Joan Makes History Read Free Page A

notebook for great thoughts as they occurred, and a few bits of paper relating to enterprises that flickered and smouldered but never caught fire.
    My love for you is hunger, he had whispered to the the thin woman on the dentist’s slippery couch, which during the day was the place where anxious folk squirmed and waited with their toothaches. My love for you is hope. What is your thinking about a new life in a new land? The thin woman loved this man in his suit that bulged and buckled, had loved him for a year or more, and had long ago decided that this was the man she wished to spend her life with. She was impatient with dentists and their cautions, their painstaking days fiddling with the endless decaying molars of folk stiff with the apprehension of pain, and was even willing to undergo the rigours of being foreign, and go to a new land on the bottom of the earth, to be with this man. He was a man of wit, a man given in a mild way to the extravagant gesture, and he was a man of intense brown eyes and a mouth that made most things plausible, but it was for none of this that the thin woman loved him. It was for his adoration of her that she loved him, knowing she would never again meet with a love like his.
    My pink-scalped father panted, then, and groaned with the pain of adoring his wife, that no amount of penetrating her flesh could assuage, and while he panted and history was being made in the interior of a thin woman, other kinds of history were also being made.
    In the new land they were approaching, men with frock-coats and small knowing eyes spoke of the birth of a nation, and thought with satisfaction of their fertile acres and the cash in their strongboxes. These were starchier folk, not eaters of garlic or wearers of rustic embroidery, they were folk who had never had to confront jellied eel, or the bailiff on an empty stomach. They were folk made uneasy by gesticulation and suspicious of too much hope: they were men in frock-coats and side-whiskers that hid the shape of their faces, they were women with heavy cheeks made bland by privilege.
    The birth of a nation, the men brayed, from their mouths concealed under heavy moustaches that smelled of mutton. Our debt to the mother country, they intoned, and turned up their small eyes piously. They thought, or said they thought, that this was the moment at which this barbarous land was entering into its glory after a long and squalid beginning. In their folly they thought that was history. But the real history of that moment was known only to myself, where something as real as a human was being made.
    No book has yet recorded that event, though whole forests have been sacrificed to all those men with their frock-coats and to princes burdened with frogging. The books are strangely silent on all that matters, so here I am to put them right: watch, and you will see history being made in front of your eyes.

JOAN MAKES HISTORY
    SCENE ONE
    In the year 1770, the continent that would become known as Australia was claimed for Britain by James Cook in the Endeavour. This is history, and well known. Less well known is that I, Joan, was there in one of my many manifestations, alongside Cook. Here, told now for the first time, is the true and complete account of that famous event.

My husband the Captain, that famous man, has not had justice done to him in those portraits, and particularly not in those statues. He would never have stood in those grotesque postures, clutching a roll of bronze chart in front of his breeches in a somewhat suggestive way, as he is known to generations of sniggering children. He was a man of achievement, enough achievement to warrant moving his humble cottage stone by stone from the Old Country to the Antipodes. There are those who slyly hint that the cottage moved thus across the world was not the Captain’s at all, but belonged to a pullet-breeding drunkard neighbour well known to him, and much disliked by him, and that the whole thing was a