Lance Corporal Martin, bless you

Spare a thought for Lance Corporal John Martin. And here I take an extract from the expedition diary of Charles Cooke Hunt, Superintendent of Convicts and explorer of the (now) Eastern Goldfields during one of Western Australia’s numerous attempts to better itself:

March 12, 1865. ‘Fine and hot. Corporal Martin left in charge of dray at Burracoppin.’ Hunt goes on to point out Lance Corporal Martin “had… only been in the country a few months.”

Picture, if you will, Lance Corporal Martin in this situation. According to the Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australian Biography, LC Martin arrived at Fremantle on the fifteenth of April, 1864. Thus, Hunt’s “few months” were actually eleven but, be that as it may, we can assume that sometime around February 1864, John Martin was sitting at the breakfast table in a small but clean and well-kept lower middle class row house in East Acton, UK, with his mother fussing over him, getting porridge and wiping up the mess he was making. She tells him she’s terribly worried about his well-being in the colonies, saying she has heard terrible tales of tigers and snakes.

“Little Jack,” she says, “you might be eaten by cantaloupe.” LC Martin’s education at the newly opened government school (the UK is flush with Victorian post-reform self-satisfaction at the time) unfortunately did not allow him either to recognise a malaprop when he heard one (it is likely Mrs Martin meant antelope, but I wasn’t there; I can’t be sure. However, both Mrs Martin and her son were almost certainly unaware of the herbaceous and other habits of an antelope so the intent of her comment may well remain), nor even, sadly, to know what was a cantaloupe. Nevertheless he wanted to reassure her. “Please Mumsie (he bore a resemblance both physical and in manner to Hugh Laurie), it’s ‘John’ now. You mustn’t call me Little Jack any more. I’m twenty-seven years old and the lads at the regiment will tease me horribly. Anyway, Mumsie, there are no snakes in Australia (Martin’s lack of understanding of the world is beginning to worry even me at this stage). I’m going to make my fortune and come back and buy you and daddy a brand new house. One with a garden. You’ll see. You’ll be so proud of me.”

Sadly, Martin really did imagine having one jolly huge adventure in the Colony. He pictured himself riding horses across dusty plains, engaging in sword play with swarthy tribesmen (which, in his mind, he always won – and this should be a pointer to his total unsuitability to even disembark the ship, let alone be nominally put in charge of half a dozen ticket-of-leavers – men of very low capabilities themselves), and rescuing a beautiful white woman captured by these dastardly sons of the soil. Martin, naturally, left out the finer details out of these daydreams, details which we, in this more demanding age, might refer to as continuity and believability. The point is, in the end, his fantasies always resulted in him returning home with the beautiful maiden and a bag full of diamonds. And here he was, at Burracoppin, Western Australia, in charge of a cart.

Worse yet, his superior (oho, yes, they still used – and believed in – such terms) Hunt, the officious prick, had sent the dozen or so convicts and TOLs off to sink wells and slash rudimentary tracks through the scrub. They would have taken with them the supplies the dray was carrying, leaving Martin in charge of a near-empty cart. Well, imagine the man’s despair. Even today, Burracoppin isn’t much. In fact (and, gentle reader, I remind you that I write from experience), it is the archetypal country town. One main street, a throughway, because country towns are only ever a place one passes through on the way to somewhere else, usually nearer the coast; they are never a destination. A general store (newsagent, post office, some hardware, basic foodstuffs, limited banking facilities, Chiko rolls), a pub (three white Holden utes parked haphazardly out the front, one with a blue heeler in the back, panting at passers-by; there aren’t many), a scattering of houses, all – despite the four trillion acres of empty country that surrounds the town – lined up facing the main road in perfect symmetry. A wheat bin just out of the town limits. Two gravel roads running off the main highway. One, on the west side of town runs north, adorned with an aluminium blue sign/white writing saying ‘rubbish tip.’ The other road, of course, is on the east side of town and runs to the south. Here there is a pre-metric wooden white sign/black writing giving the name of another country town and a distance that is invariably 38 miles.

(And incidentally the fact of the town having the name Burracoppin tells us much about how Europeans vs Aborigines read the landscape. Hunt (and all other members of his exploray fraternity) liked to name the important features – mountains and lakes – after people he was trying to impress, (career-wise, in the case of his superiors, or pants-wise, in the case of ladies). Silly little things like water holes, well, they could be appelled w/ the blackfella name. Imagine, say, Forrest’s reaction if he found he had funded Hunt and co. to wander aimlessly around the desert and upon returning C.C. proudly stated he had named a trickle of water in Forrest’s honour. Never mind that the trickle of water might be the only thing keeping thirty people alive out there.

Oh shit, the Dutch started it. That dickhead Vlamingh, mustering all the seagoing knowledge possessed in Europe at the time, managed to land off the Western Australian coast at 32º South imagining himself to be in Java. His men, sent to look for water on an offshore island came back and reported the place was dry and worse, it was populated by hundreds of bloody huge rats. Vlamingh retired to his cabin to drink schnaaps and doodle in the captain’s log, emerging four hours later with a wild look in his eye and declaring he had thought of a name for the island. “Rottsnest(sic),” he declared with slurred triumph. His men looked at him with the usual disrespect but thinking, almost to a man, what a genius was their captain. Only in first mate Boorsdag was that thought sarcastic. The rest actually meant it. OK so far, but Stirling, sailing into a sandbar at present-day Fremantle centuries later sent his own offsiders up the newly discovered river to explore. Stirling, like most who would live in the new colony over the next 180 years, had a keen sense of history (you know you do, fuckers), and was determined not to repeat the nomenclatural idiocy of the Dutch. Yet when his men paddled back down the river and gave their report, mentioning the inordinately large number of black swans on the river, and presented him with two recently deceased members of the species, well, to go on would risk over-clarification.

And this continued, with the exception of a period of naming places after Stirling and Darling and Carling, thus, incidentally, setting up a legacy of ‘lings’ which would long resonate in this place where the most to which one could aspire was to be a little fish in a little pond. What we have learned is that Stirling and his British successors, through to Hunt and beyond, showed themselves to be as unimaginative as the Dutch – and this is a rum condemnation indeed. This in a period when American explorers and malcontents were wandering around naming places such as ‘Busted Knee,’ Dead Man’s Gulch,’ ‘Tendonitis,’ ‘Nearly Dead but Got Better’ &c. And that, of course, is why they got Hollywood and we did not. This lesson, unfortunately, seems to be this: If you want to find water in the desert, consult Aboriginal wisdom; if you want to know the bleedin’ obvious, look at European cartological efforts. Mind you the French fauxbourg could be applied, by law, to most of this (fair) city and I wouldn’t complain. God, I love the French. But you knew that.

Well, to return. For Martin, even modern day Burracoppin would have been something to enjoy. He begins writing a terribly painful letter to his parents, “dear mummy and dad, I’m doing really well. You won’t ever believe this, but we (Mr. Charles Hunt who I told you about and some of the men) are hundreds of miles from the settlement. No, Mumsy, we haven’t even seen any tigers but Carter (he used to be a convict!) says he saw a snake but he is not the most reliable man. Well, anyway, things are going really well. In fact, Mr. Chas. Hunt has put me in charge of…” Here Martin’s writing falters, and you, dear reader, won’t be surprised. What can he say? His mother is sure he will never return to dear old England and his dad is secretly proud of him. And here he is, if he is truthful, having to tell them he’s in charge of an empty cart. Could it get any worse. Yes! (hands up those who spotted the lazy literary device there – ah, me. The author as author). He screws up the letter and as he looks up to toss it into the scrub he realizes that not ten feet from him stands a group of a dozen Wongi men, their spears shipped.
To be continued (oh, OK, probably not.)