In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

XI

  IN COLONEL CRAWFORD’S OPINION, TASMANIA OFFERED SO MUCH more than a health resort: it was a place to put down roots. Another factor ardently promoted by him in his brochure, and liable also to have found favour with Petre Hordern, was the quality of the soil, especially in the north-west. Scrupulously abstaining from ‘any fancy-painting’, Crawford included a report by James Erskine Calder, then the Crown Surveyor, on a tract of 32,000 acres that Crawford had earmarked between the Mersey and the Leven rivers. Calder gave this ringing endorsement: the spot where Crawford proposed to found his settlement for retired officers, to be called Castra, was, he wrote, ‘a most magnificent country, an expression by which I mean you to understand that its soils and forest are not to be surpassed in Tasmania.’ Planted in its rich red soil, trees would bend under the weight of all kinds of fruit and vegetables – the same vision had so enticed Anthony Trollope and Thomas Arnold – quince and pear trees, luscious strawberries, gooseberries, raspberries. ‘It almost makes my mouth water now to think of them,’ Arnold wrote on his return to England. Trollope was almost more enthusiastic. ‘The fruit is so plentiful that in many cases it cannot be picked from the trees.’

  Crawford had only two caveats. ‘I would most earnestly deprecate the idea of any gentleman plunging alone (or with a family) into the backwoods, however good might be the soil, however tempting the situation. Union is Strength.’ For this reason, he proposed ‘a body of gentlemen’ to live together in a community with their own church and school. Essential to the execution of his plans was a road from the coast into the interior. But on this matter Crawford had received guarantees from Louisa Meredith’s husband Charles Meredith, then Minister of Works, that the government proposed to build a tramway from Ulverstone.

  One reader of his pamphlet, Colonel Michael Maxwell Shaw, was so bowled over that he started to organise a scheme to induce a body of Glaswegian mechanics, artisans and labourers to emigrate. It seems more probable that Petre Hordern read and learned from the Letter to the Officers of H.M. Indian Services.

  I had an instinct that Crawford’s recommendations on their own would not have been enough and that Hordern needed a further sign. When Ivy retrieved from the bottom of his trunk a book with a jade-coloured binding, I suspected that this was it.

  The book was the 1896 edition of The Orient Line Guide: Chapters for travellers by sea and land, by W.J. Loftie. Hordern had bought it to study on his sea journey.

  Few can have read Loftie’s chapter on Tasmania without wishing to book their passage on the next ship. It reads like a prospectus for the island paradise portrayed in Matthew Kneale’s novel, English Passengers, in which a Victorian clergyman, under the illusion that it was the original Garden of Eden, sets sail for Tasmania. The island was praised by Loftie’s contributors alternatively as ‘the garden of Australia’ and a gem suspended from its neck. ‘How shall I describe,’ writes the now knighted Edward Braddon, ‘the balminess of that air which makes him who breathes it feel a pleasure in merely living?’ A seductive claim was made for the vitalising power of the atmosphere and its effect on Tasmania’s fortunate population of 150,000, among whom ‘zymotic diseases hold a very obscure place in the bills of mortality’. Her unrivalled climate and beautiful scenery made Tasmania’s prospects for the enterprising immigrant vastly encouraging. Hobart was billed by Loftie as pre-eminent for beauty among capitals, ‘being built on more hills than Rome herself’, while the snug homesteads, the orchards, the fields rich with wheat crops, the hawthorn hedges, with here and there a small plantation, ‘were charming duplicates of England’.

  The clue was in the map of north-west Tasmania. I read the name and saw it quite well. A chance meeting with Louisa Meredith. A glance at the atlas. An island remote from the scene of his disgrace, and where he could breed prizewinning cattle and plant mulberry trees. And the racing of his pulse as he absorbed place names that duplicated the villages and districts of his childhood: Launceston, Bridport, Appledore, North Devon – even a North Molton (although this seemed to have been spelled incorrectly in Loftie’s map). ‘It is the Devon of Australasia,’ Braddon wrote, ‘a happy mixture of Elysium and a lesser Eldorado.’

  Hordern felt a twinge of destiny. He saw this antipodean Devon and, with all the romanticism of his hero John Ridd, persuaded himself that here was one place where he might begin afresh.

  On November 12, 1900, Thomas Arnold was reported dead. In the same week, Hordern packed his belongings. He put his books, his spats, his silverware, his sterling riding-crop and a cutting from a laurel bush in the drive at Boode into a trunk. Then he had his stockman, Mr Eastbrook, drive the family to Plymouth to board the Pacific Navigation Company steamship Orizaba.

  XII

  THE Orizaba DEPARTED PLYMOUTH ON NOVEMBER 24, 1900. Hordern could only afford second-class tickets for himself, his wife and their seven children – they had left behind their eldest son Will. The four sons and three daughters were of ages from two to 17. They had been at sea a week when the family assembled on the promenade deck to listen to a concert of songs that included the duet ‘Life’s Dream is o’er’. Few passengers noticed the 44-year-old father of the group, silent and morose, with his nose surprisingly mottled, his face sagging a little and no longer exhilarated by champagne. Richard Blackmore had died ten months earlier. Never had Hordern felt so unmoored.

  The steamship touched at Gibraltar, Marseilles, Naples, Suez, Colombo, Fremantle, Adelaide and Melbourne, where the Horderns changed onto a packet to cross Bass Strait. They travelled saloon class for the overnight journey. Hordern may have lost his fortune, but he was damned if he was not going to arrive in his new country in style.

  On January 6, he stood on the deck of the Pateena as she steered past George Town, up the Tamar and towards Launceston. Deep in his sad thoughts he looked at the passing creeks. The consensus on board was that the rain would immensely benefit the potatoes. Ninety-seven years earlier Kemp had watched the same hills solidify in the same steady wind.

  Talk on deck that Sunday morning, according to the North-West Post, was of the murder of a girl at Oyster Cove by a jealous teacher. She had been engaged to a returning soldier from the Boer War called Potter. On board the Pateena eight Tasmanian soldiers invalided home from South Africa, some with their arms in slings and one with his little finger amputated following an ambush on the Marico River, discussed poor Potter and his homecoming.

  Another topic of conversation was the new Commonwealth of Australia, ushered into being five days earlier. The announcement of the cabinet, said the North-West Post, had ‘caused a thrill of disappointment in very many minds in Tasmania, for it was naturally enough expected that as one of the oldest states and as one that had laboured long and hard to bring about the much desired union of interests, her claims to be represented in the initial ministry would be fully recognised.’ But once again Tasmania had been ignored.

  And Hordern – what intricate regrets did he have? And had he given up alcohol? If he had opened that day’s paper, he would have read an advertisement for a herbal remedy that a roster of satisfied customers affirmed as an effective cure for chronic enlargement of the liver. (‘Sir, I have been a great sufferer the last four or five years from Liver Complaint … I have been induced to try Vitadatio and it has acted like a charm on me … You are at liberty to use this memo as you think fit.’) One letter of endorsement read simply: ‘I am cured and I feel quite “a new man”.’ The hope of his family was that Tasmania would act on Hordern like Vitadatio.

  At 9.18 a.m. the Pateena docked at the Launceston wharf where a crowd waited to welcome the wounded soldiers. In a sharp shower of hail, Hordern led his wife and children down the gangplank and disappeared into a sea of white flags that swayed back and forth, back and forth.

  Barely had the Horderns retrieved their luggage from Customs and settled at a hotel in Launceston when there was news from the Isle of Wight that saw shops shuttered, flags at half-mast and churches draped in black. In Hobart, the telegram arrived
mid-Regatta Day. The band stopped playing. The Kaiser’s grandmother, Peace and Plenty’s new owner, had died from a blood clot on the brain. ‘There is an atmosphere of mournfulness prevailing such as was never experienced before,’ commented the North-West Post.

  As Queen Victoria’s body was escorted by her fleet to Portsmouth, Hordern began to look for a property to buy.

  Against Kemp’s noise, Hordern’s silence.

  Kemp pitched his Regency house in the centre of Tasmania in open landscape. Treeless pastures that required no great agricultural expertise, and from where, at the smallest provocation, he could gallop into town to stir up trouble.

  Hordern, by contrast, elected to lose himself beyond a virtually impenetrable maze of blackwood and myrtle forests on the north-west coast. After his landing in Tasmania, no-one in England heard from him again. Save once.

  The clipping that Ivy produced was from the North Devon Journal and dated 1904. ‘A Tasmanian paper just to hand shows that Mr P. Hordern still worthily holds his own in his new home. Some fat sheep of his sold at auction (everything is sold by auction in Tasmania), topping the market … Mr Hordern’s many old North Devon friends will be delighted to hear that he is in good health and doing well.’

  I returned her the article. ‘Then he made a success of things?’

  ‘We weren’t told much.’

  ‘Did you go to his house?’

  ‘I once went. It wasn’t very big.’

  I did not know why, but I had the impression that behind Ivy’s answers was a feeling of shame. And yet each time I tried to bring the subject back to her grandfather, she was not forthcoming, and without her guidance it was impossible to track Hordern through the dense scrub into which he had vanished. Not until my third visit did she produce the image that encapsulated the many surrenders that he had made in coming to Tasmania. ‘You wanted to see where he lived,’ and she showed me a photograph – the only one she possessed – of the dwelling that Hordern had built in North Motton.

  The legend on the back said ‘Stoke Rivers’, which was the name of Hordern’s birthplace. I drew breath when I turned it over. The building stood in pathetic contrast to Boode and Yarde, where SPB Mais, my grandfather, had passed his enchanted childhood. Single-storey, of weatherboard with a corrugated iron roof and a brick chimney, Stoke Rivers would have fitted into any of the stables on either one of Hordern’s estates.

  Stoke Rivers

  The crude construction was made to appear bleaker by its setting. On all sides, a forest of bare white tree-trunks receded in ghostly files, branchless and leafless, while a mass of creeping vines and fallen eucalyptus obscured the front deck. It did not resemble a property on which a man could graze fat sheep. The scene was the image of poverty – a shack in the bush for a man who had once entertained royalty. At Boode, each of his eight children had had their own bedroom, plus a governess. How happily the family squeezed into Stoke Rivers, I could but imagine.

  Ordered out of doors by the photographer, Hordern’s wife and children had assembled like the other ranks of a routed army to defend him from a sniper. They took up position in a loose line – on the deck, behind a tree, against a single-beam fence with white roses growing over it. The youngest girl was dressed in a large cream hat and held a Hereford calf by the halter. Her wintry smile suggested that she and the animal had been asked to stand still for far too long.

  ‘That’s Aunt Dorothy,’ Ivy said.

  I was still trying to take on board that these were SPB’s cousins who had not long before played hide-and-seek with him in the laurels at Boode.

  ‘Where’s Hordern?’

  ‘Grandpa? He’s inside, I suppose.’

  The front door to the house was slightly open. I held up the photograph to the light and looked through the pane of glass and the reflection of tall white gums that had been either burned or ring-barked, but I could see no-one.

  XIII

  ON SPB’S BEHALF I STARTED TO GO AFTER A LOST UNCLE OF WHOM my grandfather had been fonder than of his father or mother, and the cousins who had been his best friends.

  Their story emerged confusedly. The first reference to Hordern came two years after his arrival in Tasmania. In 1903, he was listed in a register of local residents as ‘Horadern P. farmer, North Motton’. He never bothered to correct the mistake, and I discovered that it was the first of several.

  Another misprint was the name of the hamlet to which he had been drawn as though by a potion. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence that the cartographer had intended North Molton – the village in which Hordern used to take my grandfather stag-hunting, and where SPB had spent his honeymoon. But when Hordern got there, he discovered that North Motton was the preferred spelling, even though it might have originated as an error. He was given the garbled explanation that people had always asked ‘Where’s Motton?’ – and gradually the name North Molton had become North Motton.9

  In Launceston, Hordern’s enquiries about North Motton had been met with endorsements of ‘the wonderful fertility of this hill-locked, river-traversed area’. An article about the neighbourhood, written a year before, spoke to his heart. ‘What parent could leave to his children’s children a more goodly heritage than an area of such land, in a perfect climate and within easy reach of great centres of population, yet remote enough to enjoy perfect tranquillity?’

  Unable to buy land in North Motton itself – it was all sold – he settled for a plot six miles from the village in a tract of dense virgin scrubland. He paid £45 fourteen shillings and two pence on a 14-year mortgage for 100 acres. It might not have escaped him that this was almost the same sum that he had received at auction for his sleek, glossy bull Joy.

  Two phrases, he was told, summed up the district where he was heading. The people were hospitable to the last degree. And his property was situated in some of the best agricultural country in Tasmania. The rich chocolate soil was valued up to £30 an acre; the potatoes brought the highest prices in the Sydney market (‘For potato growing, North Motton has the palm’); the turnips and marigolds were of excellent size and quality; and cattle fattened into beef very readily. As for the scenery – magnificent. ‘It is the English trees which make of North Motton such a pretty spot,’ remarked a journalist who travelled through the village at this time. He described an idyll lined with silver birches, poplars, mountain ash, blackberry, nasturtiums, columbine – and added that that year lupins ‘have been especially fine and gladioli a joy’.

  Despite Charles Meredith’s assurances to Colonel Crawford, no road had yet been built to North Motton. The Horderns had to travel from Launceston to the coast and follow the river down. At the small port of Ulverstone, they paused to breathe the sea air and found themselves gagging. The wharves were coated with phosphorus paste and strychnine, and from the sidewalk there rose the stringent whiff of sulphur.

  Their journey to Elysium coincided with an outbreak of bubonic plague in New South Wales, and the setting up in Tasmania of hastily assembled committees to prevent the epidemic from crossing Bass Strait. In Ulverstone, a bounty of four pence a head was paid for every rat. The carcasses were dipped in kerosene. Poison was issued free.

  The family loaded their bags into a bullock dray and floated the vehicle upriver on a steam-powered hardwood punt. The weather was still boisterous, and from under a tarpaulin the young Horderns peered at the strange trees that grew to the water’s edge.

  Six miles inland, the punt stopped at Mannings Jetty and they disembarked. Overhead, a wire cage required more persuasion to move than ‘the proverbial mule’, according to one local. Visitors to North Motton from the opposite bank had no choice but to sway over the river in this squealing contraption.

  Hordern laboured from the jetty up a track ten feet wide that was in shocking condition. He struggled to wrap chains around the cart’s wheels. Thick volcanic mud clung to his boots, the mud so deep that the cart sank up to its axles. There was no room to walk beside it, and the family squelched behind, scramb
ling and struggling from log to log. Like this, they trudged parallel to Skeleton Creek, where, half a century ago, two early settlers had come upon some human bones attached to a rusty chain. The disastrous effects of the hail were evident on all sides: paddocks strewn with fallen timber, the grain sodden and but one or two livestock standing miserable. The captain of the punt had told them that a few days earlier lightning had struck a bullock in North Motton. When found, it was still standing by a tree, quite dead.

  XIV

  REPORTS EXTOLLING NORTH MOTTON’S ‘WONDERFUL FERTILITY’ WERE of recent origin. Among the first white men to set eyes on this landscape were Kemp’s shipmates Bass and Flinders, sailing by in 1798. In 1824, another sailor, Captain Hardwicke, made a bald assessment: ‘The land is mountainous, extremely barren and totally unfit for habitation’ – an opinion shared by a surveyor for the Van Diemen’s Land Company, who in 1826 left George Town to explore the coast. ‘So entirely wretched is the country in this neighbourhood that were I to attempt to describe to you the dreary and desolate tract which extends along the coast 40 to 50 miles as far as Rocky Cape and thence to Circular Head, it would cost you more time to read than the whole place is worth.’ Two of Devon’s earliest pioneers ignored these warnings to their cost and suffered the peremptory fate of the convict who had given the name to Skeleton Creek. The sensitive surveyor Henry Hellyer committed suicide and Captain Bartholomew Thomas, veteran of Bolivar’s army in Peru, was speared to death by Aborigines.

  The settler who did most to open up the area was an Irish immigrant, James Fenton. He had spent part of his childhood on the east coast, in Swansea, and first came to the Forth Valley in September 1839. ‘We saw no vestige or mark of anything that indicated the existence of mortal man, unless it were a few little heaps of time-worn shells on the sandbanks, left there by the aborigines in former times …’ The country was densely scrubbed, broken by hills and gullies: ‘In short, a desolate, howling wilderness.’ Tempted into speculation, Fenton bought 640 acres in North Motton, but sold his land after spending a long day walking through the scrub and getting ‘fearfully stung with nettles, which were indigenous to that quarter’. His death in 1901 coincided with Hordern’s arrival.