I waited and waited for Walt Whitman. I strolled all the way to the South Bank beach and the pools where the children thrashed about like a sardine shoal, and back to Tognini’s, where I enjoyed a coffee and a blueberry friand. I was beginning to think Walt Whitman had been diverted by his own research, that he’d found a previously unseen quote from Logan about the Brisbane River.
Eventually, as I was about to return to the gallery to take a closer look at Warhol’s death pictures, old Walt finally shuffled past the café with his little cracked leather briefcase over his shoulder.
‘Whitman,’ I called. ‘WHITMAN.’
He dropped down into the chair at my table.
‘You got it?’
‘Of course I got it, you idiot,’ he said in his usual charming manner.
‘Why did you take so long?’
‘You want it or don’t you? How long do you think it takes for these hands to copy out a lot of words like that? Take a look?’ He held up an arthritic right hand as gnarled as a dead tree.
‘You want a cup of coffee?’
‘What the hell do you think a cup of coffee will do to my ticker? Have you got any idea? I’ve got to get going.’
‘Just hold your horses, old timer,’ I said. ‘Tell me what they were like. The journal pages.’
‘I’ve wasted enough of my precious time already. You want more of it? You got to pay.’
‘What are you, some Los Angeles therapist that charges by the hour?’
‘What?’
‘Forget it.’ I tossed him a twenty-dollar note. ‘So?’
‘What do you think they were like? Old. Yellowed. Insect damage.’
‘Legible?’
‘Course they were bloody legible. What do you think I’ve been doing for the past two hours? Whittling?’
I tried to picture what Andy Warhol might have made of the warty, creased and scaly head of Walt Whitman, then shook my head and tried to break out of this bizarre train of thought. I knew at least what I was thinking. I’d like to see Walt in Andy’s electric-chair picture.
‘Here,’ he said, dropping a sheaf of papers on the table, ‘I’m off’
I ordered another coffee, settled back and read Walt Whitman’s transcript. I had to give it to him. He really did have beautiful penmanship, completely at odds with his ugly physical self. I could almost see him as a Queensland schoolboy, the playground tar outside his classroom boiling in the heat of a summer day as he sweated over his lovely copperplate.
And I also had to admire him for his research abilities. Walt Whitman stuck to his brief and cut to the chase.
The excerpts covered a couple of years leading up to Logan’s death in 1830. I wanted to skip straight to the final journal entries of his short, miserable life, but delayed my gratification.
Three years before his murder, he had led an expedition into the Fassifern Valley and determined that there was ‘no preparation requisite for the ploughshare’.
On 9 June 1827, he wrote: ‘shot two beautiful parrots, not hitherto found in the Colony’. How deliciously fitting of Logan, to tear down beauty when he saw it. Or was I just thinking with a twenty-first-century sensibility? ‘Approached Mount Dumaresq towards evening; the country now exceeded, in beauty and fertility, anything I had before seen’. There were references to him shooting emu and kangaroo, and how the shoes of his long-suffering expedition party had worn through.
I was no literary scholar, but Logan’s writings seemed to change in tone and pace through the excerpts. On one hand they were formal and dull, and on the other he reflected his personal thoughts and emotions. If I’d had to hazard a guess, I’d have said he wrote the official explorer’s journal at the end of the day, and the more emotional material after some rum at night by the fire, or in the early morning after a night of nightmares and paranoia. Tyrants of whatever description, I assumed, must have more troubled sleeps than the rest of us.
For example, on 2 September 1829 he recorded: ‘Collison has begun questioning orders; was forced to reprimand him for impertinence towards Mrs Logan. Have withheld favours accorded him on account of his changed disposition, and a short measure of lashes. He accepted punishment without complaint. His attitude aggrieves me.’
He would be aggrieved even further a few months later, on finding Collison wandering the settlement drunk and half-naked. When confronted, the two pushed and shoved before a gang of convicts and the ‘show’ became a source of humiliation for Logan.
‘For as long as I have occupied this uniform I have never experienced such affrontry ... I personally took the leather to Collison and had him in irons for Christmas ... it has been suggested he be removed from my service and join the animals in the mill work, but despite all, I have an unexplained affection for him.’
Was this Logan’s fatal error? The smallest crevice of humanity that led to his downfall?
Now I came to the final diary entries of Logan.
During much of October 1830, as he trudged about the future Wivenhoe Dam region, his explorer’s entries were fantastically dull. Then it all changed. The hunter had become the prey.
‘Unsure of Collison,’ he wrote. ‘Since Christmas last he has uttered hardly a dozen sentences, yet continues about his work as if I don’t exist ... carries my scars with silence ... I have observed him staring at me with what could only be ill-intent.’
Then the final two days. History told us Logan wandered alone after he left the party in search of the lost horse from a previous expedition. The journal entries, however, told something else: ‘Collison refusing to take orders but still he follows ... on his face he expresses the malice of a common convict ... raised the crop to him to no avail.’
He then described their final breakfast. ‘Roasted chestnuts in the fire and hailed him but no response ... he has become a madman, crouched on the far bank of the creek, staring at his master ... he remains armed ... fail to recall the number of shots Collison discharged at the natives yesterday evening ... fail to recall…’
And that was the last earthly journal entry of Captain Patrick Logan. I was shaking as I folded Walt Whitman’s notes.
It had been a strange and confusing few weeks. All I’d wanted was to research my family tree and discover that elusive bushranger in its straggly branches. Yet I’d found myself digging out the roots of a far more dangerous and immovable tree — that of history — and bodies had fallen around me, and still I was groping in the dark.
What had happened between Collison and Logan? The supposedly intractable books kept telling us Logan had been bludgeoned to death with a waddy. But had he?
I smelled a rat. Several, in fact. And that was when I reached the inevitable and familiar trigger point of any frustrating investigation. It’s a dangerous tactic, but sometimes it’s the only one you have left.
I marched up to the John Oxley Library and demanded of the gentle, elderly lady behind the front desk that I speak to the man in black. Ringo. The shadow over this entire mystifying case.