Our relationship started on a windy night. South-westerlies were blowing hard from beyond Mount Wellington, making for a fitful sleep. By morning, the tree was down, one of many in the forested hills to fall unseen and unheard.
Many years previously, on a clear spot overlooking the settlement of Hobart Town, a house was built. It was large for its time, and had a little garden in the front. Beyond that, a stone boundary fence kept cattle out of the yard. As well as the main house, the enclosure contained a rough cobblestone yard, a small pond where reeds grew, and a series of smaller buildings. Beyond the fence cattle grazed on the green hills, providing milk and meat to the colonial settlement below.
More than a century after this area was occupied by farmers and homemakers, I walked by.
As usual, I cast my eye towards the tree and the land around it, suspicious something might have be there if only I interrupted my walk to look. Today, however, was different. Today I saw the tree on its side, its roots in the air. Today I didn’t hesitate to look.
I immediately noticed how unusually flat the underside of the trees roots seemed to be. When near enough, I peered into the shallow cavity and saw a conglomeration of stones, mostly of the same size, forming, obviously, a deliberately constructed stone surface. With my fingers I brushed some of the earth away to expose a fragment of ceramic.
Thus drawn in, I was not about to stop, triggering the archaeologist’s dilemma. I wanted to dig. Having found evidence that something was there, beneath the surface, I had a compulsion to see it. But while strong, such urges must be fought, else I might become just another treasure-seeker and grave-robber. Without cause, a dig is simply too destructive. Without excavating properly, data could be forever lost. And without a good research question, what, really, would be the point?
At least, I told myself in consolation, I could do a preliminary surface survey, and see if I could walk and uncover the extent of the site. So I had a question, and a non-invasive response.
Going further away from the tree and the walking track, I discovered the foundations of a reasonably-sized and well-made cottage. A few pieces of very old brick lay about, and green moss and rabbit poo covered much of the area. Small shrubs and trees impeded my progress, and the blackberry vines grew in clumps that suggested that things lay beneath, particularly a few vines that seemed to grow in rows and at right angles like weirdly conformist hedges.
Furthest from the track was the wall. A human-made wall of stone in the bush is one of those things that once seen, cannot be unseen. I beat my way through the scrub to left and right seeking out its extremities, only to discover it abutted one of my favoured walking tracks: twice. I had walked within five metres of it too many times to count but my peripheral vision had not discovered the geometry and made the connection properly. Now it is a sight that delights me and irritates me at the same time, a sort of memento of both my previous blinding preoccupations and that joy of first discovery.
Tracking back and criss-crossing the surviving enclosure, a clump of reeds alerted me to tread carefully where a small pond had been made. Carved lines in the whole area stood out as a potential vegetable patch now given over entirely to the rabbits. The foundations of another small building were clear; perhaps a workers’ hut. Another chimney pile suggested either a third building or an extension to the main house. And this, I realised, was what was obvious after a significant period of abandonment – like an iceberg, there would be more under the surface.
I was entranced. I left, still thinking through the details of what I came to think of as my site, longing all the way home to return to it. That evening I kept pondering its mysteries, wondering whether anybody else knew of it, wanting to tell the world, and yet also wanting to keep it as my secret for a while longer.
Over the following weeks I continued to visit, realising I was not the first. A tired, half-made cubby structure suggested children knew the spot once, and small fireplaces and modern glass indicated it was a sometime drinking place. Rabbits and echidnas have clearly undertaken their own minor but repeated excavations over much of the site. But that tree, I knew, revealed something that only I knew, at least for that brief moment that day after the wind.
Nick Brodie describes himself as a professional history nerd. He has a doctorate in late medieval vagrancy law, is a leading expert on the history of poor boxes, and is the author of acclaimed popular histories Kin: A Real People's History of Our Nation and 1787: The Lost Chapters of Australia's Beginnings. His latest book is The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain's Tasmanian Invasion, which uses a wealth of new archival material to re-write Australia's most infamous colonial war.