The Commandant Read online

  JESSICA ANDERSON was born in Gayndah, west of Bundaberg, in 1916, and grew up in Brisbane. She left school at the age of sixteen before briefly studying art at Brisbane Technical College. For most of her life she lived in Sydney.

  Anderson wrote stories and adapted novels for radio before she published her first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy, in 1963. The Commandant (1975) was her third published novel. She liked it the best of her books, she said, ‘maybe because I enjoyed writing it the most.’

  In 1978 she won the Miles Franklin Literary Award for Tirra Lirra by the River, and again in 1980 for The Impersonators, which also won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction. In 1987 her collection Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories, won the Age Book of the Year award.

  Jessica Anderson died in 2010, aged ninety-three.

  CARMEN CALLIL founded Virago Press in 1972 and later became managing director of Chatto & Windus and the Hogarth Press. Since 1995 she has worked as a writer and critic. She is the author of Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, and co-author, with Colm Tóibín, of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950.

  ALSO BY JESSICA ANDERSON

  An Ordinary Lunacy

  The Last Man’s Head

  The Commandant

  The Impersonators

  Taking Shelter

  Tirra Lirra by the River

  One of the Wattle Birds

  Stories from the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories

  Proudly supported by Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

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  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Jessica Anderson 1975

  Introduction copyright © Carmen Callil 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Macmillan Publishers London 1975

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2012

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by WH Chong & Susan Miller

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters

  Primary print ISBN: 9781921922138

  Ebook ISBN: 9781921921766

  Author: Anderson, Jessica

  Title: The commandant / by Jessica Anderson, introduction by Carmen Callil.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Women—Australia—Fiction. Australia—History—Fiction.

  Other Authors/Contributors: Callil, Carmen.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  Ebook Production by Midland Typesetters Australia

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Tales of Strangers by Carmen Callil

  The Commandant

  Francis O’Beirne, the young heroine of The Commandant, gives a key to the genius of Jessica Anderson: ‘I am made up of hundreds of persons, and I never know which will come out.’ Open the first page of any of her eight published works of fiction and, each time, she presents you with a different world, all-encompassing, entirely absorbing, real.

  Nora Porteous, the narrator of Tirra Lirra by the River, Anderson’s most popular novel, though not her finest—The Commandant is that—adds clarification: ‘we were all great story-tellers.’ The happiness a consummate novelist bestows upon a reader—the feeling that under no circumstance can you bear not to know what happens next, nor can you bear to come to the end of the tale—this is Jessica Anderson’s great narrative gift.

  She had many others: a precise command of the ironic and descriptive word, and an observant eye that contemplated human inadequacies in the manner of a knowing yet sympathetic bird. Observing, listening, gave her a formidable grasp of dialogue and the human comedy inherent therein. To all this she added a prose of simplicity and elegance, capable, as it is in The Commandant, of great lyrical beauty. For all these reasons Jessica Anderson was a most astute chronicler of the Australia of her time, 1916 to 2010.

  She was born Jessica Queale, in a rural Queensland town, but grew up Brisbane. She read omnivorously from the age of three. She was a child with a stammer, but one bursting to tell stories, always writing. Her stamping grounds were the places she knew and loved best: Queensland and Sydney, to which she moved when she was eighteen. In 1916 Australia was a recently federated nation bristling with religious hostilities, exacerbated by the vicious conscription debates of World War I. By 2010 its small cities had exploded into tarmacked metropolises, rattling with computers and other godless inventions. Anderson was an Australian of English and Irish descent, born in a time when travel overseas, often to countries mysteriously called Home, together with some years as an expatriate there, was a part of life for so many. Nora, and Sylvia Foley in The Impersonators, are such creatures of exile and return.

  Anderson once remarked that, with the exception of Christina Stead, she was almost entirely uninfluenced by other Australian writers, little realising that when she also said, ‘I was very much…preoccupied with people who are strangers in their society,’ she was following a centuries-old Australian literary tradition, one celebrated in so many bush ballads and stories. The loner, the swagman, the convict, the remittance man, the single women hauled out from the old country to serve the early settlers: all were outsiders, all onlookers. Jessica Anderson found their natural successors, in modern times, in her warring Sydney families, her divorcees, her bohemians, her children.

  These are novels of Australia in the twentieth century. To see her dissect the vicious pull of sex and money, read her first novel, An Ordinary Lunacy; to see her at play amidst the carnage of sibling rivalry and dysfunctional families, read The Impersonators. Her writing is at its most elegiac in Tirra Lirra by the River, at its most lucid and wise in her Stories From the Warm Zone and Sydney Stories. Social satire is her forte. The harshest of stories shimmer with her sense of humour and her singularly empathetic understanding of character. This kaleidoscope of attributes moves through all her work, but only in The Commandant does she combine them all.

  First published in 1975, it is one of the very best historical novels we have about colonial Australia in the early nineteenth century. A rarity too because it tells of the penal settlement that became Brisbane, rather than rehearsing again the well-trodden paths of convict Sydney. Moreton Bay penal colony was founded in 1824. Under Captain Patrick Logan, who assumed command in 1826, it was one of the worst, for it took repeat offenders. His brutality was recorded forever in the famous Australian folksong, ‘Moreton Bay’:

  For three long years I was beastly treated

  And heavy irons on my legs I wore

  My back from flogging was lacerated

  And oft times painted with my crimson gore

  And many a man from downright starvation

  Lies mouldering now underneath the clay

  And Captain Logan he had us mangled

  All at the triangles of Moreton Bay

  Anderson does not disguise that she is basing her characters on historical figures and events. Logan, a rigid army man, married Letitia O’Beirne of Sligo, Ireland, the daughter of a fellow officer, a member of that select band of Irishmen, Anderson implies, who sold their patrimony to the devil by fighti
ng for the British. The novel opens at sea, as Letitia’s sister Frances ends the long journey to Moreton Bay, where she is presented with ‘another kind of country’, its convicts ‘sub-human, like animals adapted to men’s work or goblins from under the hill’. From the deck Frances views the wharf, small houses, chimneys, gardens, barracks: solid British settlement. In the surrounding wilderness, evoked with the lightest of touches, are dark presences watching the construction of frightening objects on precious land.

  This was the astonishing epoch when imperial Britain presented the original inhabitants of Australia with two invading species: ragged white men in chains and shackles accompanied by uniformed white men bearing muskets or prayer books. What the Aborigines saw is barely described but throbs through the narrative: something achieved by Conrad in his similar contemplation of Africa, Heart of Darkness.

  Jessica Anderson has said how much she relished the historical investigation required, and it shows in every meticulously researched episode, in understanding lightly conveyed. Moreton Bay was a penal colony governed by Scots and Irish of the Ascendancy. The convicts they brutalised were mostly Catholic Irish. Here are the origins of the rigid division between Protestant and Catholic which was to continue in Australia until well into the second half of the twentieth century. As deftly achieved is the vivid accuracy of her historical figures. Henry Cowper, alcoholic doctor and wit, and the Jewish convict Lewis Lazarus, a Magwitch-like personage worthy of Dickens, are creations of grand—and on occasion comic—opera. There are many more.

  Frances arrives in 1830. It is the early age of science; reform is in the air in England, and in Australia Captain Logan has become notorious for his unquestioning use of the tortures permitted by law, loathed by all those who watch Gilligan the scourger at work with his lash. A liberal Sydney editor accuses Logan of murder: the matter is to come to trial. Logan is a man of the past, devoted to the ‘system of punishment and reform’ that he is ‘privileged to serve’. Anderson portrays a monstrous product of his age, yet one for whom she evokes some sympathy.

  His tragedy is played out within a domestic story which reads like a Jane Austen novel transported to strange lands. Bonnet, shawl, muff and the twitterings of the Logan children are juxtaposed with the genteel social life of the settlement, with its servants, wives and medical officers. Frances is an idealistic seventeen-year-old when she arrives, with an admirer met on the journey out who might offer her everything a young woman should want. There are echoes of the famous opening lines of Pride and Prejudice in Letitia’s homily to her sister: ‘ev’wy woman who wants a husband is in some degree a husband hunter…If she is pwetty, so much the better. If not…’ Anderson has transposed her own stammer into a lisp for the delightful Letty, as she gives the red hair to be found in every one of her works to the lieutenant’s sardonic wife, Louisa Harbin, adorned with ‘a hairpiece like six red dead snails’. Frances, more intelligent, must follow the fate of the convicts, blacks and runaways, and face the sights she is forced to see. Her moral self-education is the dramatic lynchpin of the novel.

  The novel closes, as it should, in the Australian bush, and once again, at sea: those two defining elements of our national story. Anderson writes of the natural beauty offered, then and now, to every immigrant Australian, whether convict, commandant, male or female. Lines of inspired description about her native land are threaded through The Commandant like an exquisite embroidery, writing rarely to be found in her other work:

  On Henry’s right hand a few clumps of tall trees, their rough bark the colour of iron, and their foliage a dun green, stood with the junction of trunk and root shrouded by tall pale grass; and although at his left the river marked out a fissure of brighter greens, none among them were the sappy greens of England and Ireland…It was as if everything here inclined not to the sun’s bright spectrum, but to those of the mineral earth and the ghostly daytime moon…

  The Commandant was published in England in 1975 when its English publisher put a bodice-ripper jacket on it. Today it can be published in a different way, in a different country, and be seen for the masterpiece it is.

  For help in the preparation of this novel, I wish to thank my brother, Alan Queale, who put his library and his detailed knowledge of Australian history at my disposal, and the staffs of the Mitchell Library, Sydney and the Oxley Library, Brisbane. Thanks are also owing to the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, whose award of a fellowship gave me freedom and encouragement.

  J. A.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘But Dunwich is only a depot. Don’t judge us by a depot. Wait, my dear Miss O’Beirne, wait till we get to the settlement. Which with this wind—’ Mrs Bulwer drew a hand from her muff and held it into the wind—‘will be some five hours more. It’s quite a pretty little place, I assure you. And healthy besides. None of us has gone to our graveyard. Not one. And only one soldier. Quite a contrast with the India stations. At least with Madras. I am sure the rumour that the fifty-seventh is to go to Madras is quite unfounded. Agra. It will be Agra. Agra is delightful. Very little fever at Agra. On the settlement we do have the fever, but not the India sort, not the sort to carry one off. And we have the ophthalmia and the dysentery, though neither is so prevalent with us. But of course we have nothing so dreadful as the cholera. The cholera! Do you know how bad it was at home last year? Why, of course you do, you were there.’

  Frances said, well, she had been in Ireland.

  ‘Well, Ireland. Ireland is as bad as England for the cholera. Did Letty write you that we have two surgeons on the settlement now? Both young,’ she said, on a note of persuasion, and with a sudden bold look at Frances, ‘and both such dear clever good men.’

  Frances sank her chin in her collar and opened her eyes wide. ‘Mr Henry Cowper is good?’

  ‘Why, certainly he is.’ Mrs Bulwer’s note of persuasion deepened into bluster. ‘I can’t think with whom you associated in Sydney if they told you he is not.’

  ‘But I saw him myself, ma’am, on this very voyage—’

  ‘And so you may have. But you have not yet seen him conducting divine service.’

  ‘He conducts—’

  ‘He does. We were sent a chaplain, but he and the commandant— We all have our failings, and our good commandant is sometimes short of temper. Mr James Murray is the other surgeon, the new one. He is single—’ she flashed Frances another of her bold looks—‘and dines quite often with your sister and the commandant. Oh, you will not be dull, I assure you. And the commandant’s cottage is charming. Letty has such taste. Well, I will say no more. You will soon see it all for yourself, and meet your little niece and nephew besides. So come, my dear, let us have a smile. Such a young creature, yet so-o dejected!’

  ‘It’s the architecture of my face,’ said Frances.

  ‘Arch-itecture?’

  ‘Yes. It makes me look dejected when I am only thoughtful.’

  ‘It does not do to be too thoughtful.’

  ‘But—does not do for what?’

  ‘Why, that’s a question I hardly know how to answer.’ Mrs Bulwer’s voice was slower. Without looking away from Frances’s face, she withdrew into preoccupation. ‘If you’re going to ask clever questions, you had better talk to Mrs Harbin.’

  ‘I’ve hardly seen Mrs Harbin since we left Sydney Heads. She was so sick.’

  ‘We were all sick. You don’t resemble Letty, do you? Or Cassandra? You are in quite a different style.’

  ‘Letty and Cass take after papa. I resemble mama. Or did, when she was alive.’

  Mrs Bulwer responded only with a brief but most reflective murmur. ‘H’mmm.’ Frances, made uneasy by her continued scrutiny, put a hand to her left cheek, where smallpox had left an area of roughness, and raised herself slightly in her seat to look out over the water. They had disembarked at Dunwich from the Isabella, and were now on the deck o
f the Regent Bird, going up Moreton Bay. ‘What island is that?’ asked Frances.

  But Mrs Bulwer didn’t even look. ‘Green Island. I understand there are two more of you.’

  ‘Yes. It’s not very green.’

  ‘Both girls?’

  ‘Yes. Hermione and Lydia.’

  ‘Your poor father,’ said Mrs Bulwer, with sudden frank gloom.

  ‘Well, ma’am, he is poor, you see.’

  ‘I meant, of course, unfortunate.’

  ‘I know. But it’s being poor that makes him unfortunate.’

  ‘You look much more like Cassandra when you laugh. Oh, we do miss Cassandra. Always so agreeable, so patient and tactful. But never mind, she will be as happy as a bird with her lieutenant, even in the Indies. And you will take her place. You will have Letty to help you now. And the commandant.’

  Frances murmured an excuse and got up, gathering her shawl tightly around her, and went to the side. Mrs Bulwer’s warning voice followed her. ‘It does not do to be opinionated.’ She pretended not to hear. On the bay were amazing stretches of turquoise and violet, and the sky was empty of everything except a dandelion of sun, mildly blazing, and a meek white crescent of moon. From beneath the frill on the back of her bonnet a strand of dark hair dropped and was caught and extended by the wind. The sun, the boom of sails and the race of water, would have held her there at the side, in a dream or trance, as had happened so often on the voyage out, had not Mrs Bulwer, small and black and compact in her side vision, waited. And with a sense of facing something lately evaded, Frances admitted that also waiting, the more insistent because only inwardly visible, was the commandant. Deliberately, she set herself to visualise him, in five hours or so, descending the river bank to meet the Regent Bird.

  She saw a tall, straight-backed, cold-faced, gingery man, who walked with a kind of curbed stiffness, and who moved his head restlessly, or as if fretted by his high neck band. And as detail accrued—the scarlet and gold of his uniform, the gloss and weight of the braid—the background her imagination had provided, slope and river and blurred sky, faded away and left him as she had first seen him in reality. Walking like that, he had descended the unkempt incline before her father’s house in Sligo, while she, nine years old, had peeped from a window with Bridie and Meg. Later she had met him face to face, but it was only as a dim tallness that she could see him bending from the waist to catechise her on her lessons. Her own squirming shyness, and her simultaneous shame of it, had perhaps obliterated from those later meetings nearly everything but itself, whereas at the window, safe between the adult softnesses of Bridie and Meg, she had been free simply to gape.