Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Read online

  There was no time to be lost; as soon as I had decided to set off in the morning on the next stage of my journey, across Bass Strait to Launceston hoping to re-discover my father’s boyhood, my motor stopped racing. As I pulled the covers up again and composed myself for sleep, outside on the verandah there came a scratching sound and something wailed.

  Tasmania, December 1986

  ‘Prima di morire, vedete la Tasmania; e un paradiso eterno.’ Although I am a native of Launceston, I am told that our native flora is in many respects similar to those of the Fatherland. We have our moss-covered hills with tufted ferns feathering deep little stony brooks, rosy prodigality of briers and summer scented broom.

  JOHN FITZGERALD

  The Tasmanian writer C.J. Koch maintains that Tasmania is different from the rest of Australia.

  ‘The entire land-mass of Australia, most of it flat and very dry, lies north of latitude forty. Tasmania, filled with mountains and hills, lies south of latitude forty, directly in the path of the Roaring Forties. It genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent: in the upside-down frame of the Antipodes, it duplicates North-western Europe, while the continent is Mediterranean and then African. So it was very easy, in what was once Van Diemen’s Land, for our great-grandfathers to put together the lost totality of England.’

  It is not clear to me at least why C.J. Koch’s German ancestors should have wanted ‘to put together the lost totality of England’. Australians might imagine a totality of England for the same reason that Englishmen imagine a totality of Australia, sheer ignorance. The exiles took their scraps of wilderness and did their best to turn them, not into a simulacrum of a nation state, but into home. They cleared the native trees and scrub, tried to grow the food that they knew both how to grow and how to cook. If they became prosperous they built houses like the ones successful people inhabited in the regions they had left. The names the early settlers chose were not connected with ‘England’, or even the home counties or Cockney London, but with provincial Britain, the depressed areas which supplied not only the convicts, but the soldiers who guarded the convicts, and the free settlers and the miners. The map-makers went by superficial similarities of topography and climate; if an estuary reminded them fleetingly of Devon, they called the river the Tamar and the new town above the estuary they called Launceston.

  Most of the settlers had small reason to love something called ‘England’, their first colonial master; one of the reasons they hated England was that its draconian economic policies had driven them into exile from Devonport and Bridport, from Swansea and Melton Mowbray, from Sheffield and Derby, from Deloraine and Queenstown, and they brought the names and their provincial accents with them to the far south side of the world. C.J. Koch plays down the predominant Scots-Irish-Welsh character of the life they tried to build. Australia was not principally ‘another Kent, another Dorset, another Cumberland for the free settlers’: it was a mosaic of tiny bits of Ulster, Wales. Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands, Norfolk, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire. It was the later suburbanites who called places Brighton and Beaumaris and Dover Heights.

  Australians like to pretend that Tasmania is their Norway. They go there to eat venison and buy smoked salmon, and call Tasmanians Taswegians. It is in the interests of tourism, Tasmania’s only growth industry, to pretend that Tasmania is exotic and antique but any real differences between Tasmania and the mainland are minimal. While it is true that Tasmania lies south of latitude forty, it is also true that the effect of the Roaring Forties is felt on the southern shore of the mainland, where the climatic type of southern Victoria, called ‘cool temperate west coast’ in the geography books, is the same. Cape Otway and Wilson’s Promontory, like King Island and the Furneaux Islands, are tassels on the end of the chain of the Great Dividing Range.

  A Tasmanian who abandoned Tasmania for Sydney might be impressed by the contrast, but no Victorian facing into the Tasmanian wind has any feeling of novelty. The seal-grey clouds that roll across the sky are the self-same ones that cancelled most of the tennis when I was at school in Melbourne. The wind has the same rawness; it delivers a slap like a wet towel, with no hint of the crispness of frost. I knew well the massive blue-grey sea that shifted its surface like sliding plates of rock, uneasy to the horizon and beyond. I remembered the old shiver, when I read

  Great waves looked over others coming in

  And thought of doing something to the shore

  That water never did to land before.

  I have stood on the coast of New England where those lines were written and felt nothing like the coldness that creeps into the bowels when looking south from the western Victorian coast towards a heaving horizon beyond which there is only Antarctica and the dark blue sky. The polar ice-cap only has to warm up a fraction of a degree and that vast indifferent water whose temperature never changes will in its huge inertia do something to the shore. It will not be like aqua alta in Venice, slopping over the mosaic floor of San Marco; it will be dark, implacable, dreadful. This, with its grinding shift of dark water by the ton, is not a sea to swim in; instead I waded in the rock pools with the other creatures that sheltered from its thumping roar, or dug myself a hole in which to hide from the stinging sand spray and read my inevitable book. I learned to swim in Port Philip Bay, practically land-locked and warmed with sewage; on the blue-black ocean on the see-saw slopes of the westerlies I learned to fish. And, like all fishermen, I learned to fear the sea.

  Tasmania and the remoter parts of southern Victoria show the same pattern of attempts at intensive agriculture and sporadic mining activity, now mostly abandoned. The eastern half of the island is the same rolling parkland cleared of native vegetation and striped with massive bulwarks of spreading conifers planted a hundred years ago for windbreaks, now dense black arcades sucking light from the air.

  The conifers are Cupressus macrocarpa, native to Monterey, California, like that other arboreal scourge of Southern Australia, Pinus radiata. Once the settlers had realised that the cypresses, first identified in 1838, grew rapidly and were unbowed in the very teeth of the gales that batter the Californian coast, they could not wait to import them. As fast as they ringbarked, burnt and grubbed up the native tree cover, they propagated and planted out long lines of Cupressus macrocarpa, to stop their newly naked soil from blowing away. They planted them round their houses, and alongside the home paddocks. They defined driveways and entrances and boundaries with fast-growing walls of fresh green, lemon-scented when crushed. The trees grew fast, and kept on growing fast, upwards until they reached their full height of forty metres or so, and then, ominously, outwards. As they spread they turned a darker colour, a bitter green, atrabilious, the black of the vegetable world. The lateral branches pushed sideways and kept on pushing, until the great black base of the tree was broader than the tree was high.

  Nobody could have imagined that in their new environment, suckled on the sweet water borne on the southwesterlies, unscorched by frost, the cypresses would grow so enormous. They engulfed houses, knocked over walls, squeezed cart tracks out of existence, and created tracts of desert strewn with their shed scales. The native eucalypts are leggy and shallow-rooting but these titanic trees have their tap roots sunk in the bedrock; nothing can uproot them nor can their sawn stumps decay. They never sprout or coppice but stand impenetrable as stupas for a hundred years. The native birds avoid their funereal branches. No orchid, no mushroom, no climber will grow in this driest of dry shade. Here and there householders tired of living in the roaring darkness underneath them have assaulted their flinty branches with chain saws, laying open the creaking skeletons beneath their green-black raiment. The amputated arms do not bud but display their nakedness like a curse.

  In a cemetery outside the western district town of Birregurra, I was trying to read gravestones for someone else’s family with the wind that always accompanied me whipping my wet hair into my eyes, when a groan came from somewhere under my feet and a limb of one of the
se black trees crashed to earth a few feet away. The tree was one of a double file which had originally marked the road to a little stone church, which now lay in ruins. Left to themselves the trees will soon uproot the headstones and crack open the graves. Most of the farmers are long gone; the village schools and churches and church halls that they built are ruinous, but the black trees will be there forever.

  The Australian belief that Tasmania is unlike the rest of Australia and very like England is rather like the impression that most people had of my father, namely that he was English. He did not trouble to deny that he was English, although he was careful not to overdo it, chooms being fairly universally detested. He was English, born in South Africa, brought up in Tasmania. This scenario combined all that was acceptable about Englishness without the negative elements of whingeing pommery. A man with this quaint insular background would be more charming, more olde worlde than a brash mainlander. This corresponds with the view that Tasmania takes of itself, as a tiny, picturesque, friendly sort of place. In fact Tasmania is dirt poor and struggling to survive. The centrifugal pull of the great cities of the mainland is, has been, and will always be, too much for it.

  The free settlers and the emancipists shared a dream of rich farmland serving pleasant market towns, each with handsome churches, a library, a couple of schools, a shire hall and a mechanics’ institute, and the usual flotilla of shoemakers, clothiers, jewellers, pastrycooks, saddlers, fodder merchants, blacksmiths, a lawyer or two, all within easy distance of their farms. It was not to be. Although the churches were built and still stand, because they were built with love and lavishness of real stone or solid brick, the towns have collapsed around them. The farmers could not generate enough economic activity to sustain such an infrastructure. The land was simply not productive enough. If the cropping was good, Australia was too far away from the great markets of Europe and there were not sufficient ships to carry the produce there in time. Tasmanian apples sold in London until they were pushed out by cheaper and better American produce. Anything Tasmania could grow, Victoria could grow and sell, without the expense of crossing Bass Strait. Though the settlers may have had a dream of becoming a sturdy yeomanry, the historical epoch for such a development was over. Only commercial farming of cheap foodstuffs for the urban masses was to be viable. The small farmers of Australia struggled for generations. Even today, one in three of all Australian farms is without income of any kind.

  When I was born Australia had one of the most urbanised populations in the world; since then centralisation has intensified. More and more the countryside becomes a resort for trippers from the capitals; as the motorways streak out from the cities, the city dwellers travel further and further to create ‘sophisticated recreational lifestyles’. On remote Cape Otway, after half an hour driving on a sand track, I came across a kind of private zoo for urbanites, where houses made of glass and western red cedar were to be tastefully hidden among the stringybarks and heather, affording an unimpeded view of wombats and blue-tongued lizards, as well as the golf club tucked away at the end of the drive. We may scoff at the settlers who broke their hearts trying to turn this ancient, implacable continent into a granary, and we may execrate their memory for inflicting upon us sparrows and rabbits and blackberries to destroy the native flora and fauna, but at least they did not use the countryside as entertainment. They did not trifle with it, but gave it all they had.

  When my father was a boy in Launceston, it was still a live city, supporting two good newspapers, churches of every denomination, two public schools for rich boys, half a dozen local primary schools, half a dozen clothing and drapery stores, a number of cricket clubs, rowing clubs, a football league. There was hardly such a thing as ‘leisure’, let alone a mass of people ‘leading sophisticated recreational lifestyles’. Everyone was busy at school or at work, for long hours; once a week at the end of their ten-hour work-day, all the boys had to do cadet drill.

  The Launcestonians created their own entertainment, and were not simply spectators of entertainment generated in faraway Sydney, or further-away Hollywood. In their spare time they went to church, and then trained for the sports events which happened every week, rehearsed for the church choir, the band, the annual concert, the amateur theatricals, the Gilbert and Sullivan, the smoking concert. They arranged fêtes, bazaars, raffles, contests, made cakes, garments, bibelots, etcetera for the fêtes, bazaars and so forth, attended race meetings, cricket matches, regattas, football, cycling, hockey, rifle shoots, lectures on theosophy, hypnotism, spiritualism, exotic religions, gave parties for engagements, weddings, anniversaries, visitors from the mainland, retiring dignitaries, grew things, cooked, embroidered and preserved things for the local show, and competed in practically every human activity including rabbit-skinning, sheep-shearing and the wood-chop. The Launceston newspapers carried long lists of names of everyone who took part in anything, including parties given for visiting or retiring clergymen in outlying districts; obscure indeed must have been the individual whose name never appeared in any such list.

  Reg Greer’s name does not appear in any such list. Neither does any Greer except W., who won some of the cycling races at the annual Caledonian Games on New Year’s Day in 1910. I was sure I had found Daddy’s elder brother.

  Doubtless the entertainments thus provided were rather rustic; the dresses at the parties and the race meetings were probably years behind the Paris fashions, and more beer was drunk than claret, and the singing and dancing and acting were probably downright laughable, but everybody on the street had somewhere to go and something to do, and people to appreciate it when it was done. With such satisfactions there was hardly any reason to go in search of more sophisticated (and costly) professional entertainment. The advent of the movies changed all that.

  Launceston was a port, and the principal supply depot for the miners of the north-west. In 1871 James ‘Philosopher’ Smith had found the greatest lode of tin ever at Mount Bischoff, eight miles from Burnie on the northern coast of Tasmania from where it was shipped to smelters in Launceston; by 1889, under its manager H.W.F. Kayser from the mining town of Clausthal in the Harz mountains, the Mount Bischoff Tin Mining Company had paid £1,000,000 in dividends. More tin was found in Scottsdale and Ringarooma to the east of Launceston together with zircons and sapphires. Then gold was found in the vicinity of Beaconsfield, on the Tamar estuary north of Launceston, and silver at Zeehan and gold at Mount Lyell. The population of the town grew from 20,000 to 60,000.

  The mining boom of the eighties relieved twenty years of depression; the see-saw kept moving. Speculation was repeatedly followed by inflation and collapse. The great days of Tasmanian tin, gold, copper and lead were followed by the spasm of Tasmanian scheelite, but the lodes could not compete with more accessible lodes in other parts of Australia and money ceased to be available for development of Tasmanian mining. Tasmania is now permanently depressed. Most successful Tasmanians, like C.J. Koch, leave Tasmania and go to the mainland. Unsuccessful Tasmanians also leave. Gone are the days when Tasmanian mining shares were quoted on the stock exchanges of the world and when Tasmanian apples were shipped around the world to London, the only apples available in the early English spring. The damp air and low cloud brought on by the incessant westerlies do put one in mind of Somerset, and apples used to be the result, but when I drove all around the eastern part of the island in December I saw not a single apple tree. Instead I saw tiny towns of a street or two of recognisably Victorian houses, some built in stone, with signs begging rich mainlanders to visit them, although their souvenir shops were closed and only the pub stood open for the convenience of a drinker or two. I passed dozens of tiny churches and dozens of graveyards full of surnames that had vanished from Tasmania, one of which was Greer.

  A William Greer died in Tasmania in 1832, and a James Greer in 1849. A Mrs Greer lived at Perth in 1881, a James Greer farmed in New Norfolk in 1896–7, and a Frances Greer died at Longford in 1895, unmarried, aged sixty-five, of dropsy of t
he lungs. In each case the trail ended right there; none of these people had issue living in Tasmania. As I was looking for Greers who arrived in Tasmania in 1907 or 1908, I gave no importance to the Perth-Longford-Campbelltown Greers. However, one Greer family kept turning up like King Charles’s head. They were three brothers from Maghera, who emigrated in 1854. All the brothers used their mother’s name Shaw as well as their surname Greer. The first to be associated with Tasmania is the middle brother, John Shaw Greer, who was born in Maghera in 1834. In 1863 John Shaw Greer entered the Methodist ministry. He married a girl called Elizabeth Bennett, who bore him a son, Mansley John, in Deloraine in 1873. He was based at Campbelltown from 1875 to 1878, and his baby daughter, Millicent Laura, died there in March 1878 of teething and diarrhoea. By 1880, when his son Claude was born, the family was living in Launceston and appears in Manning’s Directory for 1881–2. Some time after that the family moved to Victoria, and never came back to Tasmania.

  The primal elder’s curse made sure not only that I brought my bad weather with me to Tasmania, but that, when I opened my spectacles case to read on the plane, it was inexplicably empty. Although the Sunday evening was damp and blustery, I explored the tiny grid of streets lined with two-storey shops in the hope of finding an optician: there was no one about. The cinema was closed; all the cafés and fast-food bars were closed. The shop façades were supplied with metal awnings, on which hung illuminated signs advertising the ‘House of this’ and ‘exclusive that’. I saw a tiny boutique (pronounced bo-teek in Australian) that advertised ‘Pret a Porte’; another was the home of Comfoot-Plus Footwear; Casa Mondé sold lamps, a few doors along from the Lets-B-Crafty Craft Shop. Only the pharmacy was open.

  In twenty minutes I had walked the length and breadth of the town centre, where there were almost no office buildings; it was no more than a shopping centre after all. I was amazed at the number of opportunity shops which sold cast-offs in aid of the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, and the Red Cross. It seemed hardly possible that the people of Launceston had so much clothing to discard; I wondered if the clothes had been shipped from elsewhere to the poor of northern Tasmania, for the other shops were thinly stocked and the goods shoddy. In the centre of the noughts-and-crosses grid of one-way streets designed to force the motorist to pull up and pay attention to down-town Launceston, there was a pedestrian plaza. Its two telephone boxes had been vandalised. Over the whole lay the smell of frying beef dripping which characterises Australian cities, where fish-and-chip shops are more often encountered than stockbrokers.