history

PRE-1830 SYDNEY

Delia Falconer

Yvonne Cramer (ed)
This Beauteous, Wicked Place: Letters and Journals
of John Grant, Gentleman Convict
National Library of Australia $31.30(incl. GST)pb, 224pp
0 642 10702 5

The World Upside Down: Australia 1788-1830
National Library of Australia $20.95 (incl. GST)pb, 58pp
0 642 10713 0

'[E]VERYTHING WAS NEW TO ME, every Bird, every Insect, Flower &c. in short all was novelty around me, and was noticed with a degree of eager curiosity, and perturbation, that after a while subsided into calmness.' In The World Upside Down, historian Richard Neville quotes Elizabeth Macarthur, writing to a friend here, in 1790. Like Neville, a number of essayists in this National Library exhibition catalogue remark on how rapidly, after the first shock of arrival, the European settlers' sense of enthusiasm for the new land waned and was replaced by acceptance, as the land became more economically viable than mysterious, the traditional ways of Aboriginals whose artefacts were once prized were all but destroyed, and curiosity itself became a professionalised activity, the province of artists and writers. England, meanwhile, showed little interest in our later narratives of sturdy progress which replaced early tales of wonder, instead prizing stories of 'ropes, gibbets, arson, burglary, George Barrington [a notorious pickpocket] and Governor Macquarie.' (This last quote, from Blackwood's Magazine, in 1827, made me laugh. Substitute Crococile Dundee for Barrington, put Keating's hand on the Queen's back, and Australia's role as a site of the exotic doesn't seem to have changed much.)
     Both The World Upside Down and This Beauteous, Wicked Place return to that earlier period of colonisation, pre-1830, which might be characterised by what Neville terms a 'rage for curiosity' and Paul Carter terms 'spatial history' -- a sense of uncertainty, of negotiation with the possibilities of living in this country, before the calmness and platitudes set in. As time intervenes, it is increasingly difficult to view this era as something other than an overture to inevitable progress, a simple costume drama of finding and claiming; that is certainly how that period was presented at my high school, flattened out to the point of near-terminal dullness.
      To view this early colonial period in another light, to retrieve its joys and injustices as if they are fresh, and to see the moments when it might even have turned out otherwise, requires a sympathetic imagination. This curiosity is something we continue to farm out to specialists, it seems. I feel that it is really only in the last fifteen years or so that we have begun to actually 'see' this time as anything but an exercise in military and penitentiary logistics, as having anything to do with systems of belief and the life of the mind. I'm thankful to those historians like Carter and Greg Dening in Australia and Stephen Greenblatt overseas who write about the uncertainties and even Utopian aspects of early contact between indigenous people and settlers, between settlers and the new country, that space of negotiation before history determines what it 'meant'. It has also been exciting to see a recent proliferation of collections of primary sources from this period, offered with strong editorial comment, including Tim Flannery's editions of Watkin Tench and The Birth of Sydney, the exhibition and catalogue An Exquisite Eye (on Flinders' natural history artist Ferdinand Bauer) and the landmark exhibition on Baudin's 1800-1804 expedition, Terre Napoléon: Australia Through French Eyes.
      Following in this tradition, The World Upside Down uses work owned by the National Library of Australia to focus on how the ways of speaking and thinking (ranging from phrenology to theories of social development) imported from Europe gave shape to what was visually recorded from 1788-1830. Accompanying the reproductions of early natural history drawings, maps, ethnographic portraiture, and illustrative views, the seven essays emphasise how, although artworks in this period were generally the work of amateurs, cultural assumptions wrought their own censorship. In fact, according to the essaysits, the works are distinguished by the absence of accurate depictions of convict life (Patricia R McDonald), women (Deborah Oxley), children (Robert Holden), or Aboriginals (Sasha Grishin), although most of the authors exclude Augustus Earle's paintings from these criticisms, particularly his sympathetic watercolour 'Desmond, a N.S. Wales Chief Painted for a Rarobb, a Native Dance'. Actually, that particular image pinpointed an irritating editorial problem. The plates are not numbered, and do not necessarily appear on the same page they are described, so that, each time a title is named, one has to flip through the book in order to find whether it appears.
     While this catalogue is particularly illuminating on the material circulation of these works (it is strange to think that most artwork did not stay in Australia, but was sold overseas, often appearing, like V. Woodthorpe's mild-eyed 'Kangaroo' as the etching of an etching, poorly reproduced, and shipped back to Australia from London) this struck me as a rather flat, sober collection of images. Perhaps this is because of the preponderance of well-composed picturesque views, but also because the essays give the impression that what has been found in the Library is exhaustive. Yet, even as Earle's 'Desmond' was praised, I found myself thinking of the extraordinarily individualised Aboriginal portraits of Nicolas-Martin Petit and, in contrast to the gentleness of Bauer's natural history drawings, included here, the startlingly vibrant jellyfish of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur. These deserve a mention. These short essays, without room for further detail or divagation, sometimes had the unfortunate side-effect of reducing the artworks to 'evidence' of the discourses they represented, ignoring the odd details which give them their freshness: the accurate stillness of flat harbour light at dusk, a last wild tuft of bush clinging to a hill in Woolloomooloo. And what, I wondered, was the story behind August Earle's strange verse letters to the mysterious Mrs Ward?
     It is an interesting question: where do the 'realities of Australia's foundation' (as essayist Michelle Hetherington puts it), reside? Does one get a whiff of history from its most symptomatic gestures or from its baroque exceptions? Like Robert Darnton, who writes about cat massacres to understand the French Revolution, I find, as a writer, history's explosive charge in the oddest details: the fragmentary recordings of bedtime conversation between Lieutenant Dawes and Patyegarang, the footnotes in Robert Hughes' Fatal Shore (starving on Norfolk Island, men cut eggs out of living birds, then set them free...).
     John Grant, the 'Gentleman Convict', whose letters and journals are excerpted in This Beauteous, Wicked Place is such a find, the kind of oddbod who tests the limits of his times. Manipulative and self-obsessed, yet strangely endearing, Grant strikes me as a kind of eighteenth-century Baron Corvo, doggedly convinced of his rightness in all things, whose every gesture contributes to his own great project, himself ('The distress I feel is silent, but excessive', 'I am perfectly restored to health, but in order to indicate my sufferings I have not touched my beard with a razor since my unjust arrest, and there are those who call me Insane as a consequence').
     Outraged that he is transported for attempted murder (he only used 'swan shot', for God's sake), and convinced of his unshaken superior status as a gentleman ('If one is to be treated with civility, it would be a commencement to invite me on Shore a few hours prior to the 199 abominable villains whom the British Government have given me as companions'), Grant is therefore treated as a gentleman, in spite of the fact that he is barking. No 'fatal shore' for him; he is allowed to share the captain's cabin on the transport to Australia, munches 'Delicious Fruits' in Brazil, and is provided comfortable boltholes on various gentlemen's farms. Yet Grant's final tragic days in the colony, while self-inflicted, have a grim and quasi-religious force that might have been authored by Patrick White.
     These books make interesting companions: in The World Upside Down, there is a map of the the broader rules, the orthodox knowledge, of the early eighteen-hundreds and, in Grant's memoirs, which one only wishes for more of, their urgent inner logic and their madness.

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PRE-1830 SYDNEY

Delia Falconer

Delia Falconer is the author of The Service of Clouds