The Mandarin Code by Steve Lewis Page B

vision.’
    Harry Dunkley tilted his head to suggest he was appreciative rather than baffled.
    â€˜He was a giant of his age.’ Dancer turned sharply, his gaze as intense as that of Banks. ‘And so superior to the pygmies who rule us now, don’t you think?’
    Dancer left the question hanging, inviting a response.
    â€˜Charles, I didn’t realise you were such a student of the arts.’ Dunkley filled the void. ‘The dark arts maybe, but not fine arts.’
    â€˜Very droll, Harry. I wanted you to soak up the history. You need to be able to put everything I’m about to tell you in perspective.’
    Dancer gestured at the painting. ‘Banks was a guardian of his age as we are guardians of this age, keepers of an ephemeral flame. Our role is to hand on a better nation. To look to the long term, for the common good. Not to be captives of the moment, of the latest fad.’ He spoke with quiet resolve. It was nearing 10.30am and the gallery was yet to fill with the bustle of tourists and locals.
    Dancer clearly loved this place. Dunkley, too, was fond of the gallery, but the work that moved him was on the other side of the room. ‘Come with me.’ It was his turn to reveal his favourite.
    There, in the middle of the back wall, were two bronze busts by Benjamin Law, commissioned in the mid-1830s. The first, of an Aboriginal man, was as proud and sure as the image of Banks.
    â€˜Wurati, the chief of Van Diemen’s Land.’ Dunkley stood close to the bronze, wondering what the man had been feeling and thinking when the piece was set. Wurati’s face bore no trace of the pain to come.
    â€˜His people would be all but exterminated by “visionaries” like Banks. And beside him is another.’ Dunkley stepped across to stand beside the bronze of a woman.
    â€˜This is his wife, Trukanini, long thought to be the last of her people. Benjamin Law cast Wurati first, regal and strong. But the statue of Trukanini, made just one year later, is very different: downcast, tragic. She knows what the white man’s arrival means. Maybe that realisation was dawning on the artist, too, that the nation Banks envisioned would be built on the bodies of another people.’
    Dancer had viewed the busts before, but he studied them and their inscriptions afresh.
    â€˜True, Aboriginal dispossession is the Original Sin of settlement. I am sorry for that,’ he finally said. ‘But it was inevitable. If it had not been us it would have been the French, the Dutch or the Germans. History does not stand still, Harry. The lesson from your art tour is that powerful people survive, and the weak are enslaved or murdered. I don’t intend to be on the side of the weak.’
    Dunkley wasn’t sure about Dancer’s agenda. But he needed to settle one of his own.
    The death of their friend Kimberley had brought the two together. They’d forged a working bond and shared a grudging respect. But Dunkley suspected the relationship was as flimsy as the Toohey Government’s grip on power.
    â€˜Why didn’t you return my calls?’ Dunkley challenged the diplomat. ‘You promised to help track down Kimberley’s killer. You know I can’t do it on my own.’
    â€˜Harry, please, let it go.’ Dancer was examining the next portrait. ‘It’s a futile quest. It wasn’t a single person who killed Kimberley, it was the ideology of an evil state. You should never have got her involved; neither of you was equipped for the task. You were innocents wandering into a war.’
    Their conversation was interrupted by the giggling of a nearby couple.
    â€˜Let’s go for a stroll, Harry.’ Dancer led Dunkley into an adjoining gallery.
    â€˜So why did you call now, Charles?’
    Dancer fronted a portrait of Lachlan Macquarie, a man described in his native Scotland as the ‘Father of Australia’.
    â€˜Harry, I have wrestled with this