Poem by Steve Gadd, co-author with with his wife and with Peter MacFie of the book “On the Fiddle”, written in memory of Peter’s work on the convict musician Alexander Laing.

On The Fiddle

(for historian Peter MacFie who rediscovered the Laing Manuscript)

Shall we think upon him now,
Through the fog of time,
Alexander Laing, convict, constable, Fiddler, composer?
I have a fair few of his tunes,
‘Do you know?’
In my memory and under my fingers,
And so does she,
In the next room,
Bow floating out a strathspey
‘Sir John Franklin Near The North Pole’,
Playing like an angel,
And it is a cracker of a tune,
One that does odd things to the soul
In the listening,
As if the rhythm has some inner logic
Not immediately obvious,
That displaces things somehow,
Moves the time.
With its grace notes, Scottish snaps,
And flurries of semiquavers,
It is not an easy tune.
Enough to stretch a fine player.
Laing was clearly a good fiddler,
Well skilled at his craft,
Trained in the school of Marshall and the Gows,
But it would be a stretch too far To say that he was a good man.

In the British army,
He had shown some promise as a soldier
But light-fingered and cunning he couldn’t resist
Taking what wasn’t his to take.
So it was the theft,
And the getting caught,
That had him sent here
To Van Diemen’s Land.

In this place, however,
Among a community of thieves,
Living on land stolen
Without shame or hesitation from the Palawa,
His crimes were conveniently forgiven,
As inevitably the gentry found
Good use for him,
Making him a constable,
In this town or another,
Chasing down blacks,
Tracking bushrangers.
Or putting the local drunk in a cell
On a stir-crazy night.

And he saw it all!
Once visiting a farmhouse
He was held hostage
By Michael Howe,
That bold and bloody bushranger,
Held hostage, and forced to play fiddle,
At gun-point,
While Howe’s men danced a quadrille,
With the farmer’s daughters.

Another time,
“Was it perhaps ill-luck or good?”
He narrowly missed being thrown
Into the Sorell prison cells,
Escaped the humiliation endured by his peers,
By virtue of being away on a tracking job,
Further south, at the time.

In his absence his fellow constables
Had been taken by surprise,
By Matthew Brady, ‘the people’s hero’,
And his bold militia,
Who had rowed quiet boats
Through the fog of night,
To set the town ablaze.
A stark message to Governor Arthur,
To say, that his so-called steely-grip
Upon the island colony,
Was an illusion.
The outlaws had locked the constabulary
Behind the bars of those cells,
Where those same traps had
Of’times thrown felons and trouble-makers.

Oh, but Laing well knew
On which side his bread was buttered,
And who tendered and spread that butter.
In each town of the colony
To which he was posted,
Sorell, Newtown, New Norfolk, Richmond,
And the rest,
Laing, armed with his fiddle
And a head full of tunes,
Set to work, with every note,
Wooing people of note,
Doing his best to endear himself to them,
Attain entry to their parlours and their circles.

Composing tunes for the gentry,
Or renaming tunes
That he had already penned for another,
Or stolen from this or that fiddler,
Back in the old country,
Ten thousand miles away,
Renaming them after
Daughters and wives
In artful flattery.

In his memoirs he had lied,
Made false witness
As to the circumstances of his arrival,
Claiming that he had come, a freeman.
Not a thief, but a contracted gardener.
Likewise he dismissed the deaths of natives,
The blood on his hand
From at least one massacre.

Likewise he remained silent
As to the fellow fiddlers
He had arrested during Denison’s
‘War on public fiddling’,
All while he still enjoyed the patronage
Of the wealthy,
Fiddling for their fancies
In their halls and houses.

We close the pages of his book,
Without prejudice or delusion.
For though some of his tunes
Repurposed, renamed,
Plagiarised shamelessly,
Were never truly his,
A hoard of them were.
And all in all,
The trove he left us
Is a great legacy.

His own works,
written for,
Or dedicated to,
Colourful characters,
The good and bad, tyrants and reformers,
Their families their homes,
Map out, in music,
The early decades of the colony,
The people and the places of renown,
The abrupt shifts in power.

He was of a time,
No more a rogue than many,
And less so than some.
How are we to stand in judgement
One hundred and seventy years on?
Here is a waltz he gave us,
And a hornpipe, a strathspey, a reel, a jig,
Saved from a dusty corner of the archive,
Awoken to be played,
And to guide us
o where we must look
To seek the truth of our own past,
On an island defined by
A tradition of convenient reinvention.

Steve Gadd 2022