confronted with his tormentor, he merely laughed

The woman who told her interviewer that there was "a great deal of exaggeration about Port Arthur and the way the prisoners were treated there" would not have liked Caroline Leakey's book, or Marcus Clarke's book; she would not have liked them if her preferences for literature only followed the direction of that recorded statement, and if she judged her fiction by the way it sympathised with the emotions that were copied down in writing on that single occasion, one day of her life; neither book is in sympathy with the idea that Port Arthur "was not so bad after all" but the woman might have liked one of them for some other reason or both of them for other reasons, if she had ever read them -- what other other areas of her preference might have existed outside that statement quoted in Susanna Hoe's book: "you have only to look at the numbers of them who came on and did well for themselves to realise that it was not so bad after all"?

With her vast finity of life around her I will not say that she would not have liked those books.

One hundred and twenty lashes were inflicted in the course of the morning, but still the sullen convict refused to speak. He was then treated to fourteen days' solitary confinement in one of the new cells. On being brought out and confronted with his tormentor, he merely laughed. For this he was sent back for another fourteen days; and still remaining obdurate, was flogged again, and got fourteen days more. Had the chaplain then visited him, he might have found him open to consolation, but the chaplain -- so it was stated -- was sick. When brought out at the conclusion of his third confinement, he was found to be in so exhausted a condition that the doctor ordered him to hospital. As soon as he was sufficiently recovered, Frere visited him, and finding his "spirit" not yet "broken", ordered that he should be put to grind maize. Dawes declined to work. So they chained his hand to one arm of the grindstone and placed another prisoner at the other arm. As the second prisoner turned, the hand of Dawes of course revolved.

"You're not such a pebble as folks seemed to think," grinned Frere, pointing to the turning wheel.

Upon which the indomitable poor devil straightened his sorely-tried muscles, and prevented the wheel from turning at all. Frere gave him fifty more lashes, and sent him the next day to grind cayenne pepper.


(from For the Term of his Natural Life, (1874), by Marcus Clarke)

Ada Cambridge, publishing in 1903:

If the afternoon is still young we stroll on around the point, along that sea-wall which was built by convict labour -- significant words, recalling days we do not care to think of. The wall is broken down in places, and stays so; this is the "old part" as the old times left it -- some day to be repaired and used, but gently going to pieces in the meantime. All around us here we feel the spirit of those old times, so stern and sad. Close by is the spot where Commandant Price was murdered. It was before my time, but I have heard the tale of his life and death from friends and relatives, co-officials and eye-witnesses, authorities whom the author of His Natural Life never had opportunity to consult. They say -- of course I can only take their word -- that he was a brave and just, if undoubtedly hard, man, and that Frere in His Natural Life, supposed to be a portrait of him, is a cruel caricature. One of his official colleagues, who was also one of the kindest and most high-minded of men, solemnly assured me that what he did was "what he had to do" and represented to him his duty.

themselves to realise

It is as if the first three volumes (the two Hymns and The Manor House) existed so that Ada Cambridge could turn against them when she wrote the ones that came after them; she was preparing herself, without knowing it, to repudiate her own stated points of view, not denying the words of other people but denying her own words and pressing back against them, "one of those comparatively rare at that time who do their thinking for themselves in regard to these matters," she says decidingly; and then she describes her own thoughts (her pushing-back thoughts) being acted out by Jim as though they are independent actions and not opinions that are attached to her own brain: as though a butoh teacher had said, "Let's be a tree," but in place of a tree they said, "Let's be Ada Cambridge's point of view," and Jim obeys (since actual living people will not behave like that so the fictional must: they are a balloon blown up and tied to the opinion, they are rustling and coloured heliums) -- a clergyman's wife for forty-seven years until her husband died -- much harder not to wonder what her husband's congregation thought, than to wonder it -- the tantalising and useless mental effort quite relentless there, and irresistible, like the Dockers in the semis.

A woman who once spoke to Ada Cambridge at a funeral spends the rest of her life wondering, "Am I Aunt Ellen?"

Then novels, novels, and Caroline Leakey -- I'm coming back to her -- wrote a novel ten years after her book of poems had been published (that same Lyra Australis).

Neither of these authors stopped after one or two books of reiterated shapes (Leakey's rub) but went onward like the cockroaches that try to make themselves houses in the kitchen, or like the people downstairs who broke back into their flat or apartment when they had been locked out -- rent not paid -- the bedroom window grinding down there at two a.m. followed by shoes on the gravel -- evidence that the person has hands and feet -- that same window later smashed and boarded up -- further evidence of their existence, finally the evidence stops when the manager of the apartment complex has a dowel rod inserted in the window runner.

Leakey wrote about the convict system and called her book The Broad Arrow after the convict pheon. Marcus Clarke? She came before Marcus Clarke. He used her book for research. Why do we read his book and not hers; why do the schools teach one and not the other? In Australia I mean. There must be reasons. Her story is more detailed; his story is more exciting. I mean there are more whippings, drownings, failed rescue attempts, etc, "uncontrolled, unbearable brutality," Susanna Hoe writes in her book about Tasmania (Tasmania: Women, History, Books and Places (Of Islands & Women) (2010)): "the contrast could not be more striking between the control and subtlety of the writing in The Broad Arrow and the uncontrolled, unbearable brutality of the treatment of Rufus Dawes."

Just prior to that, on the same page, she (Hoe) has quoted a woman who lived at Port Arthur with her husband from 1846 to 1850. "There has been a great deal of exaggeration about Port Arthur and the way the prisoners were treated there, but you have only to look at the numbers of them who came on and did well for themselves to realise that it was not so bad after all [...] They were not the depraved nearly maniac creatures you may have read about, at all. Some of them had been sent out for trifles, and never broke the law again," which, if you want to consider it as an emotional shape exposed by language, is similar to the article that David G. Schwartz published in Las Vegas Seven on September 3rd when he wanted to describe The Green Felt Jungle (1963) as a "pack of fabrications, half-truths and tall tales." His article is called The Book That Tried to End Las Vegas. "Reid and Demaris vacuumed up just about every stray anecdote they found and passed it on without verifying a word. And it's no surprise that the city's reputation suffered." "And while people living in Las Vegas knew much of the book was, at best, exaggerated, those who didn't had no way to distinguish fact from fiction."

Las Vegas feels that it suffers like this often, old Tasmania too, certainly other places: very easy it is to feel misunderstood, very tempting to write correctives.