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Authors: Gabrielle Lord
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to be still attached to the hair for DNA processing. In Nesbitt’s case, there was even less. I put the reports aside. They were disappointing but not unexpected. It’s only in the movies that the lab gets a result that matches some old warb on the database, let out for weekend release. And our database is only just getting up now.
I glanced through the local newspaper and noticed that the council was running an art competition, and today was the last day for entries. I went to the big carton marked with my initials and opened it, pulling out the large folder. Underneath this were several paintings that I’d liked enough to have framed and over the years, I’d collected half a dozen. My favourite was a misty view of several cottages on the ridge at Blackheath, called Morning Mist —my tribute to Turner in acrylics. I looked at it again, still pleased by the way I’d captured the bluish mist that settled around the lower reaches of the ridge and the way the eastern light edged trees, buildings and rocks. There was one murky corner on the lower left-hand side that I’d abandoned because it was already overpainted, but taken altogether, I thought the whole thing worked passably. And I’d never exhibited this one before. I put the other paintings away and shoved the box back in a corner. I clipped and filled out the entry coupon, noting the address to deliver my work.
Later in the afternoon, I was on the road, having delivered Morning Mist to the council only hours before the competition closed, and at Goulburn Gaol by four o’clock. Just for a moment, when I’d handed over my painting and glanced at the other entries stacked along the wall, sniffing the odour of fresh oil paint, I’d felt a surge of something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Life, enthusiasm, reality. Even coming back to life after all the drinking years hadn’t had this quality to it. And it was something completely different from the mechanical misery of the last few years. Whatever it was that had made me want to paint in the first place. The loss of Rosie, although it had caused immense grief, hadn’t dulled me. After the initial shock, there was a terrible realness about everything, a starkness that pierced and stabbed. I’d done a painting then, not long after she went, of her room and her belongings thrown on the floor, the book she’d been reading still open, face-down on the bed next to Mrs Gumby, her chewed bear, the little silk bag that had housed the blue and yellow enamel necklet lying empty beside the bed, the view to the trees outside her window. It had been some sort of comfort to sit in her room and paint. By that time, my father was almost never in the house, and my mother stayed in her room. Charlie and I had a few months of feral living until our mother’s sister came to see how things were in the house and installed a live-in housekeeper, Mrs Moss.
In those days, and in the early days of my marriage, I’d turned out a few paintings a year. But it seemed that over time, my responses to life had become smaller and flatter. It was years since I’d finished my last painting, yet the smell of oils and acrylics, the canvases and pieces of masonite stacked modestly with their faces to the wall in the council warehouse where Morning Mist now joined them, ignited a long-dormant urge to paint again.
•
Goulburn Gaol is a terrible place, not so bad as it was in the old days when the Corrective Services vans had to be hosed out after the prisoners got out because men had soiled themselves in fear, knowing the reception beating that awaited them at the worst gaol in the state. Maybe that doesn’t happen any more, but Goulburn is still the hardest, and it takes prisoners no other gaol will house.
I walked past the rose garden with its magnificent display of pinks, golds, whites and mauves, thinking of the hundreds of men who were about to be locked up at four thirty until next morning in a small stone room with a solid iron
I glanced through the local newspaper and noticed that the council was running an art competition, and today was the last day for entries. I went to the big carton marked with my initials and opened it, pulling out the large folder. Underneath this were several paintings that I’d liked enough to have framed and over the years, I’d collected half a dozen. My favourite was a misty view of several cottages on the ridge at Blackheath, called Morning Mist —my tribute to Turner in acrylics. I looked at it again, still pleased by the way I’d captured the bluish mist that settled around the lower reaches of the ridge and the way the eastern light edged trees, buildings and rocks. There was one murky corner on the lower left-hand side that I’d abandoned because it was already overpainted, but taken altogether, I thought the whole thing worked passably. And I’d never exhibited this one before. I put the other paintings away and shoved the box back in a corner. I clipped and filled out the entry coupon, noting the address to deliver my work.
Later in the afternoon, I was on the road, having delivered Morning Mist to the council only hours before the competition closed, and at Goulburn Gaol by four o’clock. Just for a moment, when I’d handed over my painting and glanced at the other entries stacked along the wall, sniffing the odour of fresh oil paint, I’d felt a surge of something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Life, enthusiasm, reality. Even coming back to life after all the drinking years hadn’t had this quality to it. And it was something completely different from the mechanical misery of the last few years. Whatever it was that had made me want to paint in the first place. The loss of Rosie, although it had caused immense grief, hadn’t dulled me. After the initial shock, there was a terrible realness about everything, a starkness that pierced and stabbed. I’d done a painting then, not long after she went, of her room and her belongings thrown on the floor, the book she’d been reading still open, face-down on the bed next to Mrs Gumby, her chewed bear, the little silk bag that had housed the blue and yellow enamel necklet lying empty beside the bed, the view to the trees outside her window. It had been some sort of comfort to sit in her room and paint. By that time, my father was almost never in the house, and my mother stayed in her room. Charlie and I had a few months of feral living until our mother’s sister came to see how things were in the house and installed a live-in housekeeper, Mrs Moss.
In those days, and in the early days of my marriage, I’d turned out a few paintings a year. But it seemed that over time, my responses to life had become smaller and flatter. It was years since I’d finished my last painting, yet the smell of oils and acrylics, the canvases and pieces of masonite stacked modestly with their faces to the wall in the council warehouse where Morning Mist now joined them, ignited a long-dormant urge to paint again.
•
Goulburn Gaol is a terrible place, not so bad as it was in the old days when the Corrective Services vans had to be hosed out after the prisoners got out because men had soiled themselves in fear, knowing the reception beating that awaited them at the worst gaol in the state. Maybe that doesn’t happen any more, but Goulburn is still the hardest, and it takes prisoners no other gaol will house.
I walked past the rose garden with its magnificent display of pinks, golds, whites and mauves, thinking of the hundreds of men who were about to be locked up at four thirty until next morning in a small stone room with a solid iron
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