two novels rank with the finest fiction out of Australia since the heyday of Patrick White.’ —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
‘This first novel combines the narrative ingenuity of Golding’s Pincher Martin with the imaginative detail of de Bernières’ Captain Corelli. It’s a torrent of a book – take the plunge.’ —The Independent
‘A novel of consummate artistry and towering humanity … An enormous, intricate, intimate tapestry not only of the wilderness, but also of a family, an expansive tribal community.’ —The Baltimore Sun
‘[Death of a River Guide] defies superlatives. It is that rare commodity – a wonderful fiction which has pace, depth of feeling, and infinite imaginative possibilities.’ —Scotland on Sunday
‘Richard Flanagan’s first novel could well become a classic, doing for Tasmania what Gabriel García Márquez did for Colombia or William Faulkner did for Mississippi.’ —Mercury