- The Settlement is Jock Serong's final novel in his magnificent trilogy about our early colonial invaders and their brutal treatment of Australia's Indigenous peoples. The two previous novels were Preservation (2018) and The Burning Island (2020).
- The three novels are stand alone and each can be fully comprehended without having read the others (despite there being one character who appears in different guises in each of the novels - he's an embodiment of sheer evil).
- The Settlement demands to be read slowly and carefully. Serong's rich prose is full of intricate observation. He renders the horror of colonialism in vivid detail.
- The central character is The Man, who we later in the novel learn is the Commandant of the Tasmanian colony in the 1830s. He's a committed christian: We - Englishmen - pursue a duty to bring light to darkness. Civilisation...Here are the savages you once feared, stripped of their terrors and set to become Christians. His mission, under London's orders, is to rid Van Diemen's Land of its natives by removing them to a small island to the north. His preference is to negotiate with them and pursue a peaceful accommodation. A rebel band of natives called the Big River Mob have taken a different approach. They are determined to fight the settlers and take back their land, and not indulge in peaceful, cumbersome negotiation.
- The names of the Indigenous leaders are long and barely pronounceable, but we gradually get familiar with them: Mannalargenna, the chief leader, and his sister Toogernuppertootener are key players. 'Tooger-Nupper-Tootener', as she spells it out to a white, is plain-speaking and bold and refuses to be cowed by the British. She is delightful.
- Two key characters are Whelk, the Indigenous orphan boy who yearns to know his origins, and the little girl Pipi, also an orphan.
- Before the trek north begins we're introduced to a huge dark man who had eyes only for the children. He has an old injury to his nose, and a scar across his brow. The eye under the scar does not move. He will be their catechist. (The previous two novels featured this malignant, evil character). He turns out to be a vicious child abuser, and runs the orphanage. Pipi is beaten savagely and dies. The Commandant does nothing about it. If he raised the alarm about (the Catechist) and his evil ways, he would destroy the careful impression he had built of an orderly, pious settlement. He would scuttle any chance of the Port Phillip assignment.
- However he is upset his request to the Colonial Office for recompense for what he has achieved in Van Diemen’s land (emptying it of natives) was not granted; My contribution to clearing these people off the settled lands has never been properly recognised.
- Mannalargenna is ill and dying. The Commandant is determined to acquire anatomical specimens of the natives. The numbers could not be denied: these poor innocents were headed for extinction, and when they were gone, future generations would ask: who strove to collect evidence of these lost tribes? They would look for a name to attach to compendia, to halls of learning. A name to etch in marble. His name...He must have the head. The greatest of the Tasmanian chiefs, emblematic of a dying race: it had fallen to him alone to preserve this vital piece of evidence in anatomy’s long journey to understanding.
- Mannalargenna has wised up: You told me we safe. We not safe.
Told me we get land. Got no land...An I don’t need your Jesus, Englishman…Doan need your gospel.
- Serong includes other highly dramatic incidents in the novel, which are very satisfying, and in the Afterword tells the history of the settlement and of George Augustus Robinson the Commandant. The graves of Mannalargenna and others were rendered invisible during the twentieth century, trampled by cattle. The ruins of the settlement still mark the grasses of Pea Jacket Point today.
(The Saturday Paper (September 17-23, 2022) includes a very enlightening discussion between Neha Kale and art historian Greg Lehman on the painting The Conciliation by Benjamin Duterrau who emigrated to Van Diemen's Land in the 1830s. The painting depicts Robinson meeting with a group of First Nations people known as the Big River Mob. Lehman's dissection of the painting is highly informative. A must read.)
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