After, 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 asked 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.
