Mathinna stood with Lady Jane and the official party, but her status was changing. Less and less was she the Franklins’ adopted daughter, and more and more was she some other creature whom they came to regard as they did several other pets around Government House—the albino possum, her cockatoo, a wombat—an exotic object of amusement.
Sir John had begun to seek Mathinna out and have her sing songs in her native tongue; then, as he got to know her better, he had her dance the kangaroo dance and the possum dance, the echidna dance and the emu dance, but the one he particularly enjoyed was the black swan dance, in which she would jack-knife her body backward and jolt her arms forward and out, as if rising into flight.
Those who wished to enter the Franklins’ circle had to acknowledge Mathinna, had to profess themselves amused and charmed by the black girl. She took pleasure in her status, demanding curtsies from all, and she now castigated the servants, whom she had once been too shy even to look in the eye, for not satisfying her whims.
And when, that day of the opening of Ancanthe, as the glyptotech was named, Mathinna’s cockatoo flew onto Montague’s shoulder and left a wet, white dropping trailing down his black coat, not even Sir John’s assurance that such things were good luck could drown out the laughter of the black girl, so raucous and uninhibited that it infected the whole party until they were all laughing.
A humiliated Montague whispered to his wife that the child behaved not like a lady, but some wild thing. And he pointed to the ground, where they could see her naked toes forking their way in and out of the mud.
‘Like filthy grubs and worms,’ sneered Montague. ‘It is as if dirt itself were a pleasure.’
The more Mathinna stopped being what the Franklins expected and the more she became herself, the more the Governor grew to like her. He was fascinated by ‘the forest sprite’, as he called her, both because of her general liveliness and her particular ability to appear out of nowhere and startle people: none more so than Lady Jane, who found it a trait at first amusing, then slightly disturbing and finally immensely irritating—for what exactly had the child heard, and what had she seen? And what did she know, what did she think, that smiling black enigma?
Lady Jane would feel something wrapping around her and look down to see black arms around her waist. She would twist and stride off, and Mathinna, sensing it was a game, would take two skips to join her and, with a cry of glee, again wrap her arms around Lady Jane’s legs. Lady Jane could smell her then, that wild, dangerous, dog smell of children. Once more she would push the child away, yet still Mathinna would persist and reach out, seeking to grab one of Lady Jane’s skirt-clad thighs.
‘Please, Mathinna,’ Lady Jane would say softly, grabbing her wrist harshly. ‘
Nor, said Sir John, did he. But secretly he began to crave such touch and warmth. He loved the way Mathinna moved, so quick and alive. He watched entranced as, one afternoon, she made traps for the seagulls that plagued the port town—a simple affair of a piece of bread at the end of a long string, which with infinite patience she drew towards a cairn made of twisted branches and bark, behind which she waited and, when the moment was right, grabbed the bird in a single lightning-like movement. He spent the rest of the day playing this game with her, ignoring Montague’s occasional interruptions that he was late for this appointment or that meeting, until he finally managed to draw the seagull into the trap; but he was so slow lunging after it that the bird was in flight and Mathinna laughing before he had finished falling.
Sir John could not forget that laugh. Under his breath he boxed the compass, reciting in perfect order the sailors’ catechism: ‘North—North by east—Northeast by north’, the thirty-two points of order that summoned home’s certainty out of an oceanic emptiness. ‘Northeast—Northeast by east—East-northeast,’ he would mumble to forget that laughter’s enticing sound.
But he was south of no north now, and every compass point served only to concentrate his thoughts more powerfully upon her. For whether it was west by northwest or south-southeast, she was everywhere. And when he resorted to naming the winds and their origins, still it did no good, for Lady Jane had insisted that Mathinna should have a bell tied around her wrist so that they might know where she was, so that her presence would not frighten Lady Jane or the various dignitaries visiting Government House, and to ensure that the ‘empty black vessel’, as Lady Jane began calling her, ‘will not fill with any more indiscretions’. And just naming the Sirocco of the Southeast or the Mistral of the Northwest was enough to bring to Sir John’s ears the sound of that tinkling.
‘Can they not see,’ hissed Montague to his wife, ‘that the child
It wasn’t long before Sir John’s new interest in his adopted daughter began to affect his work. He found himself increasingly fed up with the daily tedium of executive council meetings in the morning, the endless wearying interviews with countless supplicants after lunch, the minutes to be signed, the memoranda to be dictated, the orders and inspections and enquiries—to say nothing of the social dreariness of night after night of dining with people he now found the dullest in the world, none of whom he could ever imagine having the wit or agility to catch a seagull, all of whom were determined not to reveal a single human emotion in front of the man who, for all intents and purposes, was their king. He completed his tasks, but his once implacable attention to detail was gone. He was beginning to live in two worlds, and only one mattered to him.
With Mathinna, Sir John played Aunt Sally, he rolled the walnut with the cockatoo and joined in the songs she had been taught by Francis Lazaretto. With her was possible all that wasn’t as Governor, things that were common and simple and fun, in which he could say something foolish or innocent—or, as he frequently did, both—and suffer no consequence. With the Aboriginal child he felt he could be himself.
There were other effects, though. Even he was alarmed at how he was becoming softer, more aware of the sufferings and wants of others, and this led him to several acts of compassion that were interpreted as folly and, worse, weakness. He pardoned the five convicts who had for two years cut the track over which he and Lady Jane travelled through the southwest. He sought to limit the use of the lash.
‘The man has no understanding of power,’ Montague confided to Chief Justice Pedder, as he shuffled the cards in preparation for their weekly game of piquet.
Unused to joy and seeking to justify it as duty, Sir John told himself, as he took to telling others, that this was a most singularly important experiment for the colony’s future. But not the least attractive aspect of Mathinna for Sir John was that when he was with her, he couldn’t give a fig for the experiment, the colony or its future. Secretly he delighted in what had become his life: those few stolen moments with the child, as opposed to the interminable fantasy world of colonial government, which he increasingly lived in only as a shell. Because he no longer had opinion or ambition or interest, and because his wife had all these things, he abdicated all responsibility and even took to openly asking her advice and immediately endorsing it, without either discussion or enthusiasm, while his ear was ever waiting only for the tinkling of Mathinna’s wrist.
‘Why have you allowed this?’ asked Montague, disturbed at the way the Governor now gave his enemies all the evidence they needed.
‘Why not?’ replied Sir John. And he laughed, because out of the window he could see Mathinna playing with her possum, which, with its large eyes for seeing better in its preferred night-time wanderings, wore the same look of astonished amusement as Montague at that moment.
Sir John had inherited his secretary from his predecessor, Arthur. In the troubled history of the colony, with its outbreaks of banditti and black wars, the savagery of the slavery of the convicts, the mythical stories of men who ate each other and the determination of his predecessor to hang as many men as was necessary—in order that all would understand that they could hope for anything except hope itself—Montague had played a quiet but essential role. He understood power as the dominion of necessity, not as a justification to go on
‘Someone has to,’ continued Sir John, ‘and my wife wants to.’ And he laughed again, because he understood that Montague could not see how trivial and pointless ruling anything or anybody was. Sir John knew he was being careless, but his contempt was so complete he did not think it could be of any consequence.
‘Power is like that too,’ Chief Justice Pedder said to Montague, after the latter had recounted this story. ‘It is the kingdom of forgetting.’ He declared a retique, took sixty points and won the game.
Still, on occasion Sir John felt ashamed of himself and, as a pious man, asked God in his prayers for His guiding wisdom. He felt he was what he knew the colonists increasingly whispered: a useless fat old man infatuated with a piccaninny. He tried to focus his thoughts on anything but the Aboriginal child. But only the memory of her
