Officers and convicts

Having enjoyed The Lieutenant, I was looking forward to another Kate Grenville novel. A Room Made of Leaves is the account Elizabeth MacArthur nee Veale writes 12 years after her husband’s death, contradicting the narrative he had spun. John MacArthur is a most unprepossessing of protagonists; Elizabeth describes him thus:

My husband was rash, impulsive, changeable, self-deceiving, cold, unreachable, self-regarding. I had learned all that, and thought it was the sum of him. Now I knew I was wrong. There was worse. My husband was someone whose judgement was seriously unbalanced.

p93

John MacArthur is a touchy man, always finding the whole world guilty of impugning his prickly dignity, a man convinced of his self-importance and vainglorious to a delusional degree. Disgusted by the spin and outright misrepresentations her husband had created of their lives, after his death, Elizabeth says

My first impulse was to burn the lot. But now I have a better idea than a bonfire. I will create one more document and that will show all these others to be the heroic work of fiction that they are. What I am writing here are the pungent true words I was never able to write.

p11

And so this novel, in very short succinct chapters, lays out double lives of Elizabeth as Mrs MacArthur, the private and the public, and how this clever, patient woman manages to hold true to herself while appearing to bow to the demands of her husband which she cannot in good conscience always countenance.  

Wisely, she could not win by undermining the husband she did not love, so even to her own family, she had to support her husband’s version of events, as well as write and represent him and herself in ways which aligned with what he wished.

I would not lie, not outright. I set myself a more interesting path: to make sure that my lies occupied the same space as the truth. […] It gave me a mocking, angry satisfaction to fool everyone so well. But I well remember the bleakness of folding up that letter and sending it off. To be clever in quite that way is to live within a great solitude.

p103

Elizabeth leaves her life as a genteel English countrywoman when her debt-ridden husband decides to take up a commission which requires him to travel to New South Wales. This is 1788;

It has been two years since a thousand prisoners and two hundred and fifty of His Majesty’s marines sailed into a bay called Sydney Cove and stepped onto a wild shore of which absolutely nothing was known.

p108

She makes a success of her new life by judicious management of her difficult husband, and a great deal of self-discipline and forbearance. But she also derives great joys from her new ventures and learning.  

One of the most unusual things about Elizabeth MacArthur is her nuanced appreciation of the aboriginals, whom the other settlers fear and denigrate and eventually kill. Elizabeth is deeply unusual in her community in being able to glimpse how radically different the ‘natives’ are in their whole approach to life, to land, to ownership, to value systems, and so on. She is able to see beyond her own world, and comprehend the narrowness of her own understanding and premises. For example, she ponders why the aboriginals would trade fresh fish for the settlers’ salt beef, when it is not profitable to them, and unlike the other settlers, does not just assume it is because aboriginals don’t know any better and are easy to exploit. Instead, Elizabeth perceives their starting points are different:

Trade was our word. But what the Burramattangal were doing, when they exchanged their fish for our beef, was perhaps not commerce. Perhaps it was something more like education. Look, they might have been saying, I am showing you the proper way to do things: I give to you, you give to me. And in accepting your inferior food, I am teaching you grace, forgiveness and generosity. Perhaps also shame. 

When the exchange of goods ended, it may have been because the pupil was too dull to learn. Too coarse-grained to feel shame.

p262

It is amazing how this woman could have the imagination to understand her people are not superior to the ‘natives’, which was an assumption taken for granted as being self-evident by the settlers. “

Now, after so many years here, I know better than ever what has been done to the Gadigal, the Wangal, the Cameraygal, the Burramattagal and al the others. Not just the turning-off from their lands and the damage to the old ways. Not just the cruelties inflicted. Not just the deaths. Behind all that is another, fundamental violence: the replacement of the true history by a false one.

p312

Elizabeth MacArthur appreciates that violence can be both physical and epistemic, and perhaps her rewriting was not just to set her own version of events against her husband’s spin, but also to redress the wrongs perpetrated against the aboriginals: 

I can see no way to put right all the wrongs done […] the difference is that now I do not turn away, I am prepared to look in the eye what we have done. 

That repairs no part of the sorrow of it, I know. But it is the first thing, the first hard truth, without which no repair can be hoped for.

p314-315

A lovely lovely read, light of touch, showing rather than telling, giving such tantalising glimpses of life in Australia for the earliest English immigrants (both officers and convicts).