The Mystery of the Missing Frontier

Konrad Muller’s novel My Heart at Evening is the first offering from Hobart-based independent publisher Evercreech Editions. It is set in Van Diemen’s Land in 1832 and reads like a murder mystery, albeit one of the subtle, superior kind. It concerns an actual historical event, the suicide of Henry Hellyer, a surveyor and architect employed by the Van Diemen’s Land Company.1 One of Hellyer’s main tasks was to explore the swathe of land granted to the company – in search of suitable pasture for the sheep that were the central element of the enterprise. Having served the Company from its earliest days, Henry Hellyer had recently been appointed Surveyor-General to the Colony and was soon to depart to Hobart to take up this distinguished post. This final circumstance added an element of surprise to his suicide, since it was not driven, as far as one could see, by overwhelming personal failure. It is this suicide that is elevated to the level of existential mystery in Muller’s novel.

The novel’s formal point of departure from the historical record is the wholly fictional decision of Governor Arthur to send a ‘Special Agent’ to investigate Hellyer’s suicide. We hear that the Governor was perplexed by the unexpected turn of events, losing his Surveyor-General before he had even started. Moreover, Arthur was concerned, and this does accord with historical sources, that the Company was operating as a law unto itself in the northwest of the island. Arthur’s ‘Special Agent’ for the investigation is Jorgen Jorgensen, a figure Muller plucks from the rogue’s gallery of Vandemonian history. Jorgensen had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land but sported a colourful past as a Danish revolutionary, self-styled explorer and occasional pirate.

The premise of the novel – that a company at the edges of empire was going rogue – is one of the many ways that the shadow of Conrad hangs over this novel. With his dark charisma and legendary reputation, Jorgensen resembles Conrad’s Nostromo. But, as the reluctant investigator of a colonial company, Jorgensen immediately reminds one of Marlow from Heart of Darkness. Indeed, Muller’s choice of title seems to directly invoke Conrad’s classic novel. Since the ‘heart’ is ‘at evening’ rather than ‘of darkness’, we feel perched on the precipice of night in Muller’s work. The night is ensuing and must be kept at bay.

History has also provided My Heart at Evening with a ready-made Mr. Kurtz. The inaugural manager of the Van Diemen’s Land Company, Edward Curr, might easily have served as a model for Conrad’s impassioned lunatic. Curr, like his near namesake Kurtz, is kept tantalisingly beyond readerly reach for much of the novel. The more we hear about him and don’t see him, the more we feel compelled to assume that he is the invisible author of everything we do see. The real Edward Curr is a figure of some considerable contradiction but when it came to his duty as Company Manager (or ‘Chief Agent’ as he is called in the novel) he was under no illusion about what he must do and why. At one point he had feared, from the nature of their questions, that the Company’s London-based directors were labouring under a misunderstanding. They seemed to think that he had only accidentally killed Aboriginal people and that this must also be a matter of deep regret. Curr set them straight: ‘My whole and sole object was to kill them, and this because my full conviction was and is that the laws of nature and of God and this country all conspired to render this my duty.’2 Like Kurtz, Curr draws colonial logic to its lethal conclusion and understands the ultimate directive is to ‘exterminate all the brutes’.

There are also correspondences with Heart of Darkness at the level of the narration. In the nested narrative structure of Heart of Darkness, the first person ‘I’ (the addresser) hovers ambiguously between Marlow and an unnamed narrator who is relating Marlow’s tale. The narration of My Heart at Evening is couched in the conceit that Jorgensen is writing a letter to his estranged wife. So, rather than the ‘I’, it is the second person ‘you’ (the addressee) that remains ambiguous in Muller’s novel. The situation is compounded by the fact that it is a letter that Jorgensen knows he will never send. This foreclosure flavours the account with a certain remorse and fatality. It also helps enlist our belief, promising a candour that comes when there is nothing left to lose.

But this brings us to the central problem in the novel. For, despite this confessional quality, what will stand out, at least to almost any Australian reader, is the more or less complete absence of Aboriginal Tasmanians. They are mentioned, but only ever in passing. Given we are in the midst of one of the bloodiest frontiers in the British conquest of Australia, this absence scrapes down the narrative’s surface like fingernails on a blackboard. Yet, the studied avoidance of the genocidal dimension in Muller’s novel can hardly be an oversight. An afterword spells out the author’s debts to the key sources and the novel displays a sharp grounding in what is after all an intensive historiography that takes in some of Australia’s most distinguished historians (Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, James Boyce) of the last half century. Even without the aid of this para-text, the sophistication and poise of My Heart at Evening militate against the idea that it is choosing to ignore the facts of the matter or offer up a dignification of Keith Windschuttle’s notorious denialism. So, what is going on?

The Company

The Van Diemen’s Land Company was formed in 1824 with a large land grant in Tasmania’s northwest, a royal charter and investment from London capitalists. The plan was to stock this land with sheep and export the wool to Britain to supply its burgeoning textile mills. Labour would be supplied by convicts assigned from Van Diemen’s Land’s gulags. The Company appointed Edward Curr to manage the enterprise. He exercised an almost complete authority and executive power over the land, affairs and people that fell under the grant. Curr himself acknowledged that on the lands of the Company he was ‘both master and magistrate, party and judge’.3

The method by which European powers colonised the world through state-sponsored companies is distinctive of the capitalist era. The colonising power drew key advantages from the mercantilist mode. It allowed them to outsource the capitalisation of empire-building and spread its financial risk. Importantly, it incentivised colonial annexations and extractions through the profit motive. By investing these activities with the apparatus of private property, the colonisation of peoples and their lands was made to coincide with ‘protecting’ these property rights. Theft, pillage, murder and enslavement were re-badged in various ways, in accordance with the paradigm of commercial enterprise. The ultimate motive force was not brute avarice, as it seemed, but rather the implacable, invisible hand of the market. A final advantage came when the intrinsic barbarism of the colonial project came to public light. Then a colonising nation could claim that this was the result of weaknesses in the company. It could even hold enquiries and slap these companies on the wrist. If things got especially ugly, there was always someone to throw under the bus. Much like Marlow in Conrad’s novel, Jorgensen fears that his job is to procure a patsy for the Company. A scapegoat whose ‘excessive’ behaviour would serve to throw the lesser crimes into gentler relief.

The thousand square kilometres granted to the Company in northwestern Tasmania was home to what Lyndall Ryan has called the ‘North West nation’.4 Much of the land was the traditional Country of the Peerapper people. By the early 1830s, the peoples of the North West nation had been largely removed from the lands of the Company, although resistance continued until the early 1840s.5 The extermination was punctuated by the Cape Grim Massacre, perpetrated by employees of the Company in February 1828, in which an estimated forty-three people were slaughtered.6 Reports had come to Arthur of this massacre from Alexander Goldie, a Company officer charged in relation to the killing of Aboriginal people in 1829. Goldie had adduced the events at Cape Grim in the previous year to show that his own behaviour was in keeping with the directions and actions of Curr and the Company.7  

At the time that Arthur received his reports of the Cape Grim Massacre, George Augustus Robinson was already in the northwest on his so-called ‘Friendly Mission’ – the purpose of which was to persuade the Indigenous peoples of Tasmania to surrender and in return be allowed to live, albeit in exile on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. Robinson’s offer was only palatable if the alternative was immediate annihilation. To call them ‘negotiations’ would be to shuffle that word into semantic territory it wouldn’t normally occupy. Nevertheless, Robinson and Arthur, at least in principle, were committed to trying to avoid bloodshed where it was possible. They were sensitive to claims of unchecked violence on the frontiers of settlement, including the newly granted territories of the Van Diemen’s Land Company.

It was in this context that Arthur instructed Robinson in late 1829 to investigate the Cape Grim killings that took place in February of the previous year. Robinson visited the site of the massacre to reconstruct the events. He interviewed Aboriginal women who had survived the massacre and the convicts who had perpetrated the violence, acting on Curr’s instructions. The convict Chamberlain estimated that thirty Aboriginal people had been killed. This was considerably more than the six that were reported by Edward Curr. When asked why the numbers differed, Chamberlain explained to Robinson that they feared ‘the Governor would hear of it and we would get into trouble’.8 Another convict, Gunshannon, had been reluctant to provide details of the event. But when he learned that Chamberlain had confessed, his guard came down and he ‘seemed to glorify in the act’.9

What we find in My Heart at Evening is in many ways a transposition of the forensic thoroughness of Robinson’s investigation of the Cape Grim Massacre onto the fictional investigation of Hellyer’s suicide by Jorgen Jorgensen. In this way, the novel’s central premise, the investigation of Hellyer, encrypts its most glaring lacuna, colonial genocide. As a form of revisionism, this is certainly curious. In conventional revisionism of the left-liberal kind, the cover-ups of history, the convenient amnesias and self-serving euphemisms of the hegemony, are exposed and the silenced are allowed to speak. In this case, however, we meet a rare historical instance of a Governor ordering an investigation into a colonial massacre, only to find it repackaged in Muller’s novel as an internal investigation of corporate culture. Are we to understand, then, that the entire novel is powered by this displacement? That the violent annihilation of a people is condensed into the melancholia of a middling agent of empire?

The Detective

In insisting that behind the veil of Hellyer’s suicide we will find the heart of darkness, My Heart at Evening places itself in the tradition that Jim Davidson famously called the Tasmanian Gothic.10 The gothic is the privileged mode of Tasmania’s exceptionalism. In the Tasmanian Gothic we find that Tasmania is not so much an anti-Australia as its virulent intensification: the island continent’s islanded excess. In Tasmania, national traits and traumas are amplified and brought to a higher pitch. From the violent eradication of Indigenous peoples to the bestial excesses of the convict system, the Tasmanian experience is understood to constitute a kind of limit-case for the broader Australian settler polity. The accident of landscape – gloomy temperate rainforests, wild storm-battered coasts, precipitous mountains and cliffs – to say nothing of the uncanny marsupial predators (tigers, devils, ‘native’ cats) meant that the lure of the gothic mode would always be hard to resist. Cape Grim, after all, is a name that you could not make up.

When Jorgensen arrives by boat into the wintry gloom of Circular Head, the gothic machinery swings immediately into operation. The fact that it creaks and groans a little merely adds to the effect. Indeed, this sense of being in a dilapidated historical theme park is a feature of the gothic from its earliest moments in the eighteenth-century novel. Stepping ashore, Jorgensen meets the denizens of Circular Head, Company men in various states of decline. There is the avuncular company secretary, Horatio Nelson, who greets Jorgensen on the beach in his pyjamas in a nod to the Harlequin in Heart of Darkness. The earnest settler George Bromley, who would like to make Jorgensen aware of certain anomalies at the scene of the death. Then there is the contemptuous bookkeeper, Anderson, and the Irish storekeeper, Connor, who has locked himself in the storehouse and is refusing to come out. Finally, aloof and out of frame, there is Edward Curr, the brooding Chief Agent whose relationship to Hellyer was intimate and complicated.

So, is this a gothic tale or a detective story? In fact, the two genres are closely related and often coincide. The detective story shares the same architecture as the classical gothic novel – a cut-off community, the shadow of violence, a web of secrecy. The detective’s investigation with its steady yield of clues and signs has the effect of heightening the darkness that surrounds this narrow beam. In this respect, the detective is not the enemy of the gothic, but its patient tour guide. Whether the story offers a supernatural causality or one couched in aberrant psychology is not as consequential as it seems. Because, in the end, we will come up against an opaque kernel that lies beyond the limits of reason. It is this kernel that the detective pursues.

One of the paradoxes of the detective narrative is that the detective is only ever trying to discover what is already, and often widely, known. They are trying to discover what everyone knows, except them. While the detective seems to be the vector of enlightenment, it is in fact the detective who labours in the darkness of their ignorance. As Jorgensen complains: ‘Why […] do I have the distinct sense that everyone here more or less knows what happened to Henry Hellyer, yet no one is willing to talk about it; and here am I, the Governor’s so-called Special Agent, not knowing a bloody thing?’11

It is this social secret, the one that binds the community, that the detective, at least as a cultural figure, was invented to delineate. Another paradox of the detective genre, however, is that to find the truth of this social secret, they must pass painstakingly through the petty crimes, private shame and wearying hypocrisy of each and every person in the community being investigated. Only after trawling through this labyrinth of individual perfidy is the social secret released into the hands of the detective and handed over to us, not without a certain flourish.

The reason for the detective’s roundabout method is that the individual failings are not important, except insofar as they point to a deeper guilt, which is their complicity in a foundational social crime. This dialectic between private shame and social complicity provides the essential structure for crime fiction from Chandler to Christie. The detective always remains a little awed by the consistency with which everyone holds the line. In the case of this novel, it is literally the Company line. There is a note of admiration in Jorgensen’s complaints about the duplicity of his informants: ‘[E]veryone is behaving impeccably of course, as if absolutely nothing has occurred between them, and then, the next day, Henry blows his brains out.’12

It is this divorce between outward civility, which is maintained in spite of the seething resentments, and the eruption of social catastrophe, that captivates Jorgensen. What he desperately wants to instil is the sense of social shame. He brings a stern and unwavering judgement to bear. In this respect, though, the community is already there. They are already ashamed. Indeed, he is struck by ‘how Hellyer’s undoing, and the general collusion of circumstances pressing down on him like a stone, had left a sense of shame, even amongst innocent people who had played no role in his death, not even that of bystanders and witnesses.’13

Yet, for all the outward display of ingenuity and wile, which are the qualities we admire in the detective, Jorgensen admits that each of his subjects hands their confession to him on a plate. ‘[T]he most compelling aspect of the entire case’, he says, ‘was how much every witness and bystander wished to share their truth with me in the end, despite whatever pressures and expectations they were under – and they must have been under some. All of them. Even Samuel Anderson. Even Edward Curr.’14

The Skull on the Desk

Reading My Heart at Evening has its narrative pleasures. It combines the suspense of the detective story, the intrigue of the gothic romance, and the antiquarian fascination of the historical novel. All the same, one cannot escape a feeling of the preposterous. There is a palpable imbalance between the event itself, the apparent suicide of a company officer, and the moral anguish that it is made to hold. It goes deeper, much deeper, we are continually told. Never mind the fact that it is rarely doubted that Hellyer did indeed kill himself. The event is a signal, a cypher, a symptom. The entire moral order depends on its mystery being plumbed. How the universe came to rest on this improbable Archimedean point is never really made clear. Even Jorgensen seems troubled, at times, by a sensation of non sequitur: ‘It all smelt of maliciousness – petty maliciousness. But I still couldn’t quite see how such maliciousness had driven Henry Hellyer to shoot himself.’15

And the more that Jorgensen fixates on the figure of Henry Hellyer, the more we are left wondering why he will not see what is everywhere around him. Not the suicide of a surveyor, but the genocide of a people. His interviewees try in their fashion to let him know. His old friend Dr Hutchison reminds him: ‘Henry may have been a romantic, but he was quite prepared to shoot natives.’16 To underscore his point, Hutchison hands Jorgensen the skull of an Aboriginal man that Hellyer had ‘found’. Why, in the face of this, does Jorgensen cling to the idea that the man whose job it was to find and steal the best of the Peerapper’s lands was a beautiful soul whose only crime was to be misunderstood by the brutes he worked with?

And as for Curr, who in other times would be tried as a war criminal – why is Jorgensen so easily seduced by his taciturn charisma? Why turn him into an antipodean Heathcliffe? Does his aloofness really have to be read as the mark of moral seriousness and anguished conscience? When Jorgensen meets Curr’s wife, who is visiting the seaside with her young children, he notices that she is followed by a convict with a gun. He does not draw the obvious conclusion that one would only arm a convict if one feared something worse. That the gun was for no other purpose than shooting Aboriginal people.

During their interview, Curr gives Jorgensen a book that Hellyer had been reading at the moment of his death. It is a book containing submissions to parliament on the Black War, the protracted and brutal campaign to defeat and eradicate the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Much like the skull that Hutchison hands him, Jorgensen places it on his desk, in determined ignorance of its most obvious implications. Picking it up some time later, we are meant to gasp as from its pages tumbles a letter that turns out to be Hellyer’s suicide note. At last, the words of the man in his morbid extremity.

They are reproduced with due solemnity, but the letter is incoherent nonsense. Why wouldn’t it be? It turned out the man no more knew why he was killing himself than anyone else did. The point of course is not this stray letter, with its stuttering denials and high-minded pleas for justice in a cruel world. The point is in the book from which the letter falls, which documents in black and white the annihilation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In the pantomime of the novel, we are reduced to schoolchildren: ‘Behind you! The genocide is right there behind you!’ Dramatic irony is the condition of historical fiction, but this refusal to know goes beyond the structural ignorance that the past has of its future.

Even the villainous bookkeeper Anderson expresses some exasperation with Jorgensen, who is attempting to beat the truth out of him and demanding he spill the beans: ‘If you insist. If you really wish to know. But I wonder whether you really wish to know?’17 Doing his best impression of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, Anderson calls the detective’s bluff. It does become less and less plausible that it is the truth that Jorgensen is seeking. Indeed, for all his investigations, Jorgensen is never any the wiser. He pursues the story of Hellyer to its suitably banal end. Was Henry the subject of a nasty rumour? Did he suffer from a love that dare not speak its name? Could his colleagues have been kinder to him? Did he kill himself, as Elizabeth Curr offers airily, ‘because of the isolation – the vileness and stupidity of the place’?18

Negative Hallucination

I must say it took a long time for the penny to drop for me. I was seduced by the genre, compelled to keep believing Jorgensen because he was the narrator and a detective. He seemed to be fearlessly following the truth at great personal risk. In this respect, I was not much better than Jorgensen, either. Like him, I became ever more adept in the art of what Jacques Lacan called ‘negative hallucination’. Of determinedly not seeing what was there in front of my face. And like Jorgensen, I cannot say I wasn’t given every opportunity to not miss the point. But on I went. It is either a testament to my obtuseness or, as I would prefer, a mark of just how ingeniously Muller’s novel set me up.

My Heart at Evening is in this way a brilliantly enacted charade. Its genius lies in its double feint on the theme of detection. The trick it plays is to decouple the mystery in the novel from the mystery that transpires in the implied allegory of settler foundation. For Jorgensen, the mystery is why a man in the prime of his career would suddenly commit suicide. But for us, the mystery is why we are reading a frontier novel in which the frontier has disappeared. To put this another way, the crime being investigated in the book is not the crime being investigated by the book.

More pointedly, it is the failure of the detective to see what surrounds him on all sides that is the true crime of the novel. In other words, the detective is the criminal, and their crime is dressing up their obfuscation as detection. The true mystery is not why Hellyer killed himself, but how colonialism accomplished the moral divorce that allowed it to believe in its own goodness even as it murdered people and stole their land. As Jorgensen says of the people of Circular Head: ‘[A]t times I’ve wondered if some of them conduct their emotional life on another planet, Jupiter or Mars?’19 But on this crucial question, the detective spectacularly fails. Jorgensen’s investigation does not solve the mystery of colonial disavowal, it exemplifies this disavowal.

I suspect that My Heart at Evening will be criticised for its failure to adequately represent Indigenous people. In spite of everything I have said, I am not sure that the novel can fully escape this criticism. The book contrasts markedly with other novels of the Tasmanian frontier. Rohan Wilson’s brutal novel The Roving Party (2011) brings to life historical figures from both sides of the frontier and gives agency and grandeur to the first peoples of Tasmania. Clearly inspired by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985). Wilson’s spare, lyric realism seems worlds away from the trappings of Muller’s detective story. There is also Mudrooroo’s (Colin Johnson’s) novel Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for the Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) which casts the Tasmanian frontier into the register of postmodern farce in order to underscore the hypocrisy of colonial benevolence. This absurdist response to the reality of genocide is also visible in Richard Flanagan’s sprawling pastiche of colonial Tasmania, Gould’s Book of Fish (2001).

But these diverging modes beg the question of whether there is a right way to depict an event that is, in essence, unspeakable. Muller’s solution to this impasse is daring because it involves an extended wager on the extra-textual knowledge of his readership. In the first instance, he is betting that they will know they are in the epicentre of genocide – and realise the novel is conspicuously failing to mention this fact. For a literate Australian reader, this is a relatively safe bet. But then Muller bets again, and this becomes the central wager of the novel. He gambles that this reader will not immediately cash in their knowledge of what the novel is not saying for sanctimonious advantage. I presume that the writer has weighed up this risk and decided that a short-circuit of this kind will be both inevitable and instructive. Indeed, the novel is calculated to cause this false epiphany. It was only after I fell headlong into this trap that I scratched my head and started to really think about the novel.

In this respect, My Heart at Evening is reminiscent of Jonathan Glazer’s modern masterpiece The Zone of Interest (2023). In this film, we follow the ups and downs of daily life in the home of Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig. Their pleasant suburban home is built against the wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where Höss is commandant. They grow fruit trees and flowers and their children swim in the outdoor pool. Behind them, dark plumes of smoke curl endlessly into the blue summer sky. A constant humming hiss, the soundtrack of incineration, sits under the children’s laughter and squeals of excitement. But the film insists on keeping the holocaust at the edge of the frame, where it bleeds dully and horrifyingly into the quotidian preoccupations of the bourgeois household.

This is the effect we begin to experience in My Heart at Evening. Since we know we are in Tasmania in 1832, in the midst of genocidal conflict, we constantly have the pressure of this knowledge bearing down on each and every sentence in the novel. In these circumstances it is the act of not saying what we know is happening that starts to become unbearable. But the critique the novel offers is not one that we can solely sheet home to the ignorance of the past. This is the crucial thing. By folding us meticulously into the mechanisms of Jorgensen’s quest, we find ourselves complicit in his crime of not seeing. Of continuing to not see. It came as something of a surprise to me, for instance, to learn that the remnants of the Van Diemen’s Land Company still exist. It was last sold in 2016 to Chinese-based Moon Lake Investments. But why should I be surprised? My surprise can only be a sign that at some level I have consigned the colonial moment to that convenient point of disappearance in my settler historicity which drains the iniquity of my condition into a past that is not mine to own. Yet the profits that flowed from the land that Hellyer surveyed continue to trickle merrily through the tributaries of international capital, just as they did two centuries ago. In this way, Muller’s novel offers a new modulation in the colonial allegory, one which forces a reader to act out the mechanisms of wilful ignorance. My Heart at Evening resists the demand to redress the past. Instead of redressing the past, the book does something quite surprising and powerful. It undresses the present.