Wanting by Richard Flanagan Page B

of pictures and a dozen casts of the Elgin and Vatican marbles. Expense is an important object, or I shall never in this money-loving colony get the means of erecting it. Could you arrange to have casts made of the Theseus, Ilyssus, Torso and Horse’s Head at the British Museum, also the Apollo Belvedere, Venus de’ Medici, and the Dying Gladiator?’
    ‘Lady Bluebottle would do better filling her dance card with admirers than the island with the French ideas of the petticoaterie,’ her husband’s secretary, Montague, sniffed to his Hobart Town friends when recounting her ambition. But in her presence, of course, he only smiled and praised her initiatives.
    ‘Other women seek flowers,’ she once told Montague, in whom she correctly sensed piqued influence, ‘but I contend for laurels.’
    And for a time, her laurels pleased the upper echelons of the island, for, though in various ways dependent in their prosperity and power on the dreary misery of the many, they had nevertheless acquired the habit of defending themselves by garlanding themselves with culture.
    For the leaders of Van Diemen’s Land weren’t objectionable because they had dull poets, pompous naturalists and bad watercolourists, but because, having them, they couldn’t keep quiet about it. They recited grating verse, hung their walls with brutal brushwork, gloated about their learned societies and assured eachother their several amateur scientists were daily making extraordinary discoveries.
    Above all else, they boasted of the couple who seemed to them to embody all that they saw as most splendid and special about themselves: the reputedly dashing new Governor and his wife. They were interesting people, celebrated people who were abreast of the latest fashions of thought, respected people who knew the right people in England, remarkable people who would make greatness of this colony, marvellous people who were exactly the right motley to throw over the mediocrity that really ran the island.
    And so they flattered and feigned to the vice-regal couple, and only the women convicts at the Female Factory gave definite expression to what the unfree felt: as Lady Jane lectured them on morality as the basis of all life, they turned their backs and, as one, flicked up their skirts and waggled their dirty arses. Beyond the immediate halo of power, in the outer rings of society, most convicts and ticket-of-leave men paid them no heed. In their sly grog shops and knock-houses, life went on as it had, with their banned songs and wild grog sweetened with sugar; in the backblocks and the forests, in the kitchens and stables and workshops and pits, luck and fate as ever determined whether they lived or died, were raped or flogged or freed, whether they found enough to eat or starved.
    But then a great depression swept Europe, the market for textiles collapsed, the mills faltered, the free settlers could no longer get the prices they once had for their wool,and there was no longer gold flowing in abundance. The colony’s prosperity was halted and everyone in the colony understood the cause—His Bulkiness, Sir John, and his interfering wife, Lady Jane.
    The Franklins were for a long time oblivious. Sir John began a Van Diemen’s Land navy with the construction of six gunboats, and was rather excited at the prospect of ordering new cannon with powder and shot. It gave him the illusion he was a man of action, which he felt might compensate for his failure to be a man of intrigue. On his arrival, he had been astonished by the prosperity of the colony. He was received with feasting, balls and every form of public rejoicing. On entering the northern capital of Launceston, he was escorted by three hundred horsemen and seventy carriages, the streets were thronged with well-wishers, all enthusiastic. The tyrant Arthur, his predecessor, was gone. It was as if he were a liberator. He never understood, then or later, Montague’s advice.
    ‘No government,’ warned his