The book cover has a wonderful evocative image, of a lone sailing ship on wide open seas under a massive, looming sky which takes up four fifths of the image. The colour of the skies are ominous above, with massive dark storm clouds, and yet luminously golden on the underside, seeming to hold promise and brighter skies. The image matches the novel’s storyline beautifully, as it is about the shipping of convicted criminals (the focus is on women criminals in this novel) from Britain to Australia in the 1840s, which can be a terrible condition to be reduced to, with attendant risks and hardships, but also with the promise of a new start in new lands.
We begin with Evangeline, a governess, former daughter of a vicar, from a very sheltered life, who in classic manner, gets seduced by the young master of the house, becomes pregnant, and then is not just dismissed from her post, but accused of theft of a ring the young master gave her, and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment. Kline writes us through the conditions of the prison for women, the way they are crammed in inhumanely and unhygienically, barely fed, mistreated, stigmatised. Then when a ship becomes available, some are shipped out on slaving ships to Australia. Some think this criminalising of women and their harsh sentencing is part of a racket,
England used to send its dregs to America, but after the rebellion they had to find a new rubbish dump. Australia it was. Before they knew it, there was nine men for every woman. Nine! Ye can’t found a settlement with only men, can ye? Nobody though that through. So they came up with arse-backward excuses to send us over there.
p60
It is a very upbeat novel despite the careful detailing of the many miseries Evangeline and her fellow prisoners have to undergo, particularly on the journey to Australia aboard ship. Conditions are vile but the novel writes of Evangeline’s very positive frame of mind for most part.
One day soon she would give birth to this baby, and the ship would land, and she’d serve her time, and then perhaps she could put all of this behind her. She wouldn’t be too old. She had some skills […] She thought of those two fine ladies she’d seen strolling down Bailey Street in front of Newgate Prison, encased in corsets and silks, tethered to convention, alarmed by everything beyond the bounds of their own narrow sphere. She knew more about life than they ever would. She’d learned that she could withstand contempt and humiliation – that she could find moments of grace in the midst of bedlam She’d learned that she was strong. And now, here she was half way around the world. The sheltered, unworldly governess who’d entered the gates of Newgate was gone, and in her place was someone new. She barely recognised herself.
p155-6
Evangeline is not our only protagonist – on board ship, there is a young girl, Hazel, only a teenager, convicted of stealing a single silver spoon because her alcoholic mother had made her steal. Hazel learned midwifery and herblore from her mother and has some skills at healing and delivering babies. She makes friends with Evangeline, and we follow Hazel’s story when they dock in Australia, how Hazel is put to work, punished if disobedient with solitary confinement in the cold and dark, and forced to pick 5 pounds of oakum a day, or be beaten with a rod if she falls short. Oakum is hemp rope caked with tar, wax, and salt, used as a caulking compound to plug holes in ships, and which has to be painfully picked apart,
Her hands cracked and bled. Salt seeped into the cuts; they felt as if they were on fine. She tried to manage the pain, as she’d taught women in labor to do.
p294
But Hazel is a survivor, and she manages to make a life for herself after she had served her time as a convict.
Parallel to the story of women convicts, is the story of Mathinna, who is one of the last surviving indigenous people, and as a child, she is picked up by a rich British family, the Franklins, who want to try to ‘civilise’ her for their own amusement or interest. They separate her from her tribe and family, and bring her to live with them, learn French and dancing and manners, dress her up as a lady, and parade her to guests and visitors as if she were a pet animal. When they move away, they discard her to an orphanage. Mathinna’s story is tragic, plucked out to be isolated, belonging to no world, and treated like a savage. Hazel had been put to work as a convict maid for the Franklins and had met and befriended Mathinna there, but the two stories don’t fuse well together – Mathinna’s story is vital, and yet feels like a bolt on in this novel. The parallel stories don’t quite work out in this novel.
Later on in the novel, when Hazel has gain partial freedom, she meets Mathinna in Hobart Town, where she is probably a prostitute. Mathinna tells her story of being locked up at the orphanage without being told why,
They beat me. Shaved my head, Dunked me in ice water. I don’t know why. They said I was insolent, and maybe I was. […] one day they pulled me out and put me on a boat back to Flingers. But it wasn’t the same. My stepfather had died. Influenza, they said […] Most of the people I knew were dead. The rest were wasting away. And anyway I’d lost the language I was too….different.
p319
This of course is a very important part of he story of Australia’s white settlement origins, how they mistreated the aboriginals and regarded them as subhuman. Inflicting all manner of atrocities on the indigenous people, the white settlers ended up exterminating most of them.
Mathinna was then sent back to an orphanage, then to Oyster Cove, an old convict station where everyone was sick and dying. She ran away and ended up on the streets. The point of Hazel and Mathinna’s stories running in parallel in the novel seems to be because Kline wants to flag up how although women from all nations were mistreated and exiled from homes, there was a difference:
watching Mathinna make her way down the street, Hazel felt a strange and unquenchable sadness. They were, both of them, exiles, torn from their homes and families. But Hazel had stolen a spoon to earn that status; Mathinna had done nothing to deserve her fate.
p322
That said, the Mathinna portions of the novel just don’t seem to blend well enough into the novel, for all their importance that these are also recorded as the narrative of Australia’s 1840s life. In her acknowledgements, Kline tells us of the extensive research she had done for the novel, but the two different sets of circumstances just needed to be welded together more organically and cohesively; otherwise, it almost seems to be two stories and two sets of conditions which don’t necessarily speak to each other.
All that said, this novel was a good read, pleasurable and informative, evocative and lively. Would definitely continue to follow Kline’s oeuvre with positive anticipation.
Recent Comments