Kiera Lindsey review of Graeme Cohen, The Possibly True Story of Martin Gardiner

(Halstead Press, 2022), 280 pp., PB $34.95, ISBN 9781925043693

Martin Gardiner (c. 1830s–1899) was not a likeable man, not by his nineteenth-century contemporaries and certainly not by this twenty-first-century reader. He mistreated women, neglected his children, lied for sexual pleasure and professional advancement, and was dismissed from many promising appointments due to what colleagues variously described as his ‘impertinent’, ‘audacious’, ‘barbed’ and ‘belligerent’ personality.

And yet, the sheer unlikability of this colonial mathematician-cum-civil engineer is precisely what makes Graeme Cohen’s historical novel so compelling. In addition to writing this ‘possibly true’ life story in a way that is, as the historian Anna Haebich proposed, ‘factually informed but imaginatively conceived’, Cohen’s novel exemplifies Greg Dening’s reminder that historical subjects had different interior worlds from our own and we must be careful not to assume they are ‘just like us, only wearing funny clothes’.¹

In the epilogue of The Possibly True Story of Martin Gardiner, Cohen provides an explanation for his subject’s prickly peculiarity, hypothesising that his ‘character shows classical aspects of Asperger’s syndrome’ (p. 273). At the very least, he was probably ‘on the spectrum’, as were Lewis Carroll, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein, to mention a few well-known scientists on Cohen’s comprehensive list of ‘difficult’ high achievers (p. 273). Many of the characteristics now used to diagnose Aspergers syndrome have long been valued in a good mathematician, Cohen explains, such as:

advanced language abilities, with regard to vocabulary and syntax but not necessarily conversation, a tendency to pedanticism, an intense fascination with narrow topics, skill in learning, but difficulty with social reasoning and forming relations. (p. 273)

And yet, as this explanation appears in the epilogue, the reader must first form their own impression of this awkward and ambitious Irishman. This Cohen artfully allows in the opening chapters by showing how Gardiner’s contemporaries responded to him, and also subtly inviting us to see the world through the eyes of this difficult man. The novel commences, for example, in the office of Professor Hearn, a mathematics don at the University of Melbourne. Hearn is now a man of influence but once taught Gardiner as a scholarship student at Queen’s College, Galway. Gardiner wants, or rather needs, a favour from Hearn, in the form of a letter of introduction to the Philosophical Institution of Victoria. Despite the purpose of Gardiner’s visit and the fact that deference was crucial to advancement at this time, he fails to demonstrate basic courtesies. We also quickly glean that his lack of appetite or aptitude for small talk is more than matched by his keen awareness of his own abilities. The author’s curious attention to the size of Hearn’s desk and blazing candelabra imbues the scene with a cold, even calculated atmosphere, especially as these details contrast to the few that are offered regarding the emotional effect this stilted conversation has upon both men.

A few pages on we are offered some clues about this episode when the good-hearted Hearn takes up the cause of his old student. The president of the Philosophical Institution of Victoria has had his feathers well and truly ruffled by Gardiner’s ‘impertinence’. ‘You are hardly alone in finding Gardiner’s character distasteful’, Hearn explains:

regard for his academic ability was equaled by universal acknowledgment of his obnoxious behaviour. That is who he is. Despite it all, I imagine he would bring great honour the Philosophical Institute. (p. 15)

‘That is who he is’, the reader thus learns, and must now decide if they will persist with this unpleasant protagonist as he struggles to make his mark in the precarious world of colonial power and patronage. A struggle it shall certainly be, for Gardiner’s restless quest for recognition and reward will lead him back and forth between Melbourne and Sydney, then Newcastle, Brisbane, Adelaide and Cairns, as he is forced to reinvent himself after offending his employers or falling foul of a failed romantic relationship—yet again.

Cohen’s evocation of each of these contexts does much to capture the harsh banality of colonial life and stimulate sympathy for Gardiner’s uncertain existence on the margins of respectability. After the opening scene in Professor Hearn’s university office—replete with its well-proportioned desk and blazing candelabras—our protagonist walks home to a squalid two-room hut in Emerald Hill (South Melbourne). There, we are introduced to the apparent reasons for much of Gardiner’s seething resentment and come to understand why he is so desperate for something better. His domestic domain comprises little more than a few modest possessions. He begrudges his wife for neglecting her domestic duties, while his interactions with his children indicate that he perceives them as a financial burden and distraction from his ‘real work’. His only respite appears to be his intellectual companionship with a neighbour, William Wills, who is yet to embark upon his expedition with Robert O’Hara Burke, which will make him a household name.

The care with which Cohen constructs these scenes adds much to the novel’s plausibility and pathos. In addition to the numerous pubs and brothels that offer relief to the frustrated Irish civil engineer, Cohen sketches Gardiner’s violent childhood in Galway as well as the day-to-day life of Gardiner’s sister, who works as a prostitute on Melbourne’s notorious Lombard Street. The scenes of Gardiner’s professional life in various surveyor camps and railway companies are particularly poignant, for this is where we see how his commitment to mathematical precision combine with his limited social skills to expose him repeatedly to bullying, then isolation, and finally dismissal.

Such sympathetic episodes are, however, punctuated by depictions of Gardiner’s appalling treatment of women. In addition to two wives and a mistress, whose existence has been confirmed by the historical record, Cohen invents two lovers, who, as he explains in the epilogue, provide narrative solutions to ‘a number of questions’ he could not answer from the surviving sources (p. 275). It is here, perhaps, that Cohen’s decision to deploy both research and imagination is most interesting and successful.

We may not like Gardiner’s contempt of Bridgit, his first wife who soon dies from illness and neglect, nor his abuse of his second wife, Emma, let alone the astonishing lies he uses to seduce his mistress, Caroline. Nonetheless, we recognise Gardiner as a man of his times. Not a likeable man, it is true, but not so different from contemporaries such as Charles Dickens and Dante Gabriel Rosetti, both well known for their callous treatment of the women they purported to love.

As Gardiner’s life was marked by so many missed opportunities and close calls, the novel often reads like a nineteenth-century one, in which the reader swings, pendulum-like, between ‘rooting’ for Gardiner professionally and hoping he will get his romantic ‘comeuppance’. Gardiner’s occasional ‘brushings’ with familiar colonial figures furnish the reader with the pleasure of recognition. In addition to the ill-fated William Wills, Gardiner becomes acquainted with the Roman Catholic intellectual Joseph Sheridan Moore while living in Redfern with Emma, his second wife. Moore was part of a well-known Sydney intelligentsia that included figures such as Daniel Deniehy, and newspaper advertisements confirm that Moore and Gardiner were planning to establish the City College on Hyde Park in 1869.

As Gardiner was to oversee the syllabuses, instruction and staffing of this new institution, and went on to place many comparable advertisements in newspapers over the following decades, Cohen speculates that this partnership with Moore represented his ‘best chance’ of gaining status and security (p. 274). Consequently, Cohen felt some narrative explanation was required for why Gardiner’s name was removed from all advertising just days before the opening of City College. This Cohen provides by weaving the seeds of dissent between the pair early into their association. We witness Gardiner’s awkward entrée into Moore’s Sydney salon. Gardiner is so bewildered by the affectations of these aspiring Victorian ‘artistes’ that he seeks solace in the company of their wives who are drawn to his good looks. Soon, the aspiring school principal is embroiled in two love affairs, and when Moore finds out that one of these is with his wife, he abruptly terminates their agreement.

Cohen developed this narrative solution after triangulating a swathe of archival clues. In addition to newspaper articles associated with the City College and Gardiner’s later educational aspirations, he found considerable documentary evidence regarding Gardiner’s romantic relationships. As the death certificate of Gardiner’s first wife was signed by the woman he married soon afterward, Cohen speculates that an intimacy developed between the pair as she was nursing his ailing wife. Around the time Gardiner’s association with Moore imploded, newspapers detailed Gardiner’s assault of Emma, with whom he had recently separated. This encouraged Cohen to speculate the two events were somehow intertwined. Unless fresh archival material emerges, we are unlikely to know what actually happened during this documented crisis, but Cohen’s depiction of Gardiner’s character makes this account entirely ‘possible’.

Cohen’s approach raises rich questions regarding the relationship between history and literature, a topic that has animated historians and biographers for decades. My own work on ‘speculative biography’ considers the ethical implications of using ‘the discipline of context’ and the triangulation of historical documents to address the silences in the sources with ‘informed imagination’.² Elsewhere I have cited Australian historian Greg Dening’s term ‘re-presenting’, which he coined to suggest all acts of history necessarily involve acts of re-creation.³ In so doing, Dening aligned himself with Hayden White, who insisted that history, like literature, involves narrative and narrative devices and is best understood as an act of representation that can never achieve pure objectivity.⁴ In her contribution, the English historian Carolyn Steedman goes so far as to explicitly refer to the ‘speculative nature’ of history:

History-writing is the poetics of indeterminacy. Nothing ever, ever can possibly have happened as we tell it … the indeterminate and speculative nature of any history account … derives from the fact that it cannot have happened—like this—it cannot have happened as it is told, here by me, or by anybody else.⁵

Consciously, or otherwise, these ideas form the philosophical basis of most imaginative responses to historical sources as well as the way authors choose to signal the ‘indeterminate’ nature of their ‘re-presenting’. In this regard, Cohen has chosen to play rather a ‘straight bat’, categorising his work as a ‘historical novel’ and including ‘possibly’ in the title, to leave the reader in no doubt regarding the nature of his truth claims.

Authors often cite specific reasons to justify such methods. Many point to the partialities and prejudices of the historical record that privilege those of specific education, economics and influence, asserting that their work is politically motivated because it will people the past with previously obscured figures. Reflecting on the difficulties of writing about the American abolitionist Sojourner Truth, for example, American historian Nell Irvine Painter insisted on the need for ‘new biographical approaches’:

In order not to cede biography to the usual subjects who had resources enough to secure the educations that would allow them to leave the usual sources for the usual kind of biographies, we need to construct new biographical approaches.⁶

So, what about Martin Gardiner, the surveyor and geometer-mathematician? Does the subject or the surviving sources justify such speculative methods? In reflecting on the process of working with the redacted sources of an Australian spy, Laura Thompson observed that some subjects and sources are so speculative that they lend themselves to such approaches. There is no doubt that Gardiner lived a highly precarious life; however, he also had access to an education that ensured he left some record.⁷ Indeed, in the acknowledgements, Cohen describes how he first encountered his subject while conducting research for Counting Australia in, ‘the first and only’ history of mathematics in Australia. Cohen was impressed by Gardiner’s prolific output as well as the network of notable correspondents with whom he exchanged information on current developments in mathematics (p. 277). Even more impressive was that fact that, despite never completing his formal studies and only qualifying as an assistant-civil-engineer, Gardiner published a dozen articles in his lifetime, thus earning the distinction of being the most prolific Australian mathematician of the time. And yet, as Cohen acknowledges, such achievements are insufficient justification for his novelistic representation, for although Gardiner achieved more than any other professors of mathematics in the four Australian universities up to 1900, his work has been of little lasting value to modern mathematics.

As Cohen was an associate professor in the Department of Mathematic Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney for over 30 years, he is uniquely qualified both to determine the merit of Gardiner’s contribution and guide us through the calculating world of colonial civil engineering. And it is here, perhaps, that The Possibly True Story of Martin Gardiner proves most rewarding. As we follow Gardiner in various survey camps across the country and watch the laying down of chains and measuring of miles, we see how civil engineering was crucial to the colonial project. At the same time, we witness how, as Gardiner becomes increasingly perceived as a weak link in this project, his status shifts from beneficiary to brutalised subject. Thus, rather than reinforce nineteenth-century tropes of success and self-improvement, Cohen’s novel leaves us with a clear sense of how the chains that tethered the colonial to the imperial world also served to dehumanise those it deemed too different.

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1. 1 Anna Haebich, ‘Somewhere between Fiction and Non-fiction: New Approaches to Writing Crime Histories’, Text 16, no. 28 (2015): 5, doi.org/10.52086/001c.27291; Greg Dening, ‘Endeavour and Hokule’a: The Theatre of Re-enactment Histories’, Humanities Research (Winter 1997): 34.

2. 2 The term ‘informed imagination’ was first coined by Natalie Zemon Davis regarding the methods she used to write her prize-winning The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1982). See: Natalie Zemon-Davis, ‘On the Lame’, American Historical Review 93, no 3, (1988): 572–603, doi.org/10.1086/ahr/93.3.572. See also: Donna Lee Brien and Kiera Lindsey, Speculative Biography: Experiments, Opportunities and Provocations (Routledge 2022), doi.org/10.4324/9781003054528; Kiera Lindsey, ‘The Speculative Method: Scientific Guesswork and Narrative as Laboratory’, in Speculative Biography, 41–59, doi.org/10.4324/9781003054528-3; Kiera Lindsey, The Convict’s Daughter: The Scandal that Shocked a Colony (Allen & Unwin 2016); Kiera Lindsey, Wild Love: The Ambitions of Adelaide Ironside, the First Australian Artist to Astonish the World (Allen & Unwin 2023).

3. 3 Greg Dening, Performances (University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37.

4. 4 Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (John Hopkins University Press, 1978).

5. 5 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Intimacy in Research: Accounting for It’, History of the Human Sciences 21, no. 4 (2008): 20–1, doi.org/10.1177/0952695108095509.

6. 6 Nell Irvine Painter, ‘Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic’, Gender & History 2, no. 1 (1990): 14, doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0424.1990.tb00073.x.

7. 7 Laura Thompson, ‘Speculating upon a Spy: Working with “Suspicious Sources” in Deciphering the Life of Ralph Harry’, in Speculative Biography, 149–64, doi.org/10.4324/9781003054528-9.