The Gold Machine

In the Tracks of the Mule Dancers

Iain Sinclair

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780861540716
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Travel

A New Statesman Book of the Year, 2021 'Follow Iain Sinclair into the cloud jungles of Peru and emerge questioning all that seemed so solid and immutable.' Barry Miles From the award-winning author of The Last London and Lights Out for the Territory, a journey in the footsteps of our ancestors. Iain Sinclair and his daughter travel through Peru, guided by – and in reaction to – an ill-fated colonial expedition led by his great-grandfather. The family history of a displaced Scottish highlander fades into the brutal reality of a major land grab. The historic thirst for gold and the establishment of sprawling coffee plantations leave terrible wounds on virgin territory.In Sinclair's haunting prose, no place escapes its past, and nor can we. ' The Gold Machine is a trip, a psychoactive expedition in compelling company.' TLS

‌Hell’s Gates

‘Some inch of Scotland in my blood.’

– Don DeLillo, Americana

It was a disconcerting experience, combining recognition with novelty in equal measures, to greet Susan Voutier and her sister Catherine on our Hackney doorstep. And to take an impulsive step towards them, as if to offer an embrace, and then at the last to hesitate: a firm handshake and a froth of welcoming babble. We were not, on the Scottish side, much of an embracing family, but we shared our curiosity about a discontinued heritage. Old Arthur Sinclair was the only one to gift us with some form of written record.

The sisters, as I understood it, were leaving Australia for the second time in their entire lives. They had long plotted a ‘return’ to the home country. I was surprised – thinking that their methods and inclinations must be like my own – to learn that they had visited none of the addresses associated with Arthur and his family. They based themselves in Edinburgh and took the tourist excursions that best fitted their agenda. It was good to have discovered this connection, and to have physical proof of the family journey to Australia.

We liked each other and the meal progressed very well. Farne joined us and says that the stories went easily back and forth, despite the fact that our visitors were both somewhat deaf. Catherine ate slowly and carefully, a kidney condition meant that she had to avoid potassium. Neither of the sisters had children. Catherine, the medical librarian, was married. Susan lived at home. And there was a brother who was not well. Like my father, Susan didn’t drink. But she made no objection to our indulgence.

They were a generous pair, these sisters, on unfamiliar ground. Susan delivered a memory stick, which I tried to download but only managed, as usual, to drop into the unfathomable well of nothingness where the Cloud dissolves. She also brought a small pink box that contained something of Arthur’s that she wanted me to have. A family relic. In fact, she wasn’t quite sure that it had belonged to Arthur. Or indeed what its history and purpose could have been. She called it a ‘thumb ring’. If so, Arthur must have possessed the prehensile and opposable thumb of a particularly delicate lemur. Thumb rings were usually worn over gloves to protect the pad during archery. This item, burnished copper with a dull red stone set in a solar design, felt like the membership token of some obscure Masonic sect. There was also a handwritten note from Susan’s mother, Margaret Helen Ironside Angus: ‘[This is] a very old ring, perhaps a “thumb ring”, which must have belonged to my mother’s father, Arthur Sinclair. I’m sure it must have been made in Ceylon.’

The ring sits nicely on my little finger, the facets of the red stone catching (and swallowing) London light, as I start to pick my way through Arthur’s reports from Tasmania. Susan, in one of her emails, reminded me that the photographs carried by her family to Australia were ‘the next best thing to having their loved ones with them’. Most of these group portraits and individual cartes de visite were taken by studios in Aberdeen and Orkney, but the final one, wife and six children present, a more serious affair, is credited to the Anson Brothers of Hobart, Tasmania. For the first time, Arthur is not smiling. None of them are smiling. They have been transported to the Ultima Thule among colonies and they have run low on expectation.

I began to read the ninety or so pages, in the form of letters, that Arthur composed for the Aberdeen Free Press and the Colombo Observer. He flagged the series as ‘In Search of a Home in Tasmania’. Gold was not the driver, it was land. Arthur was now an established part of a northeast Scotland diaspora, restlessly relocating from colony to colony – India, Ceylon, Australia, New Zealand – looking for that one good place: ‘an abundance of elbow room’. It was never about mining. The challenge was to take advantage of climate and soil, to plant healthy crops, and secure adequate shelter. The letters date from 1886. Arthur’s nom de plume has shifted from ‘Young Scotchman’ to ‘Old Colonist’.

Why man, an island as large as Ceylon or Ireland or 18,000,000 acres occupied as yet by a population only equal to that of Aberdeen, the granite city. And, oh, man, the glorious rivers now stocked with salmon and trout! At present my notes must be brief, for the time of dreams and sentiment is past and the time for work has arrived…

My first impressions of Hobart were anything but disappointing: its spacious streets, handsome freestone buildings, beautiful vegetation and delightful temperature more than fulfilled anticipations.

Is this, at last, the looked-for paradise? The family are in tow, present but barely mentioned. They must be housed.

To find temporary shelter for my family was my first duty. I had not very much difficulty in arranging a good hotel at two guineas per head per week for board and lodging. This accomplished, I walked out to the Botanical Gardens to see what this celebrated climate and soil can produce. And for a few hours I simply revelled amongst the numerous old European friends which seem to have found so congenial a home. Giant geraniums, brilliant verbenas and a perfect jungle of Helétrope, greet me as I enter the gate. The gardeners though civil are not very communicative.

I could willingly spend days in these lovely gardens, but I am reminded that a more pressing if less agreeable duty awaits me, viz., house-hunting, which here, as at home, I find to be the most worrying, wearying work I ever engaged in. My requirements were simple and definite enough: ‘To rent with option of purchase, a good house with orchard or small farm, river frontage, &c.’

‘No need to advertise,’ said agents in London, ‘you’ll find at once abundance of what you want.’ In vain however I scanned the papers on arrival and those terrible imposters the house agents by their most exaggerated descriptions gave me many a vain journey.

My chagrin may be imagined on finding the ‘rich land’ to be an exhausted and abandoned field by the side of a lagoon, without the ghost of a tree or shrub: here a thistle and there a sweet-briar tried to find their way through the baked clay, but both seemed inclined to give up the struggle in despair. Years ago there evidently had been a roof of some sort, but this portion had entirely disappeared.

And so the fruitless chase begins.

The sun was now high in the heavens, and the day proved one of the hottest of the season, the thermometer recording 100.2 in the shade… The house was deserted but in fair order… The orchard of about 2 acres was fully stocked with apples, apricots, plums and peaches, and, though quite abandoned, bearing really astonishing crops… I now sauntered on the lawn. ‘This,’ thought I, ‘is exactly what I dreamed of and the sooner I secure it the better. With what pleasure I shall mow down these weeds! Renovate the flower-garden and see the orchard put in order! And then should some old Ceylon friend come and see me… only think of the fishing!’

Having set up his pastoral pipe dream, Arthur is immediately confronted by the politics of place.

The owner is a very wealthy man and does not care to let or sell. Though living in Victoria he is one of the largest proprietors of Tasmania, owning 93,000 acres chiefly along the principal river valleys, many of the blocks shaped fan-like so as to take in as much of the river frontage as possible. In short, Mr X is a species of land-grabber, the bane of this and every country they exist in, and the pitiable Government of this colony, while enforcing strict laws upon the poor little immigrant, wink at the squatocrat who may hold 100,000 acres and not employ a dozen men or spend £100 in the colony. But, by George, their day is coming! ...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• Glints
• By the Brown River
• Something out of Something Else
• Dirty Sand
• The Silence in the Forest
• Frets
• The Map on the Downstairs Wall
• Visiting Agent
• Passage Money
• The Beast in the Jungle
• Casement’s Camera
• Guano
• Tasmania
• Hell’s Gates
• Into the Interior
• Fevers
• The Advocate
• Lima
• Breakfast
• Bones
• Soroche
• Convento de Santa Rosa de Ocopa
• La Oroya
• Tarma
• La Merced
• Furies
• San Luis de Shuaro
• Maria Genoveva Leon Perez
• Lucho’s Farm
• Cerro de la Sal
• Pampa Michi
• Bajo Marankiari
• The Waterfall
• Mules
• Mariscal Cáceres
• Pichanaki
• Puerto Yurinaki
• Cascades
• Pampa Whaley
• The Cage of Paper
• Melbourne
• Proxima Centauri
• Solly Mander
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements