by Adrian D’Ambra
There are some reading experiences that are just like those other areas of your life that gather around regret. Frankly, you wish that they cold be undone and you know that – just like every other word and action – they cannot be. That’s how I’ve been feeling for the last few days about Richard Flanagan’s ‘Wanting’ [2008]. Not that the novel itself has not been worth reading, no, far from it, but that having just finished it in the last hour I feel burdened by it. There’s an ashen taste in my mouth and a general sense of unease caused by what Flanagan has written about. It begins quite early on with the realisation that this is a piece of historical fiction whose characters are drawn far more from primary and secondary sources than they are from imagination. Misguided in their avowal of a curious mixture of Enlightenment, English and Christian values, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin believe they are bringing civilisation to Van Diemen’s Land. A bounty hunter disguised as a missionary, George Augustus Robinson is mopping up the last remnants of the indigenous population to have survived the genocidal war waged by the colonists against them, receiving a bounty for every ‘savage’ brought in whilst having himself proclaimed their Protector. Charles Dickens is treading the boards in Manchester and embarking on the affair with the then eighteen year old Ellen Ternan that will destroy his marriage and cover her in secrecy and innuendo.
And then there is the aboriginal Tasmanian girl Mathinna whose story Flanagan recounts from her capture by the Protector, her forced adoption by the Franklins, her rape by her adoptive father who is dressed in the black swan costume of the devil, to her abandonment and brutalisation at first in a typhoid orphanage and then at large in the colony. I cannot tell you how devastated I have been to discover that there actually is an 1842 Thomas Bock portrait of her as an eight year old girl wearing the red dress that Flanagan refers to on numerous occasions.
The history covered in this novel is a story of devastation inflicted on an indigenous population by a foreign power debauched by its own belief in itself, its hypocrisy. It is also truly devastating to read. It is one thing to know in one’s general knowledge of the world that genocide was committed in Van Diemen’s Land. It is one thing to know in one’s political and social consciousness that we can never overestimate the traumatic inter-generational impact of colonisation. But it is quite another to have it dragged through the entrails of language and recast as literature in the way that Flanagan does.
Thomas Bock, Watercolour portrait of Mathinna (1835 – 1856), an indigenous Australian girl from Tasmania (1842)
english literature teacher 