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.
By David Selzer