44 JOSEPH LYCETT CALLS SCENES TO MEMORY 9

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