‘Nothing else of interest,’ commented the Daily Telegraph, ‘has come out of that blighted desert’; adding, in jocular parenthesis, that it might prove to the advantage of all godfearing Christian gentlemen if Mr Charles Darwin booked passage with the dusky savages, when they returned to their wilderness. He should question them closely, demanding anecdotes of their grandfathers, the monkeys. Indeed, with their fine dark beards, slanting brows, and deep-set eyes, did not these sportsmen bear a striking resemblance to the Fenland Sage? They would surely take him, on a more intimate acquaintance, for a god; and cause him to revise his blasphemous works — in the light of his personal knowledge of the labours of divinity.
King Cole, standing at the rail of the Parramatta, watching the pilot-boat butt its way across Gravesend Reach, knew that this was the Land of Death. He had dreamt this place and, therefore, it had become familiar. He was returning, without fear, to the country of the Dog Men, the destroyers. A great tree had followed him for many days over the ocean: the eucalyptus that must grow from the stone of his heart.
Johnny Cuzens, Dick-a-Dick, Mosquito, Jim Crow, Twopenny, Red Cap, Mullagh, Peter, Sundown, Bullocky: they were dressed in ill-fitting gamekeeper’s waistcoats, bow ties, flat hats. They walked in silence, close together, carrying their own bags up the creaking gangway towards the Immigration Hall. King Cole recognized these planks immediately, as they all did: the Bridge of Hazards. If they walked beyond it, there was nothing but the Leaping Place of Souls.
King Cole was prepared: his fingers ran rapidly over the painted markings on the wall, the priapic pinmen at their dance. The loving encounters of women and animal-ancestors. So they came into an arching cathedral of sunlight, of voices, and confusion, and movement. They kept together. The dead man with the others.
They were covered in black smoke. Smoke surrounded them, warning them of the city. The voices of trees were hidden in the smoke. The carriage doors were slammed by porters: the pages of iron books, a collapsing library. Shouts, waves: as of the drowning. The Immigration Hall was once more deserted. And the station photographer had nothing to record but their absence, the subtle alterations in temperature that their passage had provoked. He infected his plate: the kiosk, the clock, the soul-snaring patterns in the stone flags of the floor. Officials watched from behind their moustaches, legs spread, at ease: the returned soldiers. A faded placard: ‘Birthday Honours’.
The glass plate, coated with white of egg sensitized with potassium iodide, washed with an acid solution of silver nitrate, developed with gallic acid, was fixed; and made available for close examination, long after the anonymous photographer was dead and forgotten. The positive image, when it appeared, uncredited, years later, in a nostalgic album celebrating ‘the steam era’, revealed — by some fault in the processing, some fret of time, or trick of the light — that the roof of the Hall had become a version of the river, a reflection of water from the dock: ropes, hawsers, hull-shadows, ripples of tide. Tons of water hung, and floated in the air, above the heads of the porters who were sternly facing the demands of posterity: emptying themselves into the shrouded camera, so that they could remain forever ‘on call’. And the river would flow above them, until they ceased — or we ceased — to believe in it; when they would be swept away entirely.
The notion of an Aboriginal cricket team proved a rewarding speculation for the hotelier (and former Surrey man) Charles Lawrence, and his partners, the ‘shadowy’ W. G. Graham, and George Smith of Manly. The demand for novelty they stimulated was such that, within ten years, a troop of white Australians followed them over — to the disgust of several elderly MCC members, who felt they had been cozened into wasting time on a cheap fraud. ‘Demm’d fellers can’t be Australian. They ain’t even half-black.’
The 1868 ‘darkies’ drew a large crowd to Lord’s, six thousand of the curious, sportsmen and their ladies — despite the counter-attractions of the Ascot meeting — to watch the Aboriginals face up to a side that included the Earl of Coventry, Viscount Downe, and Lieutenant-Colonel F. H. Bathurst who, statisticians will recall, ‘bagged a pair’, falling twice to the wiles of Johnny Cuzens. King Cole limited himself to half a dozen overs of under-arm lobs, which he bent dangerously, or pitched into the sun — to drop directly on to the stumps.
At the close of play, the Aboriginals put on another kind of show: running the hundred-yard sprint backwards, throwing boomerangs and spears, executing tribal dances, and dodging the cricket balls that young blades were invited to hurl at them.
King Cole spat blood on to a white cloth. The linen absorbed the outline of the stain, a map of his lungs. A nurse folded and removed the soiled towel; but the place was recognized. King Cole was eager to relive his death. He found the infection he needed in cow’s milk; he had to release it. Nodular lesions spread through the weakened tissue. His lungs were paper, patched with paper. They were beyond use. Night sweats, fevers: he melted. They could not look at him. He returned the name they had given him in a triumphant pun: his eyes burnt like coals.
Two weeks after the circus at Thomas Lord’s cricket ground, King Cole lay dead in Southwark. They brought him from Guy’s Hospital to a pauper’s grave in Victoria Park Cemetery, East London; long accepted as a necropolis of the unregarded. They carried him on a board, past the domed scalloped alcove, a cross-section igloo, built from the Portland stone blocks of Old London Bridge; and they aimed him at its twin, across the river, in the far reaches of the park, beyond the cricket grounds. The particular site where they folded King Cole into the earth is now diligently disguised as ‘Meath Gardens’: a light-repelling reservation, amputated from its original host by the twin cuts of Old Ford and Roman Road.
And here, Meic Triscombe — a powerful advocate of Aboriginal Land Rights (‘Land is Life’) — was instrumental in arranging that a hardy eucalyptus tree (sacred to caterpillar dreaming), and supplied courtesy of Hillier’s Nurseries, should be planted by some noted local figure, who was known to be sympathetic to the Cause; and who could be relied upon to conduct himself, and the difficult ceremonies, with dignity — but also with passion, subdued fire. Triscombe thought he knew just such a person. He would not have to travel a million miles to find him. The memory of King Cole would stay forever sharp in Tower Hamlets.
A cricket match would follow on a specially laid synthetic strip, donated by Tru-Bounce (Wanstead). There might be a little low-key television coverage. A quirky, heart-on-the-sleeve account by some local pundit to pitch for the Saturday Guardian. Who lived in the Borough these days? Alun Owen? Andrew Motion? Fredrik Hanbury? Triscombe could call in the favours. He would emerge, rightly, on the international stage, confronting global issues: genocide, torture, acid rain. He’d stuff the greeny yellowy whale-bait on their own patch. Sponsorship, by Qantas, was assured. This was the ‘Qantas Aboriginal cricket tour’. A nice conceit: ‘Qantas’ Aboriginals, presumably living in burnt-out fuselages, and hunting by jet. The ‘souvenir programme’ already credited: Slazenger, Puma, Barclays Bank, Nescafé, Cell Link (suppliers of mobile phones), Wood of Bournemouth (supplier of BMW), TNT Magazine, Benson & Hedges, East Midland Electricity Board, Arcade Badge Embroidery Co., Australian Wool, and Contagious Films. Triscombe’s in-house humour would have to be aimed with great care; some of these jokers could be touchy.