Wanting

  ‘The child of God, sir.’

  ‘What was Jesus Christ for us?’ the captain continued, determined the child would have the basic catechism mastered by the time she reached her destination.

  ‘Our righteousness. Sir.’

  She stumbled over the long word, such that it sounded like ‘rage-in-us’. But the captain was satisfied and continued.

  ‘What is the Devil?’

  ‘The enemy of our souls, sir.’

  ‘How does he wage war on our souls?’

  ‘By making us give in to sinful desires.’

  ‘What was Jesus made to do for us?’

  ‘Take on our sins for us, sir. Why—’

  ‘Who crucified Jesus Christ?’

  ‘The Jews, sir. But why, sir, why Jesus, he good fella, why he have to sin if we no sin?’

  ‘Who are the Jews?’

  ‘The people of God, sir.’

  If Mathinna wondered what sinful desires might be, or why the people of God might wish to kill the child of God, or if she saw it as obvious, having grown up ruled by the children of God, it was impossible to know, for having completed her task to the captain’s satisfaction, she burst into chatter.

  ‘And sir, sir, Napoleon he good fella, he teach me count to seven, teach me good, he know that first fella and all and the fella who made mountain and tree and stars. Yes, sir, he know. Jesus he bleed like a blackfella.’

  ‘Who taught you Shakespeare?’ asked the captain, suddenly suspicious.

  ‘Napoleon,’ said the child, who knew nothing of anything called Shakespeare.

  Mathinna did not arrive in Hobart Town as she had intended to leave Flinders Island: her slight body clad in the skin of a white kangaroo hunted by her father. When the child burst into tears at the prospect of leaving her people, the Protector told her it was impossible to arrive at Government House dressed as a savage, but he relented on the matter of her favourite companion, a ringtailed albino possum she had tamed. It ran round her shoulders, nuzzled inside her grubby shift, and frequently dropped round turds like lead balls from a shot tower.

  He let her keep the animal not out of sentimentality, but for fear that she might do something untoward if she were denied at least one small comfort. Of the children of Ham that had not perished, she was the brightest: high-spirited, admittedly, but the most advanced and, recalling her composure in the wake of her father’s death, perhaps the one with the greatest possibility of redemption.

  But he took several months agreeing to the Franklins’ request, citing weather and the child’s health, and even advancing contrived pedagogical arguments. The real reason for the delay was that the child went missing every time she was about to be shipped out. And deep inside, Robinson grew oddly troubled, and it somehow made him feel a little better about himself when she was not able to be found. For there was about Sir John something that Robinson, ever a keen student and petitioner of power, could not quite put into words. He turned to prayer and Scripture, in which he found not answers but the evasion of transcendence.

  At the point his own prevarications ran too thin to be sustained, Mathinna intensified her own campaign to stay by absconding with two native women to a sealers’ colony on Gun Carriage Island. If the Protector was loath to part with that for which the Franklins asked, if he was failing to find Mathinna, he was nevertheless succeeding in persuading himself that he would hardly be abandoning the child to the scum of the penal colony. Rather, he told himself, it was to the very finest flowers of England, disciplined in habit, religious in thought, scientific in outlook—a woman who seemed to be the worthy consort of a man celebrated as one of the greatest names in the annals of heroic endurance, and that man himself. And their selfless goal? To raise the savage child to the level of a civilised Englishwoman. How could he deny anyone such opportunity?

  Finally he had locked Mathinna in a room in his own house for a week, confiscated her possum and refused to give it back until she was embarked on a small sealing sloop, the Cormorant. He gave her some ship’s biscuits as a parting gift, but he had not stayed to farewell her, instead returning to his house to read Scripture until dusk fell and the boat was lost to sight.

  The Cormorant had fallen so far behind schedule that the captain offloaded his cargo for Hobart at a small inlet at the head of the Derwent estuary. There he came to an arrangement with a silver-haired old sawyer carting firewood. At first, the sawyer hadn’t wanted anything to do with the black child. His brother, a convict shepherd, had been speared to death by blacks in a raid on his outstation during the Black War. But in exchange for some sealskins—the captain wished to hurry back to the islands to collect more—the sawyer finally agreed to take Mathinna through to Hobart Town.

  The sawyer looked down at the small child and resolved she would be no more to him than a bag of chaff to be delivered. Though only a blue tattoo of her name remained on his shoulder, he had once had a daughter. He noticed a lump in the girl’s smock, and dangling out below a button at waist level was a tail. He leant down, tugged the tail as he might a door pull, and was surprised when two large and sleepy pink eyes and a damp nose poked out.

  With hands that were at once very large and very gentle, that seemed like a sea eagle’s nest made of gnarled eucalypt branches, the sawyer picked up Mathinna. Holding the small weight and trust of the child in his grasp, he began to fear that hate was beyond him.

  She looked up at the sawyer’s face. One of his eyes was dead and milky, and his hair reminded her of a mat of bleached she-oak needles. As he slowly swung her through the air, she felt safe with the old man. He sat her down on the seat board of his cart, and then, in spite of his promise to himself, he found a dirty rug in the tray and spread it over her knees.

  ‘Garney,’ he said.

  He noticed her bare feet poking out from the rug’s ragged bottom and, reaching down, he tweaked her big toe. He smiled.

  ‘Garney Walch.’

  The child had seen nothing like the town, a vast confusion of white men in many colours, and large buildings and mud and shit and horses—so many horses! And the whole effect, as she rode by the new warehouses and the older grog shops and slum cottages, as they drove past pigs and cows roaming free in the streets, men in yellow and black clothes chained like oxen, men in red clothes leaning on muskets, and finally up a hill to Government House, was one of overwhelming excitement.

  A few people here and there stopped and pointed at her, shaking their heads as though they had seen a ghost.

  ‘Why, Gunna?’ she asked the sawyer, unable to pronounce his name.

  ‘Well,’ said Garney Walch, who didn’t have an answer he wanted to tell the child, ‘because…because you’re going to be their new princess, that’s why.’

  When they arrived at her new home, they were directed around the back to a bustling series of outbuildings that served as kitchen, abattoir, laundry, stables, piggery and servants’ quarters to the large house.

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said, as he picked her up off the seat board.

  ‘These are good people,’ he said. But when he went to put her down, she dug her hands and feet into him and the possum ran round the back of his neck. ‘The best people,’ he said.

  He didn’t believe it. Nor did she. She clung to him ever harder.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. Her bony frame was that of a terrified bird, pushing in and out against his old body. And though he wanted to hold and soothe what had nothing to do with him, he had to tear her and the possum off him and give them both to a small woman with a birthmark over fully half her face, soft and strange as an overripe apricot.

  Garney Walch left quickly, cursing himself for feeling as bad as he did, his soul painfully open to a wound he thought long ago healed.

  The woman bathed Mathinna in a wooden trough that ran along one side of the brick-nogged stables and out of which horses drank. The water was cold, the mountain covered in snow, and the black child irritated the convict maid with her silence.

  Af
ter, the maid took her into the kitchen and fed her some tripe and potatoes. The food calmed the girl. As her fear began to subside, she sensed an inner life to the house that propelled all the energy, the resentment, the strange furtive gestures and quick asides, the groans and the odd laughter; the way, amazing to her and so unlike Wybalenna, that people never seemed to halt and sit and talk but kept on at their tasks like ants.

  Mathinna was taken to her rooms. The first room, though not wallpapered, was freshly distempered and austerely furnished with a desk and stool, an easel and a small bookcase of primers and grammars to occupy her idle moments. For, as Lady Jane told several dinners in a row until even Sir John grew weary of it and asked her to talk about something else, the child was about to embark on a rigid programme of improvement. No moment was to be wasted, and all reckless passions were to be subjugated to the discipline of industry.

  The second room was a corner room; the western windows faced onto the great timbered mountain range that was the backdrop for the town. Lady Jane, worried about the return of any painful nostalgia for a life in the woods, which she had heard afflicted all the natives incarcerated on Flinders Island, had ordered all the western windows’ shutters to be nailed closed, leaving open only the northern window that looked out onto the industrious and elevating sight of the kitchen garden.

  This was Mathinna’s bedroom and contained within it what she thought was a third room—an intricate affair of coloured sails and wooden posts, so forbidding and mysterious that she mistook it for some whitefellas’ tent that she was forbidden to enter. Only after the apricot-faced woman sighed, climbed up into the confusion of cotton and chintz and timber, and demonstrated its purpose by lying in its deep downy recesses, from where she said one simple word—‘Bed’—did Mathinna finally understand its purpose. Leaping on it, she played there with the possum until, later that afternoon, the fruit-faced servant returned to find them lost in its folds, the black girl and the white possum, both asleep.

  ‘Where are her shoes?’ asked Lady Jane the following morning, when Mathinna was taken by her governess, the Widow Munro, to meet her new mother. For though the Aboriginal child was dressed in a dark grey serge dress of a type that attracts the word sensible, poking out from beneath its hem were two large, splayed and very brown feet.

  ‘Don’t talk to me about shoes!’ said the governess. ‘Shoes! May as well ask a snake why it won’t get back in its skin.’

  Lady Jane’s aversion to snakes bordered on a phobia. But this was her very first meeting with the Aboriginal child as her new mother, and she had stressed to Sir John how important it was to establish the nature of their respective positions from the beginning. And so, much as she felt a sudden urge to pick the child up, she tried to regain her composure by returning to her intended comments.

  ‘I am a modern in these matters,’ said Lady Jane. ‘Dress. Morals. The soul starts with detail and ends with tone.’

  ‘Curtsy to the lady,’ said the governess, who, while appearing a cicada husk of a woman, still delivered a shove in Mathinna’s back worthy of a bullock driver.

  ‘Man has judgement,’ said Lady Jane, trying to ignore the governess, ‘but woman sensibility.’ The black child standing in front of her seemed as mysterious as a lynx from Siberia or a jaguar from the New World. ‘But sensibility unrefined by moral improvement and mental discipline quickly declines into sensuousness, and sensuousness into wickedness. Do you understand me?’

  Mathinna understood none of it and said nothing.

  ‘You were given them, Mathinna? Shoes—you were given some good boots or some such?’

  ‘She arrived with a wild beast and worse insolence,’ said the governess. ‘Impossible enough to get her body fully covered and half-respectable, far less her feet shod.’

  Women were thin on the ground in the convict colony, and governesses almost unknown, so the discovery of the Widow Munro, formerly the wife of an officer of the Rum Corps, had at first seemed to Lady Jane a godsend. But it wasn’t turning out at all well. Lady Jane pressed on.

  ‘The programme I have devised for you stresses woman’s natural virtues of faith, simplicity, goodness, self-sacrifice, tenderness and modesty.’ How she longed to hold the child.

  ‘They like it, they say,’ said the Widow Munro. ‘The dust and the mud and the earth hot and cold.’

  Mathinna looked at the floor. A flea leapt from her hair to Lady Jane’s wrist.

  ‘You will be taught reading and spelling, grammar, arithmetic—’

  ‘That’s why,’ interrupted the Widow Munro, ‘they don’t take to the shoeing.’

  ‘She will be shod and she will be civilised,’ said Lady Jane to the Widow Munro, forcing a smile. ‘And I trust you to ensure that both things happen. Now, Mathinna. Where were—’

  ‘Arithmetic,’ said the Widow Munro.

  ‘Yes,’ continued Lady Jane, ‘and geography, then you will move on to more elevated subjects such as…’

  How, as she went on with her dreary litany, Lady Jane wanted to dress that little girl up and tie ribbons in her hair, make her giggle and give her surprises and coo lullabies in her ear. But such frivolities, she knew, would only ruin the experiment and the young child’s chances. Mathinna would one day recognise the wisdom of her benefactress. For such lapses ran risks that Lady Jane did not even dare think about: risks of the heart that might confuse her; risks of the soul that might undo her. And knowing she wouldn’t—that she mustn’t—she went on listing the subjects Mathinna was to study.

  ‘…rhetoric and ethics, as well as music, drawing and needlework. Catechism shall be our—’

  ‘My lady,’ the Widow Munro burst out in exasperation, ‘the child is little more than a savage. A pleasant savage, I will admit—’

  ‘I have a great belief in education,’ said Lady Jane, fixing the Widow Munro with her most forbidding stare.

  ‘I know my business,’ said the Widow Munro, who, with the eternal belief in her own method, was in this, if nothing else, a true pedagogue and not easily swayed by the arguments of the ignorant outside her trade. ‘They have thicker skulls. I have a manual on the instruction of the feeble-minded I will—’

  ‘You will do no such thing,’ said Lady Jane, seeming to emphasise her point with a loud slap of her right hand on her left forearm, but rather seeking to squash whatever had just bitten her. ‘She will be treated as a free-born Englishwoman because that, too, is part of my experiment.’

  Lady Jane dismissed them both. Harsh and distant as it seemed, she told herself that what she was doing was so much better for the child than holding her. She cursed herself. She could not believe her own lie, her cruel crushing of her own desire, yet believe it she would.

  ‘One last thing, Mrs Munro,’ said Lady Jane as the Widow approached the door. ‘She will be shod or you shall be gone.’

  For the first year, cobbler after cobbler made the trip to Government House with their tapes and their lasts and their leather as Lady Jane persisted in having new shoes made for Mathinna. And for the first year she had, under the combination of threats and inducements, out of a lonely child’s desperate desire to please and not offend, worn the beautiful court shoes and party shoes, the ankle-high kid-skin boots. But her feet hurt. Wearing shoes, she felt as if her body had been blindfolded.

  But she wanted to write and Lady Jane said she could have pen and ink and paper only if she kept her shoes on. For the magic of written words had not escaped Mathinna. She had watched Sir John and Lady Jane pore over the scratchings, like so many plover tracks in the sand, that marked the boxes of bound paper they read. Large currents of feeling passed through them. After, they would laugh or grimace or seem to be dreaming. She listened to the music of the scratchings when Lady Jane read poetry out loud, and saw the power of them to affect others when Sir John looked up from his silent reading of memoranda and ordered a lackey to act. Their meaning was large and often unexpected.

  ‘Is God the Father writing me?’ Mathinna excitedly a
sked Lady Jane, when, on going to the beach at Sandy Bay for a picnic, she had seen seagull tracks in the sand, thinking perhaps Towterer was sending her some message. Lady Jane had laughed, and Mathinna realised that what was written in the world mattered not, but what was written on paper mattered immensely.

  She wanted to write and so she agreed to the blindfold of shoes. She tried to feel her way through this strange world with her other senses—stumbling, falling, ever unsure—all in order to learn a little of the white magic of paper and ink.

  Sometimes, as she lay alone in those two large rooms that were hers, so alone in an emptiness that felt to her greater than the starry night, she tried to unravel her many fathers. It was like the catechism: it made sense if you repeated it enough and didn’t ask questions. There was God her Father, and Jesus his Son, who was also a sort of a father; there was the Protector, who had the Spirit of God the Father; and then there was Sir John, who was also her father, her new father—so many fathers.

  But she was writing not to them, but to King Romeo, whom the old people called Towterer, who had gone to where all the old people go, that place of the hunt and the forests, a world from which no one returned. And she knew the magic of white paper would reach him there and he would understand all that she was trying to tell him: her loneliness, her dreams, her wonder, her joy, her ongoing ache of sadness—all the things that were in danger of vanishing.

  ‘Dear Father,’ she wrote.

  I am good little girl. I do love my father. I have got a doll and shift and a petticoat. I read books not birds. My father I thank thee for sleep. Come here to se mee my father. I thank thee for food. I have got sore feet and shoes and stockings and I am very glad. All great ships. Tell my father two rooms. I thank thee for charity. Please sir please come back from the hunt. I am here yrs daughter

  MATHINNA