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404 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1997
I had begun with the comforting conclusion that books are the tongue of divine wisdom, and had ended only with the thin hunch that all books are grand follies, destined forever to be misunderstood.
…I have come to believe that trajectory is everything in this life, and though at the time it felt anything other than promising, the trajectory of my life was that of a cannon ball fired into a sewer – hurtling through shit, but hurtling nevertheless.
I was hauling a sled of lies called history through a wilderness. Time laughed.
I no longer even cared whether my paintings were accurate or right in the way that the Surgeon & his Linnaean books of scientifick description wished paintings of fish to be accurate or right. I just wanted to tell a story of love & it was about fish & it was about me & it was about everything. But because I could not paint everything, because I could only paint fish & my love & because I could not even do that very well, you may not think it much of a story.
I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn’t stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & flesh’s appetite & flesh’s union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself.
I have a weakness for blue gin, old women, white rum, young girls, porter, pisco, human company & the Commandant's laudanum. I have a great fear of pain. I am beyond shame. Do you think I never informed on a mate? I was both cobber and dobber. I liked them & wept for them when they took them off to be flogged on my false information. I survived. […] I gave away all I needed. I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn't stop itching. I was Australia.
Everything that’s wrong about this country begins in my story: they’ve all been making the place up […] because any story will be better than the sorry truth that it wasn’t the English who did this to us but ourselves, that convicts flogged convicts & pissed on blackfellas & spied on each other, that blackfellas sold black women for dogs & speared escaping convicts, that white sealers killed & raped black women, & black women killed the children that resulted.
"I had lost something fundamental and had acquired in its place a curious infection: the terrible contagion of an unrequited love."
"...From memories, good and bad, reliable and unreliable, by using bad transcriptions that I had made, some of complete sections, others only brief notes describing lengthy tracts of the book...
"How faithful the story you are about to read is to the original is a bone of contention with the few people I had allowed to read the original 'Book of Fish'.
"Certainly, the book you will read is the same as the book I remember reading, and I have tried to be true both to the wonder of that reading and to the extraordinary world that was Gould's."
"These two feelings, this knowledge of a world so awful, this sense of a life so extraordinary - how am I to resolve them? Can a man become a fish?"
"...I tried to rewrite this world as a book of fish & set it to rights in the only manner I knew how."
"...To love is not safe."
"...A dream is a dangerous thing if you believe in it too much."
"Once upon a time there was a man called Sid Hammet who saw reflected in the glow of a strange book of fish his story, which began as a fairy-tale and ended as a nursery rhyme, riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross." (2)
"I was falling, tumbling, passing through glass and through water into that seadragon's eye while that seadragon was passing into me, and then I was looking out at that bedraggled man staring in at me, that man who would, I now had the vanity of hoping, finally tell my story."