ROTUNDA FORTUNAE
by
PAUL F WALSH
I’m not a Lambton lad or lass, but I am a Lambton legend. Indeed, it could be said that the entire township rotates around me. I’m 128 years old, but I long to be 228 years old, and, to understand that longing, you’d need to know of what happened during my 28th year. It’s a bottler of a yarn, and, in Lambton, a good yarn is coinage of the realm that can be woven into the very fabric of a rich suburban tapestry.
The Lambton tapestry, of which I speak, nestles in a village valley, and, from my panoramic perspective, it evolves from an ugly and coarse utilitarian beauty to an idyllic, silken glade of self-indulgent, disposable domestic bliss: from hard-faced miners with seamy eyes and skeletal frames to fattened families walking their leashed dogs, from patriotic games such as “Killing the Kaiser” to Christmas carols and silent nights.
I have seen it all here in Lambton, and yet, I’ve seen nothing too. Blindness may be a selective condition, and the chronological vista before me may simply be a curtain, but what lies behind the curtain, what vision is behind my blindness?
And what blind eye have we buried here?
Nothing in Lambton stays the same, not even me. I’ve had a striped dome, a green dome, a red dome and now a silver dome. A bloke named Barney reckons I’m an architectural chameleon, but why do I even exist?
Have I passed my use-by date?
Is this what an existential crisis feels like?
What’s the point of me being here?
What is my life’s purpose?
Everybody sees me as a still point in a turning world. In their view, no matter how much I change, I stay the same, which is not how I view myself, for I cannot view myself. I’m condemned to a life of viewing others while they view me. Perhaps, in another hundred years, I’ll know the answers I seek.
Even the poet who once sat near the memorial gates spoke of me with such lyrical certainty amidst my uncertainty, though he knew nothing of the secret guarded by those stone portals:
Red-domed rotunda
sleeping on a mound
dozing decades pass
heedless of their sound
But I was certainly not heedless.
And I’ve been silent long enough.
I was conceived in what is now Lambton Library, but in 1889 it was the Lambton Municipal Council Chambers. My conception was spawned by Mayor Dent, whose name is emblazoned above two of my Corinthian columns.
I was officially christened on November 29, 1890, but no amount of brass-band-driven Northumbrian sword dancing could make me forget my first earlier moments of dawning enlightenment.
I still recall the gentle cursing of a lad named Freddie who was tasked with adorning me with electric lights. Lambton was the first township in Newcastle to embrace such fearful technology, and I was so well lit by Freddie that I initially thought I was brilliant: brilliant by night, dull by day, perhaps.
When the lights came on, my conscious memory was born, and that memory guides me now to my 28th year and a man named Robert.
Robert is a Germanic name meaning bright or shining fame.
Robert died in my embrace in 1918.
Robert was an aborigine and a veteran of Gallipoli.
Robert had chosen to fight for a country that had stolen his country from him. His ancestral land was the marsh on which I and Lambton Park now stand. The whites drained his country into a creek, now called Ker-rai, which flows into a glorified storm-water drain named Styx.
Under terra nullius Robert did not exist, and this was how he was treated on his return from the war that blinded him: he did not exist. He was like a bright shining star that could be seen in the Southern Cross, but not recognised for actually being there.
Robert died on my decking with his back propped up against the ship-like mast of my flagpole. The last custodian of the Lambton commonage marsh was a traditional owner who ended up owning nothing but the wounded shirt on his back, or so it seemed.
Robert did not die alone. A white woman named Susan comforted him in his final hours.
Susan is a Hebrew name meaning lily or great beauty.
And this Susan had great beauty in her heart. She was one of the local volunteers raising funds for the Lambton Park memorial gates and for the purchase of a horse and sulky for a returned soldier with no feet.
It pained Susan that Robert’s name could not appear on the memorial gates because he was a darkie.
Robert said that, after the explosion had ruptured his eyes, he was rescued by a bloke named Simpson who threw him onto the back of a donkey.
Bizarrely, Simpson had jumped ship in Newcastle years before, and here he was saving a blackfella from Newcastle at Gallipoli!
Robert was slipping in and out of consciousness when he found a coin, lost by some unknown soldier in the leather of the donkey’s bridle.
A medical officer named Bernie later told Robert that the coin was from ancient Rome. According to Bernie, blokes digging trenches at Gallipoli were always finding Roman artefacts, as though they were casual archeologists armed with 303s.
The goddess Fortuna could clearly be seen on the coin, but not by Robert, of course, and she was holding the bridle of a horse and standing within a rotunda that represented the wheel of destiny, rota fortunae.
Fortuna was blindfolded, and Bernie reckoned that, under these bridled and blinded circumstances, Robert had been chosen by destiny to be the new custodian of the coin.
Bernie said there was a Roman inscription on the coin that gave a nod and a wink to Robert’s ancient ancestry. And he told Robert that, if he didn’t make it, he’d have a coin for the ferryman so his soul could cross the river Styx.
And now here we were, several years later, with Robert dying just yards away from a creek that would eventually flow into a storm-water drain named Styx. But Robert had his own dreaming regarding the coin. He gave it to Susan to enable the soldier without feet to have a horse and sulky.
And then Robert died.
At the moment of his death, I felt a shiver from the mast-like base of my flagpole to the very tip of the top, above my cupola.
It was as if the Roman inscription from the coin had embodied itself in my existential emptiness with all the subtlety of a lightning strike on the road to Damascus.
Young Freddie would have been freaked out by the charge of electrical energy. In that moment, I really was brilliant! I could have lit up Lambton for weeks!
And in the light of my reflected brilliance, and I did have two large reflectors which cost five pounds, Robert departed from this world, and beautiful Susan became the new custodian of the ancient Roman coin.
Thereafter, the money for both fundraising projects was guaranteed, as if Robert’s coin possessed a magical magnetic quality that could never be truly spent.
Susan felt tremendous guilt when Robert’s coin wasn’t needed in the monetary sense, but there was another ancient dreaming sense in which the coin had been well and truly spent by Robert himself.
Susan secretly placed Robert’s coin in a bottle, which was subsequently buried under a stone pillar of the new memorial gates. She wanted the coin buried there to make up for Robert’s name not being on the pillar above.
And there the bottle lay for 100 years in Robert’s traditional country.
And then another Robert appeared in 2018.
He knew where the secrets were buried.
A crane lifted the heavy gate pillar, stonemasons drilled for hours, and there it was: the bottle: the only known World War I time capsule in Australia. If a rotunda could cry, I would have cried at that moment.
Robert knew what he had to do.
He was the custodian of something much larger than himself.
He did not know of the original Robert, or of Susan, but perhaps he felt their custodial dreaming from another place and another time.
Robert reburied the coin of destiny beneath the rising sun in Lambton Park in the traditional marshy soil of the original Robert and his clan.
Robert’s coin will be dug up again in 100 years by a newer world with an older custodianship.
Elder Street is well named.
I sit on my mound, an all-seeing eye, blindfolded like Fortuna herself.
I was built for brass bands that mostly never came, and my flagpole has been mostly flagless, but, in my selective blindness, I see the Roman inscription from Robert’s coin, and I embody the invisible flag-flapping of our united destiny: red earth, yellow sun, bright and shining stars and black …
… we are all ab origine.
Author’s note: Rotunda Fortunae is a work of fiction inspired by a perceived sense of reality. For inspiration and/or editorial advice, the author thanks: the Aboriginal people of Newcastle (Mulubinba), past, present and future; Susan Harvey; Robert Watson; Barney Collins; Dr Bernie Curran; Freddie Hector; Anthony Scully; Tom Smith; Chad Watson; Gionni Di Gravio; Julie Keating and Lachlan Wetherall.