CAPTAIN FLINDERS’ CAT: PROPERTY AS THEFT

Where should I begin? With the theft? Or the cat,

whose name was Trim? Or the Captain’s remains?

Or a statue marking the bi-centenary

of his death? Or with the two figures

missing entirely from the memorial?

Or the disappearance of the cat? Or

an uncanny coincidence?

 

I shall begin with an April weekend:

the Saturday, and a map – on the wall

of an exhibition at Tate Modern, London –

of Indigenous Australia,

of the original peoples’ numerous

countries not that they owned but to which

they had belonged for millennia.

 

And the following day, as we waited

at Euston Station with milling others

for trains delayed by signal failure

between two provincial towns, we saw,

for the first time, the Captain’s statue.

 

Matthew Flinders is half-kneeling, half-squatting

above the outline of the continent –

originally deemed Terra Nullius,

‘uninhabited land’ –  which he named as

Australia, and whose coasts he was the first

to map, so becoming, in effect,

an accessory after the fact of theft.

The pair of dividers in his right hand

bisects the country of the Balardung,

in what is now called Western Australia.

He has his back to his cat and the cat to him.

Trim looks north, over Baradha country,

in what is now the Northern Territory.

They were close companions on the sloop

that heaved to at each bay, cape, inlet

and estuary for the most part of a year.

 

Missing, of course, because the statue

commemorates a victim-less theft,

are the two Aboriginal men who sailed

with the cartographer and his cat,

as envoys and explainers knowing

the cultural protocols – though not

the numerous languages – of the people

upon whose countries they landed, and whose

ready acquiescence was essential.

They were Bungaree and Nanbaree,

though Flinders mentions only the former

and does not record his people or country.

 

Sailing home from Australia, Flinders

called at Mauritius for vittles and repairs.

Though France and Britain were at war again

the Captain thought he might be received

as scientist rather than naval officer –

but he snubbed the Governor socially,

and, despite the personal intervention

of Emperor Napoleon himself,

was locked up for six years. At some point the cat

disappeared, probably eaten –

Flinders surmised –  ‘by a hungry slave’.

 

There was an urban myth that the Captain’s remains

were buried under Euston’s Platform 15,

hence the statue erected in the forecourt

in 2014, the bicentenary

of Flinders’ death. Five years later,

when work began on the High Speed Rail Link,

to reduce travelling time on our small island

by thirty minutes, his coffin was unearthed

in St James’ Burial Grounds next

to the existing station, and really

not far at all from Platform 15 –

though the cartographer would have disapproved

of such carefree inexactitude!

 

Trim was a ship’s cat, the only survivor

of a litter born in a storm at sea,

named for that horizontal angle ships must

sustain to avoiding taking on water

at the bows or being sluggish at the stern.

If the cat had stayed in Australia

he would have become one of the ancestors

of the more than ten million domestic

and feral felines that, being invasive,

easily kill more than a billion

native animals – mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs –

per annum. And – whether owned or free –

wherever they pounce, they are trespassing,

however innocently, being themselves

victims, on stolen land.

 

 

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3 Comments
  • Clive Watkins
    July 29, 2023

    I enjoyed this, David. For the most part, it is couched in a transparent style: the glass of your language is clear, and the reader’s eye can look through it to the matter you wish to bring to attention. For the most part… for indeed there are some attractive rhetorical flourishes. The first paragraph with its eight questions is arresting and hints, in its insistent interrogatives, at the historian’s need to find the exact and judicious focus. The second paragraph, directly and also implicitly, indicates what the thrust of the poem is to be: a map, a prestigious gallery (with its own colonial associations), the capital city of an empire, and the conflicted relationship between ‘countries’ and those who live on particular stretches of land. And so it unfolds. Some further details struck me, on occasion for perhaps adventitious reasons. ‘Terra nullius’ brought to mind its companion expression, ‘res nullius’, a term from Roman Law I remember from my university years (Roman Law 1 and Roman Law 2) with its dehumanizing feel. I liked the quiet but mordant edge of ‘whose / ready acquiescence was essential’ (i.e. the acquiescence of the Aboriginal people Flinders encountered), a word that can be felt as sitting along a scale whose other terms include perhaps ‘conquest’, ‘subjection’ and ‘extermination’. The Aboriginal people were not always acquiescent. Trying to pin down the tone implied by ‘acquiescence’ opens up questions concerning legitimate points of view and stations of power. In the midst of the account of Flinders’s arduous voyages, I liked the irony of the goal of High Speed Rail ‘to reduce travelling time on our small island’ – which took me back to schoolboy geography. What is the largest island in the world? To which Australia is apparently the wrong answer. Terminology, categories: categories, terminology. The last paragraph is especially strong, in part because we have been lured into liking Trim – for his name, which suggests the uncanny ability of cats to keep their footing, and his obscure and perhaps sad end. Despite this, Trim is the horrifying congener of the feral cats introduced into Australia by European settlers. Even here, there are a further ethical twists, enacted in the interplay of ‘owned or free’, ‘trespassing, / however innocently, being themselves / victims, on stolen land.’ – A good thing, this, David.

  • Elise Oliver
    July 29, 2023

    As you will no doubt be aware, Flinders was/is much revered in Australia, where many buildings and landmarks have been named after him. He must have been a determined and fearless chap, who set off in some very unseaworthy vessels.

    The many petty criminals and innocents transported to Australia’s penal colonies and Fatal Shore (cf Robert Hughes) could equally be regarded as ‘victims on stolen land’. Incidentally, I have just received an email from an Australian friend with a link to a newspaper article in which the esteemed Piers Morgan refers to the Australian cricket team as ‘cheating convicts’.

    Being a colonial cat, Trim’s ancestors could now be trespassing on Mauritius for all we know. My point being – how do you define the trespasser, the transgressor and the displaced?

    • David Selzer
      July 30, 2023

      Cats are indeed causing the same sort of havoc on Mauritius as they are in Australia. However, like the victims of transportation, they had to be carried there. They – cats and convicts – are the displaced. They – the transporters – are the trespassers and transgressors.