Story of a Bridge
Nothing stirred in the rushes or under the black elms. The only sound was the drumbeat of frogs. Overhead, the morning cloud was breaking, and here and there, the skies were lined with silver and pale blue. Downstream, over the dark glittering water , hovered the three splendid archways. We slipped our canoe onto the river and with our paddles pushed off from the bank. As we neared, a miracle of convict art floated before us.
Carved on the arches was an uncommon feat of sculpture, a dazzling display – masks of women and men, images of plants and birds, beasts and monsters, weird symbols and abstract forms. We spied lions of oppression, snarling dogs from some hellish underworld, hybrids compounded of baboons and wolves, sudden waves of flowing water and soft ferns, keyholes and Orphic lyres, Celtic spiral motifs and the allenfolding rose, the manifestation of a stag, a fish in the form of a child.
We slid toward the western archway and soon were swallowed in the cool dark that lay between the breakwaters. More images rose above us in the sunlight of the northern side. I recognised an astonishing portrait of the Governor of the time. He was depicted as a dead-eyed ghoul with a grisly skull concealed in the stone beneath his neckcloth. How had such an image come to be raised on a public monument in a penal colony?
***
The story begins in a small bog of corruption. In the early 1830s, in the Tasmanian midlands town of Ross, the bridge, a major public project on the island’s main north road, languished in a state of incompletion. For years, a convict work-gang had been quarrying and facing sandstone, sawing timber, baking brick and shaping iron. Yet nothing ever rose on the bridge’s piers. At length, the sense of corruption grew so rank that the island’s Governor appointed a Special Agent to investigate.
And so into this fantastic tale comes riding out of myth and folklore possibly the most remarkable figure ever to be banished to the island penitentiary – the Danish revolutionary, British spy and London ludomaniac, Jorgen Jorgensen, who had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land for typically convoluted legal infractions. He had pawned his landlady’s mattress to a broker on Tottenham Court Road, been convicted for theft, and had then disregarded a court order to quit Britain, instead going back to his West London gambling haunts. The Dane had since secured his pardon by working as an explorer, a convict-policeman and a commander in the ugly war against the island’s Aborigines, but now came out of retirement on special assignment.
He arrived in Ross on 11 July 1833, no doubt wearing his usual widebrimmed straw hat and with a few pistols stuffed in his belt and his infallible broadsword strapped to his back. He was not alone. Under his command were six convict-constables (a peculiar arrangement, but highly effective in breaking convict solidarity). Also with him was his new wife, Norah Cobbett, a one-time bushranger, twenty years his junior, whom he’d first met in the wraith-like Tasmanian woods when he arrested her in the company of a sheep-stealing dwarf. Within two days they were engaged to marry, despite warnings from Jorgensen’s more respectable friends.
Like the bridge itself, the Special Agent’s investigations went nowhere quickly. The disappearance of the building materials ceased, but everywhere he encountered a wall of silence and non-cooperation from free settler and convict alike. Jorgensen had little doubt he was grappling with a system of ‘peculation’ and the main beneficiaries were the local notables whose mansions, as he put it, ‘arise like exhalations’. (Indeed to this day no district on the island is better endowed with stately Georgian houses). The magistrates who refused him search warrants and dismissed his cases were implicated in Jorgensen’s eyes.
Eventually, after weeks of frustration, he overstepped the mark. In one free settler’s yard, he ordered that two of the man’s dogs be shot for being in breach of the Dog Act. He was cautioned by Hobart for ‘excess of zeal’. The district potentates then went to work, white-anting him with complaints that focused on Jorgensen’s drinking sessions with his wife. He was compelled
to resign before he could be dismissed for ‘extreme unfitness due to repeated acts of intoxication’. The investigation was over. It would take a former highwayman and a burglar to end the scandal and build the marvellous bridge.
***
The highwayman was Daniel Herbert, the burglar James Colbeck. Of these the pivotal and more enigmatic figure was the highwayman. His is a shadow history. He was born at Taunton Deane in Somerset in 1802, then sentenced to death some twenty-five years later for highway robbery at Saddleworth in Yorkshire, a sentence later commuted to transportation for life. Almost nothing is known of the years between. Of his personal history, Herbert only ever offered the laconic: ‘I was last a sign-board writer in Leeds’. That he was apprenticed as a mason-carver seems likely, that he had unusual gifts as a sculptor is undoubted.
In Van Diemen’s Land, in any case, we are on surer ground, care of the ‘conduct records’ kept in leather-bound volumes by the assiduous clerks of the penal colony. At this time, the late 1820s, the convict carnivalia of early Van Diemen’s Land was being refashioned by the Governor of the day, George Arthur, into an island panopticon of calibrated pain, designed to break the will and enforce the compliance of the convict population. Herbert’s experience was typical enough. To sample a few entries:
6 October 1828 – absent from the muster, three days on the treadmill; 27 December 1828 – out all night, seven days on the treadmill; unknown date in 1830 – found in a public house after hours, more time on the treadmill and a month in irons; 18 March 1831 – absent from the workplace without leave, twenty-five lashes.
Eventually he graduated to the island’s No.1 Chain Gang. Here Herbert chanced to join his future collaborator, James Colbeck, originally a stonemason from Yorkshire who once had worked on Buckingham Palace.
And yet somewhere in this grim odyssey the men’s talents were recognised. Confronted with the still unsolved conundrum of the Ross Bridge, the is-
land’s Civil Engineer, John Lee Archer (himself an architect of distinction), proposed that the pair be pardoned if they could finish the stalled project. They came to Ross in May 1835. By July the following year, the work was done, after labouring in mud, with half-starved bullocks and shortages of timber and rope, an achievement made more remarkable when it is learnt that every voussoir or arch-stone, one hundred and eighty-six in all, was sculpted before being laid. It is thought that Herbert personally carved half of the stones, marking the others with chalk for subordinates to follow.
There is no record anywhere of authorisation being given for this additional work. Colbeck and Herbert’s nominal supervisor was a kindly one-armed veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, a Major William Turner, who knew nothing of bridges and granted them total latitude. It can only be presumed the carvings had their genesis in the furnace of Herbert’s brain, who now treated the stone with the same freedom as had the Tasmanian gentry, except his purpose was not aggrandisement, but a portrait of horror and transfiguration, a convict elegy.
***
Largely unsighted in a small town at the end of the world, the most sustained interpretation of the Ross Bridge carvings remains an obscure essay by a local artist and amateur scholar published almost fifty years ago. Daniel Herbert and His Icons by Norman Laird contends that the iconography of the bridge, often viewed as merely decorative and whimsical, is rather a profound utterance on the theme of psychological destruction and rebirth. Laird speculates that it works, through symbol, abstraction and camouflage, by confronting the ‘demonic aspects of the world’ in a bid to master and transform them, thereby effecting liberation from trauma.
Certainly the most obviously striking of the carvings are the monsters. Glittering terrors, stygian echoes of crocodiles and rats and wolves, with bared teeth and paws clutching at stricken lambs or human heads, they dominate the apexes of most of the arches. And invariably they are crowned as if to say: Here is Authority. Yet the artist has found ways to soften or topple his nightmares. One grotesque beast, a creature with a sharp snout and sad eyes,
is framed by two bucolic sheaves of corn tied in a knot. Another, a leonine monstrosity with a flail for a crown, has a face that sits like a sick wilting flower on a plant-like body which itself ends in a vulva encircling a phallus, an androgynous symbol that is repeated time and again across the bridge.
Needless to say such unorthodox images are often hidden, lost in the complex patterning and flow of stone, such that it can reasonably be assumed that Herbert’s contemporary audience was frequently blind to his purpose. Disguise and ambiguity are basic to his method. At times this simply permits the stone to carry motifs that are questionable – a pagan deity, a mutilated trunk, a gibbet cross. But natural images also abound, like a lament to a lost British boyhood – a lark, oak leaves, branches of berries, even a stoat. (With the exception of the serpent, Tasmanian fauna is notably absent.) Elsewhere, Herbert’s subtle stonework moves beyond the figurative, exploring the curvilinear in ways that can seem modern and abstract. Everything becomes a play of mood and tone, be it flowing or discordant.
Sadly, time and erosion, including the battering logs that occasionally come downstream on winter flood-tides to hammer the bridge’s facade, have done their work. Many of these highly original carvings are already fractured and worn.
***
We rowed our canoe out across the glinting waters. There were human portraits on the bridge, a ragbag of convicts and ex-convicts, notables and dignitaries. Two especially were of interest. And by the eastern shore, near the rippling reeds, we found them, icons of the Danish convict, Jorgen Jorgensen, and his wife, staring up the river toward the northern sky.
Like the hideous rat with gorgon hair placed above them on the arch, Herbert had seen fit to grant these two ex-convicts crowns. But his irony was gentler now, an allusion to Jorgensen’s unwanted sobriquet, ‘King of Iceland’, for the failed revolution he once staged in Reykjavik, almost thirty years before. There was nothing uncharitable about the studies of these faces either. They were works of human sympathy. Jorgens-
en’s eyes were deep set, the line of the jaw firm, his lips pressed slightly open, as he gazed steadily from the glowing stone, an image suggesting strength and a certain weariness (only underneath were there inchoate forms, twisted and broken, hinting perhaps at the man’s inner struggles).
More moving was Herbert’s portrait of the wild Norah Cobbett, originally from Galway, who was sentenced to transportation for life for stealing a sum of money from a private dwelling in Surrey. Like her husband she grappled with the demons of depression and drink. She was portrayed with sensitivity and compassion. The mouth was scored by a slight grimace. The face was alive, delicate and harrowed. This carving might have been entitled Sorrows of Exile, except that once more there was counterpoint. The mask sat above the symbol of a keyhole, implying the door that opens, the release that comes. Note on Sources: This piece is indebted to Leslie Greener and Norman Laird’s Ross Bridge and the Sculpture of Daniel Herbert (Hobart 1971).