writer and photographer JONNO BLOOD
This is the quiet land.
Tiny earthly sounds magnify in the lazy winter air, bird movements, the brittle rustle of wind in the leaves, the crunch of gravel under foot. But there is a loudness of the soul, a filling of empty places, an emboldening of creative whispers.
Every second scene here is worthy of painting and prose, a collection of small events that gladden the heart: a white tree explodes into a screaming flock of cockatoos; at the road verge a brush nosed wombat, tame as a pet, munches obliviously, even as I crouch at touching range and talk nonsense to it. Farther down the road, another wombat lies broken against the road, and a raven hops from its flank and moves slowly away as I approach; a wedgetail eagle perches on the bleached remains of a swamp gum, like a bone hand pointing to the heavens. It surveys the valley below, then launches on slow-motion wings to soar over Mills Plains.
An overcast sky breaks against the horizon in amber corrugations like the tide. Ben Lomond and Mount Augusta loom to the east as timeless blue shadow. An old church stands, resolute amongst the rolling hills, a small white gothic time capsule to a time when this community was remote and pious.
The road to Patterdale meanders through fields where blushing sepia kangaroo-grass once provided grazing lands for wallabies and hunting grounds for the palangermaireener people, who called this place weetacenner, and the mountain that watches over it turapina.
The kangaroo grass has largely been replaced by green pastures, but the wallabies are still abundant as the sun westers, joined by suicidal possums who throw themselves towards my car. The more recent arrivals, fallow deer, leap through the land like apparitions of European myth.
This is my home for the next month, sharing digs with the ghost of famed colonial landscape artist John Glover, and I cannot imagine the life of this place becoming banal with familiarity.
It’s the dream of most who love to write to earn a residency, to be sequestered in isolation, free of the worst of our distractions, procrastinations and excuses. Sure, you can still find them, if you look hard enough (like writing this article rather than my novel) but being away from the racing rats and the noises, we forget to notice distractions, and the days become filled with story.
This is the quiet land, a quiet loud with the hushed whispers of tales old and ancient, layered over each other like artist’s paint: the palangermaireener, their bloody displacement to people from afar; the ageless landscape; and traced through it like narration, the paintings of John Glover, who lived and painted here in the 1830s and 40s. His paintings somehow speak of all those layers and blend them into a story of optimism and loss, sadness and beauty. His fallen trees and dancing natives echo change in the timeless colours of lutrawita’s light.
Living here, where he painted makes one meditate on the spirit of the place – the genius loci that captivated a genius.
. . .
I sleep in the same room that Glover did, the room he died in. But if ghosts do exist, he is the quiet, contented type. His spirit is certainly here, but it’s in the beautifully restored blackwood staircase, the preserved sections of Georgian wall finishings, the windows that look out on the fields of weetacenner where Glover roamed. It is also in the art that fills the house.
My host, the homestead’s custodian, mathematician, super fine merino grazier, and owner of a razor wit, Carol Westmore, is also a fierce patron of the arts. Glover’s artistic soul has found form in her collection of Tasmanian art.
As Westmore shows me the works, it is easy to see the love she has for the paintings. She enthusiastically reels off names I know I’m going to have to relearn later. Many are Glover Prize competitors. Above my (Glover’s) bed, a Stephanie Tabram rendition of what appears to be Tasmania’s bucolic north-west spans the full width of the bedhead. It is imbued with the queer mellow light of autumn, moving over the fields of the middle distance. Across the room, Raymond Arnold has captured the sodden and moody west with oil on canvas, a slick Lyell Highway climbing through barren pyrite and shale under a brooding sky. In the hall outside a Helen Wright piece (Faded Arcadia) shows a motley flock of Tasmanian endemic birds, many of whom frequent the property.
In fact, birds linger around the house in quantities to put one in mind of Hitchcock. Green rosellas flit through the yard, currawongs perch in the nude bronchiole branches of winter elms, a kookaburra stares through the window from his perch on the arbour over the entrance path. I’m not sure if he is the same one who sat on the fence post most of yesterday staring at me judgementally while I wrote at the kitchen table, but he has the same expectant look.
Adjacent to the kitchen, Michael McWilliams has given cold life to a thylacine that stares into the room from a blue scene of shadows. That poster-animal for mystery and loss is a daily reminder of the deeper layers of this place. Before Glover, before the little white church, before even the palangermaireener, the tigers huffed, the wedgies soared, and the devils screamed in nameless weetacenner, watched on by a nameless mountain.
. . .
In my short stay, I’ve been here to see the yellow gold of May-elms blow to naked branches, filling the chill air with the rain-rustle of falling leaves. With the canopy gone, the fields where Glover roamed can now be seen from the bedroom windows. The big oak that dominates the garden resists the season longer but as the winter mists linger in the fields the oak’s gold turns June brown and it whispers and rasps with the rattle of expiration.
Walking in the cold morning hills to get the creative fluids pumping, one can imagine Glover climbing with his painting kit, pigeon-toed club feet and a rotund physique making the job challenging. To empower his spirit, Carol Westmore has installed seven easy recognisable art-nodes in the landscape to identify the locations where Glover painted some of his most recognisable works. Each has a painting printed on a weather resistant metal panel, with the subject landscape behind, so you can compare his work to it, or at least how it stands now. It also allows you to be transported to the 1830s, to see what has changed over the years. Not much is the answer, a few trees added or subtracted here and there, the fields a little less pink, some distant fences or lonely looking irrigation machinery.
The art-nodes coexist with the working farm. To view one, I must unfasten a gate and shoo a flock of sheep to the far corner of a paddock. Another node is down by the cows, and I must admit as I let myself into that particular gated field, I am nervously surveying the grassland for a bull.
Glover arrived at weetacenner in the autumn of 1832, following a short stay in Hobart. He was 65, having already found artistic acclaim in England. He had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land at the tail of a vicious conflict between what was and what was becoming. The Black War was nearing its morbid conclusion. Glover was in Hobart on January 7, 1832, when crowds lined the streets to see resistance warrior Tongerlongeter and the remnants of his people walk to Government House to negotiate armistice and ultimately their exile to a bleak and foreign island in Bass Strait. They would be removed from the world they had known for countless generations to an island that had no gods, no ancestors, no history for them. Their apocalypse had come. The war against the invaders had ended, the battle to survive as a people had begun in earnest.
To bring us back from the brink of Tasmania’s darkest history, also on those streets to see Tongerlongeter was a 37-year-old pastoralist named Thomas Giles Hayes, whose niece Elizabeth would later marry Glover’s son, Henry. Hayes’s great great great great grandson is writing this article.
It is fair to assume the environment Glover had arrived in had a significant amount of fear, not least for remote pastoralist homesteads. By the time Glover started building at Patterdale, the vicious cycle of reprisal at weetacenner had ended, but one can imagine the stories and resentment were still fresh with the details of personal experience. Glover’s neighbour, the maligned founder of Melbourne, John Batman, was clear in his hatred of the palangermaireener. He was an unapologetic Aboriginal hunter and keeper of Aboriginal servants. In this setting Glover captured beauty and peace, including Aboriginal dancing in the landscapes they had been one with for scores of millennia. The dancing natives of Glover’s paintings were imagined, remembered, maybe felt in the ache of the land, but there were no subjects to paint. Glover did not lurk around the fringe of corrobboree making sketches. He superimposed the missing part onto the landscapes – the space between notes that makes the music, the silence that asks the question.
. . .
After Glover died, in the summer of 1849, the house slid into leaky disrepair. The 1940s added a lean-to bathroom and some questionable renovations, and the 1980s contributed the ultimate travesty: a carport. Layers of paint choked out the original beauty while damp clay foundations threatened to topple the walls outwards like cheap collapsible furniture.
Carol Westmore bought the cottage in 2004, along with a hefty chunk of the surrounding weetacenner fields and neighbouring Nile Farm. She gathered a brilliant team of engineers, architects, builders and landscapers and convinced them to commit sweat and time to painstaking restoration of the property, using as their guide Glover’s paintings and an ink and wash bird’s eye view plan of Patterdale created by his son John Glover Jr in 1835.
The results, revealed to the public nearly 15 years later, are transportive, an interactive time capsule that delightfully softens the temporal shock with the modern comforts of hydronic heating, gas cooking, and, crucially, a coffee machine. Where the front façade had been given a hideous 1940s facelift, it is now as Glover intended, with Georgean sandstone symmetry.
The studio has also been reconstructed, an unapologetically asymmetrical timber edifice that opens itself toward the north sun. The light-filled space where Glover painted is now an homage to his work, and the starting point for Carol Westmore’s tours of the property.
As I descend back down towards Patterdale, the silence is thought loudening. Glover’s idyllic blue-sky hides behind a dirty white blanket, but his ochres and olives are here amongst the rain-mist that lingers in the woods like slow smoke. So too is the whispering loss of his dancing natives, so central to the spirit of this place. A raven curses overhead, and there’s an answering call from far away. Up the hill, I hear a clipped croak and several deer break from cover and leap up a steep incline back into the bush.
As I crunch along the gravel road back to Glover’s house, there are green rosellas flitting between branches, and currawongs screeching as they eye me with yellow intelligence. A crackle of sulphur-crested cockatoos launches from the branch of a mature eucalypt, screeching in the still winter air. They are always a treat for the senses. As I enjoy them, the squawking is redoubled as a huge flock joins them from the trees, hundreds of them, screeching up a storm. They caper and wheel towards turapina, before settling as a white carpet in the middle of a field, their squarks now muted by distance.
A rare vehicle approaches. The ute slows as it nears me. It’s one of the farm hands; he asks how the writing is going and tells me a wedge-tailed eagle has killed a black swan over by the dam and is feasting on it. He gives me a conspiratorial look as though it is something I will be keen to see. Then he’s off to continue farm duties. The mongrel in the tray eyeballs me, tongue lolling, as they head off up the dusty road. I think of the wedgy I saw earlier, hunting from the pallid, twisted remnants of a swamp gum. What must the palangermaireener have thought of those majestic creatures? A friend in the palawa community tells me they are a totem reserved for powerful and insightful people, true custodians of country from the air to guide the people.
Glover Country is a strange mix of working farm, natural sanctuary and cultural treasure. It’s a place for contemplation, creativity and cropping merinos. The parts make for a larger whole that is now protected and preserved. Here, where John Glover retired into beauty, story is whispered from the land and thoughts are loud. So, enough procrastinating.
Jonno Blood has been chased by angry gypsies in Hungary, arrested by soldiers in the Ukraine, and slept in a three-metre wide bed with a Red Yao chieftain and his five wives in China. He has also lived in London and Melbourne, before easing back into life in his native Tasmania. While still scratching itchy feet often, he loves his island digs, its often hidden stories, and the characters and capers that make it lavishly singular.