by Carmel Bird
There were at least two main sequences of this violence, one with sealers and one with shepherds. The first one went something like this: In 1827 a group of sealers, armed with muskets, ambushed a group of Parperloihener people with the purpose of stealing the women. When a black man hurled a spear at one of the sealers he was shot dead. Seven women were then taken to Kangaroo Island which is off the coast of South Australia, never to be seen again, nevermore to enjoy their tribal lives in the northwest of Van Diemen’s Land. The sounds of their terrified voices, their desperate attempts to escape and swim to safety stopped by the threat of the muskets pointed at them from the boats. A few weeks later another bunch of sealers hid out in a cave on one of the islands where naked Aboriginal women were collecting shellfish and moonbirds. When the women set off with their baskets of supplies to swim home the men with muskets herded them into a hollow, in Suicide Bay, tied them up, and, with the exception of one woman who drowned in the frenzied capture, sailed them off also to Kangaroo Island. The desperate black men retaliated by capturing three sealers and clubbing them insensible and leaving them to die.
The second sequence went more or less like this: In late 1827 a band of Peerapper people collecting moonbirds were confronted by the strange sight of a flock of sheep. These people had never seen such strange bulky creatures before, and had probably not seen white people up close. Imagine seeing a sheep for the first time! Shepherds appeared from their huts and invited the Peerapper women to enter. The black men attempted to stop this from happening, the shepherds insisted, until violence broke out and a Peerapper was shot, a shepherd wounded. Determined and enraged Peerapper men, howling and screaming and wielding waddies and spears then herded a lot of sheep to the edge of the cliff and saw them topple in hysterical panic into the sea.
I imagine these sheep in two ways—see them first as the ragged, bewildered, frightened creatures they must have been, crying out in terror and losing their grip on the earth as they fell swiftly onto the rocks or into the water, ending up as smashed corpses of bloody wool, or as floating rugs. Then I see them in flight, white, fluffy, angelic, a pure and blameless flock streaming off the cliff, into the pure air that buoys them up, lifts them out, out in a magnificent arc. And they fly, sail on into the wide blue yonder, heading for the horizon, silently entering the pathway of the moonbird, and setting out on the long long journey of the figure eight, all the way to Alaska and back again. I never see them coming back, just leaving, setting out in serene and godly hope. The moonbird (muttonbird) is called the flying sheep of the Pacific, so I have conflated two species to make a kind of angel sheep.
When the first lot of sheep had gone over the cliff, demented Peerapper then clubbed at least a hundred more to death. I don’t understand why the hundred stayed around to be sacrificed, but it seems they must have done so. Then a few weeks later at Victory Hill shepherds shot about thirty men from the Pennemukeer people and tossed them into the sea.
Such written records as exist of all this were kept by white people. Yet among their accounts there are too few names for my liking, too many vague groups like ‘shepherds’ and ‘sealers’. Many are the dark smudges of facts blurred and stories twisted. Most of the records concentrate on attacks of blacks on whites—and this is I think unlikely, since under the circumstances the white men had the advantage, the guns and the motive, which was the desire for land and pasture. The blood and the horror were real in the lives of all people, black and white. Virginia’s journal throws up a name for one of the black women, a name that has been spoken to her, Virginia says, by the woman’s ghost. The name is Mannaginna. Virginia’s record is one of strange and personal hallucination, or visitation, or vision. Who would believe her, she says. Who indeed?
Historians and others continue to do battle over the lost truths of the conflicts between black and white in the remote little corner of Van Diemen’s Land at Cape Grimm. I entertain a fanciful notion that the cataclysmic grisly violence of the nineteenth century infects the air and the land and the sea around Cape Grimm, and that this disease erupted again in the conflagration of 1992. But the fire did not cleanse, nor did it exorcise. The company of tormented souls that haunt the hills and cliffs has multiplied, and a greater sorrow moans its plaintive way along the winds, intones its deep lament across the groaning waters of the bays. Virginia Mean holds a key to the ancient truths at Suicide Bay, but who would listen to the stories of a mute girl in witness protection, the lover of a mass murderer? When people can listen with the heart to dreams and poetry, then they will know the truth.
For some time I had been reading extracts of Virginia’s journals, and before that exchanging brief letters with her through the Catholic Welfare Office. She had, after a while, agreed that I could see the journals as part of my work with Caleb. This was a big breakthrough in trust for her. When I thought about her visions of the massacres I experienced in a flash a simple yet incredible truth—Virginia is not only a witness to the holocaust at Cape Grimm, but a witness to the massacres there in the 1820s. She crosses time. George Augustus Robinson spoke to people some years after the events at Cape Grimm; Virginia spoke directly to the ghost of one of the victims and saw visions of the tragedies. I know this evidence will be laughed out of court if anyone tries to enter it in the debates of the historians. But my belief in what Virginia wrote in her journal prompted me to find her and talk to her. At first I thought this would be impossible, but then I became obsessed with seeing her, talking to her, believing she held the key to something deeply important, anxious that she would die or disappear before I could make contact with her. There was no reason to believe this, but I was overtaken by the imperatives of a dark desire to know—to know what—I am not really sure. I feared that the insubstantial pageant of her life could dissolve like the waves on the seashore, crumble, as she puts it, like shortbread. And so I wrote to Ben Fox, explaining some of my ideas and reasons. I happen to know he has a family history of seances and ghostly happenings, and perhaps this predisposed him to consider my argument favourably. In any case I didn’t want to quiz Virginia about Caleb at all, and I explained that to him. My interest was in her psychic powers, in the quality of her visions. I began to feel the excitement of a new discovery, the thrill of being on the threshold of a fantastic link with the truths of history. There’s a woman somewhere in America who channels the music of great composers; could it be that Virginia is ‘channelling’ the bloody history of Van Diemen’s Land? They will say I am mad.
I had met Ben Fox several times on Welfare business, and my credibility with him was high, although he was still very protective of Virginia. He wanted to be perfectly sure I was not intending to go to the media. He had permitted me to correspond to an extent with Virginia, to read the diaries, to give her the simple truth about Caleb, telling her he was still alive, something she is sometimes inclined to doubt. And now he has said in fact that he feels I might provide a clearer understanding for her, might be the one to explain to her that although he is alive she will never be able to see Caleb again. As she herself is fond of saying ‘forever and forever’. Ben Fox is a real character in Hobart, one of those down-to-earth saints working for the poor and the downtrodden and the criminal and the mad, while hobnobbing with the landed gentry and the law and high society and the media and the arts. He is distantly related to the Fox sisters who started the fashion for mediums and spritualism in New York in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is no secret that Ben gets around with a well-known forger, a brilliant man they call Vincent van Gogh. Ben arranged for Virginia to be brought to a convent in North Hobart where I could interview her. She could only communicate by writing notes.
I flew to Hobart one glorious summer morning, planning to pick up a car in Hobart and stay with my sister and her family at Tinderbox.
So it was early summer, the day I met Virginia for the first time. I walked across a courtyard with Ben and Sister Margaret, a no-nonsense middle-aged Dominican in grey skirt and cardigan, with stereotypica
l twinkling nunnish eyes and peaches-and-cream skin. Virginia was sitting on a bench in the cloister, the air minty-green around her, wearing the simplest clothing—a white tee-shirt and blue jeans. Behind her there was an old cherry tree covered in darkred fruit, and a statue of Saint Rose of Lima, patron saint of gardeners, stood beneath the tree. Everything was quiet, and there was a stillness in the air. She stood up and we shook hands, then Ben and the nun left us alone. The light in Virginia’s eyes was soft and deep and strange, and her silence only added to the silence in the cloister. She smiled sadly. She was the most lovely young woman I had ever seen in my life. The intersection of our lives at this point, in this way, was odd, to say the least, and all I could do for a moment was stare at her like a fool.
We sat together on the bench and I asked her about her journal and her visions, if they were visions, of Mannaginna and her people, and the massacres that had passed before her eyes, that had floated above the cliff, that had faded out to sea, lamenting and wailing. She wrote on her notepad (which was decorated with a pale image of Mrs Tiggywinkle): ‘Mannaginna is solid, but her people appear to me as figures of thin substance, like real people, but they are constructed of gauze or smoke. As they move across the landscape, the landscape moves through them. Mannaginna is the only one who speaks to me; the others—shepherds, blacks, soldiers—they perform their vision-lives as they lived their earthly lives, and I see the soldiers and the shepherds as they kill the black women and men and children and drive them over the cliff at Cape Grimm. It is like a film.’ That was all she could say or write.
I nodded, and I think she could see in my face that I believed her.
‘But how can you prove this to other people?’ I asked her gently. And she wrote that she could not, that she was speaking the truth of what she had seen and that she could not be concerned with what other people believed.
‘Ben believes me.’
‘I believe you. But is there nothing you can suggest that will prove the truth of your story to others?’
‘No,’ she wrote, ‘and what does it matter anyway? There are still people who do not believe in the visions of Saint Joan, or the visions of Saint Bernadette. It makes no difference. My people move across the stage of the world in a terrible procession. If nobody believes this, it makes no difference. It is true.’
‘It would make a hell of a difference to—well, to the way Tasmanian history is told.’ I felt completely idiotic saying that, and Virginia smiled and wrote: ‘Quite so.’ And then she closed her notebook as if the interview was over. She was going to keep her ghosts close to her heart, safe in their own phantom world of truth, untroubled by the marketplace of history-making and media limelight. I was conscious that in her eyes I had not really fulfilled my part, had not brought up the question of Caleb’s future. I know she expected me to say something. Virginia looked at me quizzically, as if she knew I had more to say. Then she opened her notebook once more, smoothed a fresh page with her hand and wrote: ‘You have not spoken to me of Caleb.’
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘I am not sure where to begin.’
‘I had a dream. He was not in the dream. But an angel came to me and said that I would never see Caleb again.’
This was my cue to tell her the truth, that the angel in the dream was right. I hesitated for too long, and she wrote: ‘That is true, I know. I will never see him again on this earth. Tell me it is true.’
‘I believe it is true.’
‘Thank you. I knew I could trust you to tell me. And now, tell me this, is he alive or is he dead?’
‘He is alive.’
‘Thank you. I needed to hear that.’
She showed no emotion, closed the notebook and stood up. She gave me her hand in a goodbye gesture. I felt very sad and somehow bereft. I thanked her for talking to me, and I felt stupid again.
Ben quickly gathered her up and she was back in the car and on her way to wherever they had come from almost before I could think what was happening. I wanted her to stay, I wanted to sit in the garden and look at her and talk to her and watch her as she quietly and thoughtfully bent her head over her notebook and wrote her notes in her perfect flowing old-fashioned handwriting that reminded me of the handwriting of my grandmother. I wanted to look at her for endless moments.
I was under her spell. I wanted her to stay forever. But she was gone with Ben and Vincent, disappeared.
The sky darkened and it began to pour with rain. I was in a trance in the front parlour of the convent, having a cup of pale tea in a fine bone primrose-yellow cup with forget-me-nots on the rim, when Sister Margaret came sailing in carrying a black briefcase.
‘Goodness gracious, I forgot to give this to Father Fox,’ she said, ‘and I am somewhat at a loss. I know he needs to give it to Michael urgently. Now, what do you suggest I do?’
The rain was drumming on the windowsill. I heard the clock strike five. She was smiling up at me.
‘Perhaps he will realise and come back?’
‘Ah yes, perhaps. I shall telephone Michael for advice.’
She was gone for some time, and I watched the rain beating against the window as the twilight thickened and a shroud of slate grey descended on the world.
‘Michael says that he would like you to take the Land Rover and drive the briefcase out to him at the house, if that is at all possible.’ Sister Margaret’s voice contained the imperative of a mother superior. She was telling me what to do. I wonder if she knew that she was also fulfilling my most urgent wish, to follow Virginia Mean into the wilderness? It was really rather remarkable that I was to be entrusted with knowledge of the secret location. I must have passed some reliability test or other—or they were very desperate indeed for the contents of the briefcase to be delivered—possibly both things applied.
Driving the convent’s ancient Land Rover, wearing a Driza-Bone also from the convent, I followed a printed set of instructions and a map that Sister Margaret had given me, driving through rough terrain, thick forest, and black, black storm. When I got into the tangled heart of the wilderness there were reflecting arrows stuck into the side of the track at fairly long intervals. Out of mobile range, I boyishly felt I was on a desperate mission. I was elated, moving on a level of adrenalin-driven hallucinatory excitement—in other words I was a little mad. I was actually chasing off into the unknown southwest wilderness after a woman I had no business chasing. It was just one of those moments. I did what I had to do—the briefcase containing whatever it was that Michael had to have, on the seat beside me. I knew it would be papers relating to their anti-government work on forests and conservation of the environment, conducted in a kind of jesuitical cloak and dagger manner that seemed to appeal to them. I listened to my favourite Mozart CD, the flute and harp concerto, over and over, with the growl of the engine and the lashing of the rain as a wonderful, a glorious, an unreal background, the forest a dense world of shadow on either side of me. To tell the truth I scarcely noticed anything as I drove, the headlights slicing through walls of water, the wipers cutting their half-moon shapes, not quite fast enough most of the time. I was utterly intent on seeing Virginia again, revelling in my good fortune at being entrusted as a courier. Once I stopped to pee, and I stood for a while in the sombre, sullen blackness, where the phantom jungle shapes of eerie myrtle and celery-top bruised the world of soaking silence a darker shade of purple-black. I did not feel alone. There was a cloak of comfort, even of warmth wreathed around me, breathing deeply in the gnarled and matted wall that was the forest on either side of the track. The rain had stopped briefly, and the leaves seemed in my demented mind to quiver in response to the moment.
I must have killed about three twilight wallabies early in the drive—but there was less wildlife about than I might have expected in finer weather. Four hours after leaving the convent I was guiding the Land Rover up the rough drive that leads to the house where Michael and Gilia live, where I would find Virginia. The house was lit like a cottage in a European fairytale, nestlin
g deep in the embrace of the forest. With the strategic briefcase under my arm, I pushed through the rain to the lighted porch. The door opened, and I was greeted like the prodigal son, the long lost cousin, the angel bearing good tidings. Michael, a man I had never even met before, hardly acknowledged me, but fell upon the briefcase and disappeared into a room down the hallway. Gilia took the Driza-Bone and hung it on a peg behind the door.
I dined with Gilia and Michael and Ben and Vincent and Claudina (for such she had truly become in the forest house) that evening, and I recall that we talked mainly about the problems of how to preserve the precious wilderness—the air, the plants, the trees, the rivers, the animals, how to save the island from rapacious mining, felling, damming. The child, Stella, laughed and played and was very busy and bustling helping Gilia with the cooking. Claudina was a silent presence at the end of the table, and I was conscious only of the strange depths of this silence. Vincent was sketching her portrait. Anything I said about the trees or the rivers was uttered in a kind of routine way, as I was concentrating on trying not to stare at Claudina—but nobody really seemed to notice what I was doing. They were passionate in their efforts to subvert the state government and the timber industry from encroaching on the wilderness of Transylvania. At least ten times the phone rang, and ten times I could hear Michael or Ben in muttered conversation with their callers. Gilia served the food and the three men raved on and Claudina sat while the artist did her picture—I watched and half-listened. Claudina was wearing a blue jacket over her white shirt, and I know it sounds obvious, and stupid, but as she sat there, still as marble, she resembled medieval pictures of the Virgin, her soft hair cut short like an angel. It serves no real purpose to describe her in that way, except that is exactly what she looked like, a figure in a painting, perhaps a Vermeer.
