JOSEPH LYCETT CALLS SCENES TO MEMORY

Never did set the Thames on fire, save as

forger.  Most of us limners and engravers

in New  Holland were forgers, but  worst

they  gabbed  me a notorious  blackguard.

Fifty-three years have passed over me.  My

mind’s eye sees   pictures more clearly than

my  corporeal  seers that  merely catch  dim

clouds  on  these  hospital  walls. The  livid

scar  on my throat  grows darker by the day. 

Afflicted  so in the deep, dark doldrums  by

fearful, frightful  imaginations,  I  might yet

tear open  this  livid  scab,  let  life flow out,

a brummish boman who has bruised his bed.

           

‘Twas due to a circulation of queer screens

in Brummagem - so untimely was this lurk

-  that constables outrun me,  descend on  my

ken, clap me on the shoulder  rough as it runs

and bustle me up the stairs.  Seized me a chiv

I did and cut my throat before these shoulder

- clappers’ peepers.  I know justices’ justice!

                                      Yet I have crossed the Rubicon of

heart-heaving seas,  suffered most

dread privation to capture Arcady. 

Ergo  I did not cede the ground of

my life to the treadmill’s grind, as

I  now make out in my mind’s eye

a larger design.  The number three

holds a beginning, middle and end. 

I have already confessed my journey’s end

is nigh.   The first cast of the die was some

seven and ten years ago,   playing hide and

seek in Ludlow  with an inspector from the

Bank of England. He scared up in my back

garret a copper-plate press, engraving tools

and a drawing for a five pound note hid sly

atwixt ceiling and roof.   I had drawn to the

very like the King’s picture.  Our debts fell

due, d’you see?   Mary Stokes and me were

rubbed to  Shrewsbury  Gaol  to stand  buff.

‘Joseph  Lycett  to be  transported to parts

beyond the seas  for the term of   fourteen

years.’ Four and ten years!  Still I see and

hear the lambskin man’s doom drumming

my ears . . .  the grunts and oaths and ring

of  picks and hammers and shovels  as we

quarried stone about  Portsmouth Harbour,

sensations of a  dark mind that pricked me

years later when I made  etchings of those

rock formations at Ram Head Point and at

Worrogoomboo River,   boulders of  burnt

orange and lozenges all higgledy mounted

and massed  like Saturn’s  quartern loaves.

           

Howsomever,  the middle ground was to be

different, tinted with a rosy glaze. Less than

eighteen months after defiling a dead dog at

Sydney  Cove,   I was  sorely tempted again. 

As a  ticket-of-leave holder and  clerk in the

Police Office,   I was no longer reliant upon

government stores; ergo, the ribbin was thin. 

And so I made hundreds of queer screens of

five-shilling promissory notes on account of

Alfred Thrupp, Captain Piper’s man. An old

chum, Henry Dale, was the japanner passing

off,  smashing reckless the notes about town.

Nabbed three years’ hard labour, I did,

                   black as a poacher’s face,  hacking out

black diamonds in that hell-hole  name

of  Newcastle, paled out in the beyond. 

We coalies  let  in a  brewer’s fart with

the dust and grime and heat, hungry as

dogs and frozen for lack of clothes and

blankets, ever risking red-laced jackets. 

Down like a black cloud upon the least

hardship, often-times I rolled out of the

brewer’s basket  banged up to the eyes. 

Even that bigwigged pinchback, Bigge,

the Commissioner nob,  snitching what

chums were sweating the purser, blazes

abroad  my  voting for  the alderman  to

be  a fixed, godless and incurable habit.

Thank Gawd for the illicit grog,  says I!

Nor could I resist the art of humbugging.   Can any artist? 

We counterfeit nature itself, for who would dare draw the

dead spit of our patrons?    Save on bank notes, of course,

when awful desperate.    In my book Views of Australia, I

even borrowed representations of other artists,   in spite of

being lauded the best portrait and best miniature painter in

government labour – nay, in the whole colony!   Governor

Macquarie’s artist!  ‘Extremely correct and well executed!’

said the old bluffer, for t’was his avowed intent to promote

the colony,  thereby enticing free settlers to go on a sort of

glorious botanical excursion. I freely own that some of my

picturesque  landscapes bore  a likeness to thick woodland

and downland pastures in English shires. Elevations virgin

and verdant with no lag in sight!    Alas, no elms nor stand

of beech neither.   Or song of nightingale in ivy-clad folly!

‘Twas then the wheel turned up a trump with a

new commandant, Captain James Wallis.    His

company harried and shot four and ten blackies

mooching and marauding by Broughton’s Farm

in Appin.    This swanker possessed a vigour of

mind  and had quizzed me about art aboard that

hog-trough, the General Hewitt.    A goodfellow

who gave charitable  consideration to us artists,

he turned a blind eye to regulations,  for he was

a drawer and water-colourist himself. Even lent

me his oils.  Bungled perspectives, mind, for he

was two-fisted,  but surely knew coloured wash

for the topography  and a hawk from a handsaw.

Captain Wallis had a mind to make an account

of the Awabakal clans and customs.  The King

of  Newcastle, Burigon,  that we’d call Jack or

Long Jack, a ferocious warrior but cheery to us,

who tracked down bushrangers for some maize

and grog,  arranged safe passage and guided me

through screechy forests of hanging scroll what

hid scuttering brush fowl yet flashed fantails of

parrots – how I yearned for a rainbow palette! –

scrub dry as a lime-kiln   with no track nor sign.

                       My time with those errant natives round Newcastle
                       seemed a strange,  phosphorescent dream, for they

                                          took on curious and kiddish. No longer a scoundrel

                                          in the colony or  in Shropshire,  I was trusty Trojan

                                          -  to most of the clans,  at any rate.   The Awabakal

                                          blacks tolerated me to paint a brimful of curiosities:

                                          setting fire to dry brush to flush out kangaroo, emu

                                          and goanna, skying boomerang, diving for crayfish.

                                          Blackies climb  trees like powder-monkeys to snare

                                          possums,  wading silently, patient,  poised twixt the

                                          reeds to prong the  sinister black swans by the neck,

                                          and fishing by torchlight for mullet to bake in ashes,

                                          or spearing a tangle of writhing eels. Those blackies

                                          even let me  paint  the  burial of a  body  wrapped in

                                          bark.     To witness such scenes was dear as a Jew’s

                                          eye.  I never intended to paint a hump-backed Maria.

Of all these pictures in my head,  I remember
most striking  those scenes  under moonlight,
the natives dancing a corroboree or knocking
out the teeth of young boys mustered by their
fires on hunkers.   Those long figures, lean as
rakes, light-timbered, stick arms, legs akimbo,
lit up in the glimglow a burnished red that put
me in mind of a Wedgwood vase or red-figure
Greek urns with reliefs of nymphs or warriors. 
Or squinters shut, a frieze of Egyptian scarabs. 

                         For I did so ache for distant visions of a

                         more hospitable and civilised continent! 

                         I remembered a painting  by  Mr  Joseph

                         Wright of Derby fame,  how he brushed

                         an interior  by candlelight  to render  the

                         narrative startling dramatic. For the first

                         time I was a free object.  I composed the

                         initiation ceremony neath a huge canopy

                         of dead eucalypt  whose forked branches

                         overarched the whole canvas.   And then

                         a much smaller living tree   to pleach the

                         frame twice over.   Briefly, I’d broke the

                         shackles  of  the  picturesque  panorama!

           

I painted the figures tiddy,   in particular

the dancers in a crochet pattern, so as to

display to advantage a  winding-sheet of

storm  gathering in that vast domed sky.

The coppery blackies glowed like spirits

varnished by the earth.  Nobbys loomed

luminous  out of  the  moonlit water like

the root of a worn tooth. Signal Hill was

merely a duo of dots for  lighthouse and

flagstaff, but positioned high and central

to  show  the mastery of  our civilization.

I would never say a mouthful of ill against

these native peoples,   but I was constantly

held at the long saw.    Sometimes Captain

Wallis would send me on Sydney business. 

Once I  was in  a longboat  returning  to the

supply brig,  Elizabeth Henrietta,  that took

on  a  cargo of  red cedar at  Port  Stephens. 

In the  twinkling of a  staff,  we were in the

briers, attacked from the rocky headland by

a riot of savages,  perfidious  Worimi,  who

were stirred up like bull ants, too sundry for

us.    Rocks and  spears  whistled  about our

ears.  Scratched with a dub o’ the lick in the

the scrimmage,  I  broached  blood  and lost

my hat to a spear, but haply kept my noggin.

The Awabakal served out differently on the

question of revenge or blood for blood.   In

Albion,  felons  such as the likes of me  are

jugged for seven or fourteen year,  whereas

the natives have no lock-up.  Justice is dealt

swift and summary.   For killing his brother

Dick,  who had raped his wife,  Burigon did

show more  fortitude and  gravity  than fear,

standing agin a gang of fiery spear throwers

with only a wooden shield for cover.  At his

trial,  Burigon was grievously  injured in the

head,  which our  surgeon  duly  attended to,

but he remained chief, having done penance

enough  to  satisfy  the old  men of  the tribe.

           

As for me,  a captive exile,  I was sensible that

I’d got my badge for life.  Then on the last day

but one of his governorship,  Macquarie grants

me an absolute pardon.  To show my desperate

mettle, notwithstanding my gratitude to the old

Viceroy, I bilked my creditors with forged bills

of exchange  to cut lucky to  England, both my

daughters  and  myself.  Fortunate to me, there

was no forfeit for the copyist to pay. But Dame

Fortune’s cruel twist was a knife plunged in the

guts - sudden discovery in Brum, apprehension,

thundering threats, standing trial, hasty judging

and a  humbling most abject.  Alas, the fat is in

the fire for the reckoning.   O fickle wheel, spin

giddy one last time to douse dark candle’s glim.

                                                                                   Michael Small

                        June21-July 13, 2006

                        July 20-24, 2006

                        January 22-31, 2007