British Empire

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.