by John Kinsella
The plot
thickens or maybe gains a little more clarity when it comes to Charles Walker
and the first published volume of poetry published in Western Australia/Perth.
I have got hold
of pages from Beverley Smith’s 1961 MA thesis ‘Early Western Australian
Literature: A Guide to Colonial Life and Goldfields Life (History Department of
the University of Western Australia), in which she writes,
‘On the 6th August 1856 the following item appeared under
‘Local and Domestic Intelligence’ in the Perth
Gazette’... (p66)
and there
follows the item I have quoted earlier about Charles Walker’s death and ‘rage
for verse-making’. Smith then goes on to say,
‘Walker’s volume was the first book of verse published in Perth, but
apart from this reference there is no trace of Lyrical Poems.’ (p66)
Smith footnotes
this sentence with,
‘A search of advertising columns of the Perth Gazette for the period failed to disclose evidence of
Walker’s verse-making.’
The tongue-in-cheek
reference to ‘verse-making’ aside — maybe a tone of mockery we can forgive,
given the broader context Smith is attempting to create, and the possibility
that like us she is offended by the mockery of the press or persons who clearly
demeaned Walker’s obsession as poet (as it should be!) — clearly Smith made an
error in attributing this piece to the Perth
Gazette. In fact, as I’ve shown, it appeared in The Inquirer and Commercial News, and that is also where the
alluded-to advertisements appeared.
But Smith does
furnish us with some further, vital information. She continues,
‘Its author arrived in Western Australia in 1852 on the William Jardine. The offence for which
he is transported is not known, but existing records describe him as a baker by
trade, twenty-six years of age and married.’ (p66)
Smith references
the ‘Register and Shipping Lists, Battye Library A/128’ regarding her source.
What helps fill
out our narrative of the book in this is the fact that Walker was a baker. I
return to the premises from which Walker was to sell and apparently did sell
his Lyrical Poems — Mr. G. [George]
Marfleet’s store/s. Further newspaper investigation reveals to us that Marfleet
was a prominent Perth citizen of the period, being both a baker and a confectioner
and a purveyor of other goods. Some seventeen years after Walker’s death, we
read of items other than baked goods and confectionary evidently being sold in
(certainly stolen from!) his store/s:
‘SHOPLIFTING.—Three men, named John Gallagher, a shoemaker, Delap,
and Melville were committed for trial at the Perth Police Court last week for
stealing a chest of tea and a bag of sugar from the shop of Mr. Marfleet, in
William Street. The property was found secreted in the prisoners’ lodgings.’
TO THE EDITOR. (1873, May 2). The Perth Gazette and West Australian
Times (WA : 1864 - 1874), p. 3. Retrieved March 29, 2015, from
http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article3752307
Now, it’s
possible (likely?) that as his business developed, Marfleet (our ‘bookseller’)
increased the range and nature of his wares, but all the same, we might equally
assume he wasn’t averse to selling other items in his shop — maybe Walker’s
book.
Or was Walker
just using it as a point of contact? The book not on display, but available by
writing or dropping in, and it would come out of the back rooms where Walker
with floury hands would hand it across, Marfleet taking a small cut from the
half-a-crown?
When Marfleet
died, The Inquirer ran his obituary,
clearly sympathetic to the good citizen with his liberal religious belief, and fêting
his life as a model for the young. This was the same newspaper in which Walker
had advertised, maybe with the support of Marfleet, or maybe taking advantage
of a connection through his place of work/labour (depending on the conditions
of his post-convict status until being reclaimed by The Establishment). Here is
Marfleet’s obituary:
‘Death of Mr. Marfleet. — A mournful duty devolves upon us to record
the death of an old, highly-esteemed and worthy citizen, Mr. George Marfleet.
Arriving in the colony when quite a young man, in the year 1851, he soon
afterwards entered upon the business of his calling as a baker and
confectioner, in the establishment at that time conducted by the late Mr. Henry
Devenish, in Hay and William Streets, and of which some time afterwards he
became the proprietor, continuing the direction of its affairs until within the
last fortnight, when rapidly declining strength prevented his taking an active
part in his business. He was a staunch and liberal Churchman, and as a citizen
and tradesman he has left behind him an example of patient industry and
well-doing worthy of emulation by all young men entering upon the duties of
life. He leaves a wife and four children, one of whom is married, and the
others, we believe, are tolerably well provided for. The funeral took place on
Monday afternoon, and was attended by a large number of the deceased's personal
friends and other citizens, the brethren of the City of Perth Lodge of
Oddfellows, of which he was one of the oldest members; besides several of the
brethren of the New Swan Lodge, M.U.I.O.O.F., 4406, Fremantle. The offices for
the dead were read by the Dean of Perth. Br. DeLuey, of the Fremantle Lodge, at
the close of the Church Services, read the exhortation as set forth in the
ritual of Oddfellowship; the brethren meanwhile standing around the grave,
holding in their hands the usual emblem — a sprig of acacia — which they
deposited on the coffin in the manner enjoined by the Order.’
The Inquirer. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 15, 1881. (1881, June 15). The Inquirer and Commercial News (Perth,
WA : 1855 - 1901), p. 2. Retrieved March 29, 2015, from http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article65958465
‘Establishment’ resonates here — a life of propriety and religious
conviction that brings business and a foundational certainty, against that of
Walker’s rage for verse-making and his death in the penal Establishment, as
contrast. A tale of at least two Perths. But Marfleet was acknowledged as one
of ‘liberal’ (as in ‘reason’ and ‘tolerance’ within churchmanship — that is
‘broad church’) views, so we might suppose
he at least supported Walker’s poeticising, even if with some trepidation or
wariness. Maybe he’s a reason the book came into being at all, rather than one
who thwarted it or abandoned Walker to his ‘fate’. Maybe Marfleet enabled
Walker to pursue the one who stole his manuscript, or stood against his
material and metaphysical interests? The spiritual baker and the poet baker;
the capitalist-bourgeoise baker and the convict baker.
I search further for evidence of Charles Walker’s poetic life in
Britain. He was only twenty-six in 1852 and thirty when he dies. Did he publish
in England before being transported? He was a tradesman probably outside the
usual publishing avenues in London/Britain, and yet a book by a Charles Walker
did appear in 1853 in Mayfair,
London, published by Saunders & Otley of Conduit Street, entitled, Irene. A Tale. In Two Cantos. And Other
Poems. A search of the book doesn’t reveal anything of bakers, baking,
crimes committed, or the prospect of Western Australia, but it does being with
a ‘Dedicatory Sonnet to my Mother’ which carries the lines:
This little tribute then may raise a tear —
Remind of me if I am still not here —
Or speak in gentle whispers of a time
Then long gone by and
never to return
Now, it’s ludicrous to suggest that the year after he was
transported our Charles Walker (the insidiousness of taking possession of the
dead to paint a picture in the narratives of our own textual lives) published
this book, or that these were the works of his youth, but it can’t be entirely dismissed. By this, I don’t
even mean to suggest they are one and the same poet — out advertisement-threat
poet is rougher and readier in his delivery by the evidence we have, and one
might doubt he would then go on to say:
When I might from a
Mother’s bosom learn
Sweet lessons of the Great and the Sublime.
But we are playing class politics here and forgetting the stress of
his circumstances. His marriage. His likely separation. His loss. In this book
the title poem roils through
orientalist-Greek-mythological-heroic-Christian-romantic-Bible-Koran-Sultan-Turk-Vizier-despot-love-loss-goat-swoon-royalbed-Irene
that finishes:
Howe’er in low disguise he came alone,
To see the fun’ral he himself allow’d,
And shed a feeling tear upon her winding shroud.
The ‘Miscellaneous poems’ section of the book includes a version of
Lamartine and many poems reflecting on and inflecting death, travel (Cologne),
family, the seasons, vistas/views, Nature, a chestnut tree, and carries a list
of 129 subscribers (of which there is no mention of a Marfleet).
This is not our Charles Walker, of course! Of course it’s not. I am
sure a trip to the British Library would yield a bold (if hard to find)
declaration of a very different life lived in a very different way. For
example, there are a lot of John Kinsellas out there, and I know that over the
centuries a few others among them have written poetry. I don’t know them
(though I did correspond briefly with one John Kinsella who is a Canadian
artist and who dabbles in poetry — I have seen some of his paintings online but
not read his verse).
And there’s a John Kinsella who is a monk-poet, I believe, who wrote
some kind of dedicatory chapbook of verse thirty or more years ago. I haven’t
even read his or any of the other John Kinsellas’ works, but strangely, I feel
connected with them even if they have had dramatically different poetry,
politics, ethics, life experiences from my own. We share the body of a name and
an interest, and especially when the durations of our lives cross, we share the
body-without-organs that we fill with life experience and textuality.
Maybe the same can be said of Charles Walker? The London-published
Charles Walker had an exiled, exported, fetishised Antipodean Charles Walker contemporaneous
‘double’ who became part of the crime-as-profit modus operandi of the colony of
Western Australia. This consequence of a ‘rage for verse-making’ echoes like
rings in Narcissus’s pool. Narcissus wasn’t all bad — he knew in himself there
was a truth, he knew the ‘other’ was a truth, and if he didn’t know the mirror
the mirror knew him.
Our Charles Walker was the Doppelgänger, the twin, the shadow, the
mirror image in a construct of a world that had a centre — London — and its
colonies. It’s North and it’s South, it’s opposition, it’s inversion, it’s
less-than — Terra Australis... it’s Antipodean.
An English-speaking baker-convict who wrote and read Greek? This dialogic of
text and poets, this obsession to versify our being in even the most adverse
conditions.
Is the connection between Irene
and Lyrical Poems any more absurd
than the travesty that is the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ and its
triumphalist consumerism? Is there any real difference between the reality we
have constructed, in which Charles Walker can be ‘our’ example, our guide to
the journey through the Underworld, at half-a-crown supported by the upright if
bewildered Marfleet, and the relationship between your jogging heartbeat and
your acquisition of goods from Adidas?
No. The evidence might take us away from this first book in its
context, but in the end, that distance will only enhance and confirm the
connection. Though I have become less (and less) convinced by Deleuze andGuattari’s notion of ‘rhizome’ as outlined/configured in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of
Minnesota, 1994), I take this on notice:
‘There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality
(the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of
subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections
between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book
has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one of several authors as its
subject. In short, we think that one cannot write sufficiently in the name of
an outside. The outside has no image, no signification, no subjectivity. The
book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world. A
rhizome-book, not a dichotomous, pivotal, or fascicular book.’ (p. 23)
No longer? Thus it ever was, if at all? The Charles Walkers — ours
and the other — are the world the
book the author. This text is the assemblage of the ‘missing’ and ‘existent’
texts of poet/s, Charles Walker. The periphery, the centre, the city, the
colony. I remember reading a doctor’s report once that described someone — was
it me? — as being delirious and ‘quoting poetries and philosophies’ as if these
were evidence of instability and a need to be ‘calmed’. This is my personal
investment in a place I live in, and often feel exiled within and from.
‘Embattled’, some have said. Charles Walker, I have been illuminated by your
work, even where I do and should disagree with it.
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