Lost Worlds

by David Yeadon

  (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.

  I looked at Lanny. Was he plagued by the same deep-seated ailment? Was that why he carried such books with him to these lonely, remote places? To digest? To face the truths of his origins? To destroy the demons of Van Diemen’s Land and return released, refreshed, to a more familiar life?

  I waited for him to speak, but as I waited I could sense him slipping back into the hearty, outback swagger of your typical Australian “mate.” I had to catch him before the transformation was complete.

  “And you said your family was part of all this, right?”

  He looked up, tottering between truth and bar-brain braggadocio.

  He chose truth.

  “Yeah, Dave. They were part of it. All of ’em. But they wouldn’t talk much….” He paused. “I mean, this was still going on less than a hundred years ago. My grandfather had seen it all. But…well, for him, for all of them, it was over. It stopped. And they just wanted to forget the whole bloody mess. You can’t go through life carrying that kind of crap inside your head, ’least, not in the head you use every day. Best thing—grab a few stubbies and the racing forms and a bunch of mates and get on with things. Little things. Anything.”

  I left it at that and very soon the Lanny of the bacon-and-sausage breakfast returned, grinning, rubbing his straggly beard and talking again like the happy hiker I’d taken him for in the early morning.

  “So—let’s get the boats organized and at least you’ll be saved a swim, mate.”

  So we rowed the boat across the creek, and he returned to the other side, leaving me dry and safe on the eastern shore.

  But not without one gesture….

  “Here, Dave, take this book. You seemed like you were interested in the stuff I was reading.”

  I looked at the cover. It was Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, a book I’d been meaning to find and read ever since I arrived in Australia.

  “No, c’mon, Lanny, I can’t take this.”

  “You bloody can and you bloody will. Teach you a hell of a lot ’bout this country. Lot of stuff that people’d rather forget!”

  I accepted the gift and shook his hand. In his smile I saw the two Lannys again—the silent backpack wanderer in search of himself and his heritage, and the cocky roustabout that I knew he’d be if I’d met him in a Hobart pub. I liked them both.

  I silently promised that if I ever wrote about the journey for this book, he’d be one of the first to receive a copy, fresh off the press, and signed with affection.

  And I did—and he was.

  So—off again into another sparkling day. (Two in a row in South-West Tasmania is a most unusual event.) The straggly, beach-hugging forest had returned, but I managed to skirt around the thickest sections by keeping to a narrow stretch of sand fronting the New River Lagoon inlet. Below Wierah Hill the path turned inland for a while, crossing Tylers Creek, which trickled through patches of buttongrass moor down to Osmiridium Beach. After an hour I was back on open sand again at Surprise Bay. And the bay did indeed have its surprises—vast swaths of Ordovician limestone that originated in the murky depths of the ocean over five hundred million years ago and contained a wealth of trilobite fossils. These blind, beetlelike creatures once wandered the steeply sloping sea floor at a depth of at least one thousand feet, fed on updrafts of plankton-rich currents, and died in countless billions to form dense layers of what we so casually categorize as limestone.

  A sensation returned that I’d had a few years back exploring the peculiar limestone scenery of the Yorkshire Dales in England. There, in the midst of sheep-cropped plateaus and steep dry white gorges, the layers of limestone were piled, one upon the other, like books awaiting stacking. The oceans, specifically the Irish Sea and the North Sea, are now both fifty miles or more away from these bleak uplands, and yet the limestone with its myriad fossil fragments told tales of other times, eons ago, when these bleak regions were deep under oceans and teeming with primitive aquatic life.

  I think it was the abrupt contrast between the silence of these open, windswept Yorkshire heights and the turbulence of their ancient creations and accumulations that impressed me. I was walking across a vast cemetery, hundreds of feet thick, composed of nothing else but once-living, eating, breeding, and, who knows, maybe even thinking creatures. I had walked these hills many times before and never been struck by this thought. I knew limestone was essentially a composite of shells and calcium and the white detritus of once-living creatures, and that seemed an adequate explanation. But when I looked “into” the rock and touched the fragments of heads, bodies, legs, tails (even the whorling excreta deposits of ancient sandworms), the stuff seemed to come alive.

  My fingertips buzzed and crackled as I ran them over the rough edges of the strata exposed at Surprise Bay. Maybe I was beginning to sense what the Australian Aborigines have always known—the total wholeness of all created things, even the very rocks themselves, whose rocklike exterior contains far more fluid and dynamic creative forces and origins.

  Eleanor Wilner once wrote:

  We are but nature given eyes and, by a twist of DNA, earth given to our care.

  The Aborigines, with their web of songlines, sensed that the earth had to be constantly “sung” into existence and that it was each bushman’s duty to learn and continually “sing” his songline in order that the earth be maintained in its completeness. Otherwise it would simply disappear.

  Maybe in our steadily increasing awareness of the need to see, understand, and work with the world as an intermeshed totality (the Gaia concept of the earth) we will be able to give form and strategy to our cardinal obligation of “earth given to our care.” And yet the mysteries remain, manifesting themselves in flickers of perception and awareness that are still not wholly comprehended as we touch the earth and wonder.

  Henry Blount said it well in 1634:

  Far above all other senses, the eye having the most immediate and quick commerce with the soul, gives it a more smart touch than the rest, leaving in the fancy something unutterable; so that an eye-witness of things conceives them with an imagination more complete, strong and and in
tuitive, than he can either apprehend or deliver by way of relation.

  In other words—the magic remains!

  And Surprise Bay possessed such magic. It touched me in the same way as those lonely hills of Yorkshire, even though its juxtaposition with the ocean made the limestone layers seem more plausible. Nonetheless, I felt that sense of “life-in-everything” again and the continuity of all things as I sat on a ledge and stroked my hands across the externalities of the strata.

  Once again I was tempted to linger and reign in the flow of the journey itself.

  And this time I did. I remained at Surprise Bay. After all, I had no one to meet, no deadlines, no schedules, and a day spent lingering and looking here wouldn’t matter a damn in the grand scheme of things.

  I was pleased by my decision. Sometimes the momentum of movement for movement’s sake becomes tiresome and rather pointless. Every journey is, or can be, a means to larger ends. If it is not, then the integral point and purpose of the journey—of journeying—can be lost.

  In one of my notebooks I’d jotted a couple of lines from Aitareya Brahmana:

  There is no happinesss for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. Therefore wander!

  Close by was another quote—one of the briefest—said to be the last words of Buddha to his followers:

  Walk on!

  Both used the wandering and walking metaphors to suggest a broader meaning which, in my particular circumstance at Surprise Bay, I took to imply the inner journey, the journey of self-or soul exploration. So that day I gave myself the gift of open-ended time and walked inwardly. My blister-plagued feet tingled with gratitude at this time off from their external journey.