Colony

 

Victoria is a piece of cake. In fact, let’s face it, the British, not renowned for their imagination, divided up Australia like a cake into a few pieces using straight lines and no effort. Tasmania, which was too small to divide further, sits over there to the lower right of the table, a lone cupcake. The almost desperate homesickness that infuses the name New South Wales blinded its attributor to the untold tributaries, literally innumerable, implied in every unnamed river running into the ocean for the full extent of its edge. Unnamed while they don’t speak the language. It didn’t take anyone long who possessed a compass to figure out how to name South or Western Australia, somewhat longer to ask the local inhabitants what they call this large other half of the cake. Queensland took a little more imagination, which is why it was left to Victoria to come up with a name herself. She did not disappoint, or at least cause any surprises, surprises being something to avoid at all cost. It must have been gratifying to learn that a new colony named in her honour was created using the novel method of border, a river for most of its length. Cartography is a precise art, unless we don’t know what we’re drawing. We wonder if it isn’t time for the whole place to be divided anew following this river method, especially given that it worked for millennia before cakes arrived. It did not take long, a link of the eye, for colonies to turn into states of excitement, garden states, beautiful one day, perfect the next. We say the British, but it’s the mind of British seamen has something to do with this cake cutting exercise. They lived trapped in a worldview of longitudes and latitudes, tropics and date lines, poles and equators. When we think about it, them on a room of a deck of straight lines, if their world was not flat as the ocean doldrums in every direction for days on end, it was a permanent vision of waves on all sides whitecapped, with only clouds for variation. It must have been comforting knowing they were sailing across a chess square of blue ocean, bearings somewhere fixed, rather than the monotony of choppy surfaces concealing unknown depths they could never see. The night sky must have been a relief, as well as a help, in getting them somewhere unknown, star charts naturally being a permanent known. The seamen did not need to rechart the stars. They could rest from their labours, as some other contractor with a protractor had already joined the dots for them using very straight lines. Then it was day again and, with luck, something on the horizon sometime during sunshine, where food may be plentiful and they can have their share. Somewhere more than just new; somewhere familiar. Somewhere with curving lines, with substance, where when they fall they land, not just disappear.