Lost Worlds (49 page)
It’s ofttimes when I slumber I have a pleasant dream;
With my pretty girl I’ve been roving down by a sparkling stream;
In England I’ve been roving with her at my command,
But I wake broken-hearted upon Van Diemen’s Land.
Come all you gallant poachers, give hearing to my song:
I give you all my good advice, I’ll not detain you long:
O lay aside your dogs and snares, to you I must speak plain
For if you know our miseries you’d never poach again.
Between coughs and spits and all the sounds that suggest the sear of early morning cigarettes, his raspy voice rolled around the campsite, setting birds singing in the dunes and in the forest along the shores of New River Lagoon.
Out of the rear “window” of my small tent I could see the surf gently prattling up and back on the sunlit strand. A huge black bird, a wedge-tailed eagle, soared on the air currents off Precipitous Bluff and peered down intently at our camp. Its enormous tail feathers and six-foot wingspan distinguished it from the smaller white-bellied sea eagle I’d seen a couple of days back. It looked a very serious and determined prey-seeking creature. I learned later that its strength and broad talons enable it to attack not only lizards and mice but even moderately sized wallabies. It seemed to be sizing us up for a possible breakfast snack.
“Well—welcome to the world, Dave. Grab yourself some coffee, mate.”
I emerged in a semi-somnolent state, but the coffee worked its magic as Lanny began to pull out exotic delights from his backpack. No dehydrated mulch for him. Instead he carried lean bacon, fat Australian sausages, and thick slabs of bread.
“Fancy a bit of this bush-tucker? Nice sausage and bacon sandwich? Was gonna make you some real ‘damper’ bread, but this stuff’s okay, right?”
“Sure,” I gushed.
“Y’need decent breakfasts on this trip. What yer been eatin’?”
I almost apologized for my meager morning fare of muesli and raisins.
“Well—that stuff’s okay. But you need stayin’ power. Bit o’ meat and fat. Nothing like it for getting goin’.”
He was so right. My palate pounced on the now-unfamiliar textures and flavors. The fat oozed out of the thick slices of bread onto my jeans as I gorged on these forbidden delights.
“Lanny—this tastes great!” I managed to get out between chews and swallows.
“Right y’are, mate. Grab another one. Y’can get worn down on this walk. Need yer tucker.”
We chewed in silence. The coffee gurgled in the billy; the eagle still hovered above, and gentle breezes blew over the dune tops. We finished by wiping the pan clean of every morsel of food and fat with more slabs of soft bread.
“Good on you, Dave. No need to wash this lot. Cleaner than when I started.”
“You carry stuff like this with you—bacon, sausages, bread….”
“First couple of days. After that it gets more basic. But I like to start off right.”
“You’ve done this walk before?”
“Done the lot, mate. Overland Track over Cradle Mountain, Walls of Jericho, Port Davey Track, the Arthurs, South West Cape…. Done this one, South Coast Track, three times. This’s my fourth.”
“By yourself? You walk by yourself?”
“Most the time. Best way. Too much baloney when you go with company. If I want company I go to the pubs. Here I just wanna…well…y’know….”
I knew. Walking alone, shrouded in solitude, is an acquired habit but one that can become addictive.
“I’m glad you turned up this morning. I wasn’t looking forward to swimming across for the boat.”
“Don’t blame y’mate. Catch yer bloody death in that stream. Dangerous too. Them currents a bit rougher than you think….”
(Mind pictures of me being carried out to sea in the treacherous swirls of the stream…and the eagle hanging there, waiting to dive down for a tasty morsel of drowning Dave…. My wife would not have been pleased.)
“Y’want some chocolate?” I asked. “I’ve got some left.”
“Naw, Dave, keep it. You’ve got a few tough patches up ahead before Cockle Creek. You’ll need it. This’ll do me fine.”
And he brought out yet one more delight from his bulging backpack, a sticky square of malt loaf full of raisins and nuts.
“Try some a this, mate. Beaut way to round off yer breakfast.”
And it was. I felt gorged and stuffed and utterly satisfied. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like walking. At least not just yet. So we talked instead.
Lanny’s story was a familiar one in Tasmania. He was a descendant of Irish convicts sent over in the mid-1800s for petty crimes in the homeland. Unlike many Australians, who don’t care to pry overmuch into their murky backgrounds (but often maintain a deep-seated resentment of the British and their cruel convict colonies), Lanny seemed proud of—or at least curious about—his origins.
He extracted a couple of books from his enormous backpack.
“You carry books too—along with the bacon?”
“Right y’are, mate. Best place to do some readin’, this trail. Lots of beaches. Find a spot out of the blast and you can read as long as you want.”
“What kind of books?”
“All kinds. Bird books, plant books, couple of thrillers, history books….” He tapped the two he’d pulled out of his map pocket. “Now, these’ll give you a bit on what Tassie’s all about.” He flicked through one looking for a certain page. “Listen to this, Dave.”
He cleared his throat, threw his third cigarette of the morning into the embers, and began to read at an uneven pace as if reading aloud was an unfamiliar activity:
“This was written by a convict brought over back in the 1850s: ‘And over the soft, swelling slope of the hill, embowered so gracefully in trees, what building stands? Is it a temple crowning the promontory as the pillared portico crowns Sunium? Or a Villa carrying you back to Baiae. Damnation! It is a convict barrack!’”
He looked at me and grinned—“Nice bit a writing, eh, Dave? Fancy stuff until he realizes he’s seeing a bloody prison. He’s talking about Port Arthur, near Hobart.
“And listen to this about the old-crawlers, the prisoners who were let out on probation after their sentences to go scroungin’ around the countryside for jobs. This is what one of the rich land-grabbin’ guys said about one of his old-crawlers: ‘I’ve had this man flogged times without number…. I have put a rope around his neck and on horseback, dragged him back and forth through that pond, but it was all of no use. The man would not leave my service. He’d become so used to punishment that it had become a kind of necessity to him, and likely he felt at times uneasy if he did not receive any; all that was human in his nature must have been lashed out of him, leaving nothing but the nature of a spaniel dog.’”
He paused and I thought. Tasmania is such a powerfully beautiful place, it’s hard to imagine the cruelties and fascistlike regimes that were the cornerstones of its social and economic foundations. I started to put something into words.
“It’s weird, Lanny. So much of Tasmania looks like England, gentle, rolling green hills….”
“Y’right there, Dave—dead right—listen to this—” he flicked to another page, “this was written by that first guy I read to you, that English prisoner: ‘The roads are excellent, the houses good. The coachmen and guards are in manners, dress and behavior as like untransported English guards and coachmen as it is possible to conceive. The wayside inns we passed are thoroughly British; even, I regret to say, to the very brandy they sell. The passengers all speak with an English accent; every sight and sound, reminds me that I am in a small, misshapen, transported bastard England; and the legitimate England itself is not so dear to me that I can love this convict copy.’”
There was silence for a while. I realized, as I had done so many times with my companions in the Bungle Bungle, that Lanny was another one of these split-personality Australians whose bar-and-beer bonhomie belies a far more sensitive individual, deeply caring about his history, his background—and often angered by the cruel origins of his race. Lanny in this respect was true to form. Maybe it was only in the solitude, and the sudden friendships of passing wanderers, that he felt comfortable in revealing this side of his nature. I certainly wouldn’t have taken him for a man who placed much value in books, and certainly not to the point of carrying them with him in a backpack that looked already far too large for his struggles ahead over the Ironbounds.
I tried to think of something to break the silence.
“It’s hard to imagine this place—this little island—having such a hard history.”
Lanny laughed, revealing those huge teeth again. “Wait a minute. You wanna know how hard? Listen to this.” He flurried through the pages again.
“Okay. Now, this is about a small penal colony up the west coast at Macquarie Harbour. They called it the Place of Ultra Banishment and Punishment. There was this guy Sorell, William Sorell, lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land in the 1820s—he said it was a place that ‘held a larger portion, that perhaps ever fell to the same number in any country, of the most depraved and unprincipled people in the universe.’ So he decided to build this prison on Macquarie Harbour for ‘the most disorderly and irreclaimable convicts’ and he told the guards…where is it, hold on—” more flicking of pages, “okay…he told them: ‘You will consider that the constant, active, unremitting employment of every individual in very hard labor is the grand and main design of this settlement. They must dread the very idea of being sent here. You must find constant work and labor for them, even if it consists of opening cavities and filling them up again. Prisoners upon trial declared that they would rather suffer death than be sent back to Macquarie Harbour. It is a feeling I am most anxious to keep alive.’”
Lanny read on. Apparently Sorell’s orders were followed to the extreme. Daily floggings were commonplace—a hundred lashes for the most minor offenses with a cat-o’-nine-tails consisting of nine thick leather thongs, each four feet long, knotted at six-inch intervals and tipped with coarsely wound wire that slashed skin and flesh into bloody pulp. One description of a typical flogging (recorded by a convict named Davies in 1825) left my overburdened, breakfast-filled stomach churning:
The place of punishment was a low point almost levil with the sea, and just above high water mark was a planked Gangway 100 yards long. By the side of it in the center stands the Triangles to which a man is tied with his side towards the platform on which the Commandant and the Doctor walked so that they could see the man’s face and back alternately…. It was their costome to walk 100 yards between each lash; consequently those who received 100 lashes were tied up from one Hour to One Hour and a Quarter—and the moment it was over unless it were at the Meal Hours or at Nights he was immediately sent to work, his back like Bullock’s Liver and most likely his shoes full of Blood, and not permitted to go to the Hospital until next morning when his back would be washed by the Doctor’s mate and a little Hog’s Lard spread on with a piece of Tow, and so off to work…and it often happened that the same man would be flogged the following day for Neglect of Work.
In addition to those terrible floggings, prisoners were often placed in forty-five-pound leg fetters that ground the flesh off ankles to the bone. They worked sixteen-hour days, never received fresh vegetable or meat, only two-year-old salted beef, and thus suffered terribly from scurvy. And for the accidental error of breaking an ax or saw (Macquarie Harbour became a lumber-felling center) they received the dreaded regimen of cat-o’-nine-tails lashings. In the case of more severe misdemeanors, executions were ordered in the form of public hangings attended by all the inmates. Not surprisingly, the executions were often a welcome release for the miserable miscreants. Lanny read from the records of one of the officers:
Their execution produced a feeling, I should say, of the most disgusting description…. So buoyant were the feelings of the men who were about to be executed, and so little did they seem to care about it, that they absolutely kicked their shoes off among the crowd as they were about to be executed, in order, as the term expressed by them was, that they might “die game” it seemed…more like a parting of friends who were going a distant journey on land, than of individuals who were about to separate from each other for ever; the expressions used on that occasion were “Good bye, Bob” and “Good bye, Jack,” and expressions of that kind, among those in the crowd, to those who were about to be executed.
We were silent again. Lanny put down the book and stirred the embers under the billy. The eagle had gone. The sun was over the dunes now, warming us. I couldn’t think of anything to say. This beautiful majestic land had now become another place—a place of terrible terrors and cruelties, a hellhole of man’s inhumanity to man.
I’d read somewhere that as late as the turn of the century most “Vandemonians” had experienced the convict life before being released and probationed as “old-crawlers” and left to create what they could of a life in the valleys and emerging towns of the island.
Peter Conrad, a repatriot Tasmanian, expressed his feelings in
Behind the Mountain
on the residue of this appalling era:
The problem is our forgetfulness. Tasmania has unwritten its own history. Citizens who had made good vandalized the state archives to eliminate the record of their convict ancestry. A self-protective incuriosity about origins is an instinct bred into you…it was simply a matter of agreeing not to remember things which were painful…a convenient amnesia overtakes…but a past which isn’t acknowledged can’t be overcome.
Conrad calls it the “Tasmanian Ailment” and it pervades his finely crafted prose like bitter bile.