Wanting by Richard Flanagan Sample Chapter

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Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His

novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping ,

Gould’s Book of Fish and The Unknown Terrorist are published in

twenty-six countries. He directed a feature-film version of The Sound

of One Hand Clapping .

Praise for Wanting

‘In Wanting , Richard Flanagan has written an exquisite, profoundly

moving, intricately structured meditation about the desire for human

connection in its many forms—that commingling of compassion,

curiosity, care, lust, attraction, intrigue, selfishness and selflessness

that is clumsily grouped under that most perilous of all abstract

nouns: love.’ — Los Angeles Times

‘A haunting and powerful story . . . Mr. Flanagan does a magical job

of conjuring his native Tasmania as it must have appeared to English

settlers . . . And he enlivens his discursive narrative with some

dazzling set pieces.’ —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

‘Flanagan sets his novel in the wilds of nineteenth-century Tasmania

and evokes its inhabitants with exquisite precision . . . Flanagan

forges . . . an entirely unified meditation on desire, “the cost of

its denial, the centrality and force of its power in human affairs.”’

— The New Yorker

Copyright © Richard Flanagan 2008. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior writtenpermission of the publisher.



ALSO BY R ICHARD FLANAGAN

Death of a River Guide

The Sound of One Hand Clapping

Gould’s Book of Fish

The Unknown Terrorist





A Vintage bookPublished by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060www.randomhouse.com.au

First published by Knopf in 2008This edition published by Vintage in 2009

Copyright © Richard Flanagan 2008

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by anyperson or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or byany means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under thestatutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968 ), recording,scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior

written permission of Random House Australia.

Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found atwww.randomhouse.com.au/offices

National Library of AustraliaCataloguing-in-Publication Entry

Flanagan, Richard, 1961–.Wanting.

ISBN 978 1 74166 668 7 (pbk).

Mathinna, 1835–1856 – Fiction.Franklin, John Sir, 1786–1847 – Fiction.

Franklin, Jane Lady, 1792–1875 – Fiction.Dickens, Charles, 1812–1870 – Fiction.

Aboriginal Tasmanians – Fiction.Indigenous women – Tasmania – Fiction.

A823.3

Epigraph from Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated byRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, published by Vintage. Reprinted by

permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Cover design by Sandy Cull, gogoGinkoCover image by Getty Images

Author photograph by Colin MacDougallInternal design by Midland Typesetters, Australia

Typeset in Plantin by Midland Typesetters, AustraliaPrinted and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

Random House Australia uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable

products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The loggingand manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental

regulations of the country of origin.

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1

THE WAR HAD ENDED as wars sometimes do, unexpectedly.

A man no one much cared for, a rather pumped-uplittle Presbyterian carpenter cum preacher, had travelled

unarmed and in the company of tame blacks through the

great wild lands of the island, and had returned with a

motley cluster of savages. They were called wild blacks,

though wild they most certainly were not, but rather

scabby, miserable and often consumptive. They were, hesaid—and remarkably it did now seem—all that remained

of the once feared Van Diemonian tribes that for so long

had waged relentless and terrible war.

Those who saw them said it was hard to believe that

such a small and wretched bunch could have defied the

might of the Empire for so long, that they could havesurvived the pitiless extermination, that they could have

been the instruments of such fear and terror. It wasn’t





clear what the preacher had said to the blacks, or what

the blacks thought he was going to do with them, but they

seemed amenable, if somewhat sad, as broken party afterbroken party were embarked on boat after boat and taken

to a distant island that lay in the hundreds of miles of sea

that separated Van Diemen’s Land from the Australian

mainland. Here the preacher took on the official title of

Protector and a salary of £500 a year, along with a small

garrison of soldiers and a Catechist, and set about raisinghis sable charges to the level of English civilisation.

He met with some successes, and, though these were

small, it was on such he tried to concentrate. And were

they not worthy? Were his people not knowledgeable of

God and Jesus, as was evidenced by their ready and keen

answers to the Catechist’s questions, and evinced in theirenthusiastic hymn-singing? Did they not take keenly to

the weekly market, where they traded skins and shell

necklaces for beads and tobacco and the like? Other than

that his black brethren kept dying almost daily, it had to be

admitted the settlement was satisfactory in every way.

Some things, however, were frankly perplexing. Thoughhe was weaning them off their native diet of berries and

plants and shellfish and game, and onto flour and sugar

and tea, their health seemed in no way comparable to what

it had been. And the more they took to English blankets

and heavy English clothes, abandoning their licentious

nakedness, the more they coughed and spluttered anddied. And the more they died, the more they wanted to

cast off their English clothes and stop eating their English

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food and move out of their English homes, which they said

were filled with the Devil, and return to the pleasures of

the hunt of a day and the open fire of a night.It was 1839. The first photograph of a man was taken,

Abd al-Qadir declared a jihad against the French, and

Charles Dickens was rising to greater fame with a novel

called Oliver Twist . It was, thought the Protector as he

closed the ledger after another post mortem report and

returned to preparing notes for his pneumatics lecture,inexplicable.

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