PART 2: Remnants of an otherwise forgotten past.
PART 1: The night the stars fell to the ground
Wilmot
As stories ripple through the centuries, they retain remnants of an otherwise forgotten past. The original judgement of Tasmanian backwardness in stories like those about the falling stars and the sugar sack family was transmitted to me as a child, even though I didn’t then understand the conditions that gave rise to this judgement. But sometimes stories carry echoes from an even more distant past. This vestigial meaning can reveal many things, but only if we carefully scrape aside the other, more obvious, more recent, accreted significance of the story in question; only if we dig down like archaeologists of memory.
Another tale that was told in my family to disdain the ignorance and superstition concerns my grandmother. When she was a child, her parent’s farm at Kindred was next to that of Gustav Weindorfer. She later recalled often talking over the fence to “Mr Dorfer”, the man with the unfamiliar accent. One day he asked her why she wasn’t in school. It seems her father forgot to enrol her. Weindorfer had a word with her parents and soon enough she was behind a desk catching up.
That meant fewer visits to one of her favourite places, Forth Falls at Wilmot. It was then, prior to the flooding of the Forth River to create Lake Barrington, a much more majestic and renowned waterfall. But my grandmother didn’t visit to admire nature. She wanted a baby sister. When she asked her parents for one, they let her in on the secret that babies came from behind waterfalls. They said she would be rewarded only if she waited patiently, silently, and kept faith with her singular purpose. Many times she visited Forth Falls hoping to find the sister she longed for. She swore she sometimes heard a newborn’s cries and she searched the nooks behind the veils of water, but there was nothing there.
This is the point at which the derision of my grandmother’s audience would usually begin, derision about the poor state of sex education in Edwardian times, about time wasted on fool’s errands and about the superstitions of the past. What was obscured by this criticism was the way the story echoes millennia of lore from many different cultures associating waterfalls with love, fertility, the concealment of valuable things and the birth of children. So strong are these links even the Cabbage Patch Kids came from behind a waterfall. It’s inevitable that waterfalls, with all their power, performance and purity, would accumulate such associations. They are ruptures in the world’s skin through which the new and unexpected might emerge. They are veils concealing what we most desire.
This is a very different view of the natural world to the one most of us share today. By waiting patiently and silently for the cries of a newborn, my grandmother was engaged in a transaction with nature, one in which it responded to her wishes pending her deference to its mysteries. Nature was not set apart from humanity. It was not there to be gazed upon, admired, feared, romanticised or ravaged. It was an intimate and necessary participant in everyday life, one which had a will of its own, and upon which humans could feel confident projecting our needs, and our moral judgements, as we do with other humans. In short, what we have in this story are echoes of a pre-modern view of nature.
Australians first learnt the values and disciplines of the modern world in convict prisons. Yet Tasmania, where experience of convict life was most common, is not traditionally seen as the most modern part of Australia. Indeed, it is mocked to the point of cliché as being exactly the opposite.
Colm Tóibín once wrote that if the English became modern in factories, the Irish became modern in church. We could extend the point to add that Australians first learnt the values and disciplines of the modern world in convict prisons. Yet Tasmania, where experience of convict life was most common, is not traditionally seen as the most modern part of Australia. Indeed, it is mocked to the point of cliché as being exactly the opposite. Is Tasmania modern or pre-modern? Do we embrace personal and technological improvement or are we suspicious of the estrangement and disenchantment that can bring? The truth is that it is both. Our islands have been a battleground between modern and pre-modern values and outlooks for more than 200 hundred years. In the British Isles, factories and churches may have imposed new ways of working and living on rural peasants, but there were incentives to adapt. Prison life did not offer the same rewards. While some of our convict forebears adapted quickly to modernity, others clung to older ways quite possibly as a form of resistance.
I can see this battle in the retelling of my grandmother’s story and the other stories I have recounted. Because of the derision these tales transmitted or evoked, many of our forebears fell silent about the wondrous and preternatural lore they inherited. Like the girl who feared the end of creation and the children dressed in sacks, stories of babies behind waterfalls had no place in a modern, forward-looking, scientific society. But many storytellers did not fall silent. Their tales can be found in the hundreds of old Tasmanian novels and local histories that sit unread and unregarded on the shelves of our libraries. My grandmother was part of this second group. She never disavowed her waterfall story or joined the mockery of it. She meant it when she said she heard the cries of a baby behind the Forth Falls. She told other stories with equally prodigious and incredible elements. She remained faithful her whole life to the dozens of superstitions she learnt as a child (a bird hitting a window heralded death; it was bad luck to reverse a garment that had been accidently donned inside-out; or the one that scared me most as a child, orange pith cannot be digested and kills those who eat too much). She never ceased to regret the drowning of her hoped-for nursery by a hydro dam. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that she hated Port Arthur more than anything else in the world and wanted it obliterated.
Today, European Tasmanians are beginning to grasp the importance of lore that was once so hotly disparaged it fled from memory or into books. We are beginning to appreciate it for what it tells us not only about our forebears, but about different ways of understanding ourselves, the land and how the two are linked. An example is the magic practised by convicts to ward off evil and assume some control over their destiny despite their bondage. This was mocked and ignored for decades. Physical evidence of it was literally boarded over. But now it is studied seriously as a door into the survival and evolution of pre-modern and pre-scientific European world-views in Tasmania. Hopefully, another example of neglect reversed will be the stories our ancestors told about seemingly simple things like waterfalls.
Oatlands
My final story of Tasmanian backwardness is preserved not to shame or mock that quality of Old Tasmania, but to protest against it.
I heard it from a self-made Tasmanian businessman. He disdains those members of the Tasmanian establishment whose claim on wealth and influence is based on them slipping alive from the womb. The joy he took in receiving an invitation to join the Tasmania Club was in tearing it into tiny pieces. He particularly dislikes the gumbooted grandees who generations of his ancestors worked for on estates near Oatlands. This is one of many tales he tells about them.
One morning the owner received a call from Hobart. The milk truck had broken down and would not be collecting today.
One of the dairy hands learnt what had happened and urged others to come and collect the milk that wouldn’t be sold.
They gathered pots and pans and made for the dairy expecting a share of the unused milk.
Instead, they found the farmer giving orders to take a pail of milk to his wife and pour the rest straight into the mud.
One farm labourer stepped forward and asked, “Can we have the milk you cannot use or sell?”
The owner’s response was blunt, “No, because once you get a taste for it you’ll expect it all the time.”
When I first heard this story, it was told to explain what a cruel, class-ridden place Tasmania once was, why improvement and reform are still so hard here, and why some of the story-teller’s forebears, among many others, left Tasmania’s latifundia to work in the new, urban factories. In that regard, it is like the stories I began with, but told to dignify those oppressed by poverty, not shame them.
This meaning matters today as much as ever. We must not let the elegance of Tasmania’s Georgian manor houses obscure the exploitation of those who built them, the dispossession of those who lived there before or the unearnt and arrogant privilege they once represented. But preserved in this grim tale of plantation life is something much older than Tasmanian class conflict.
In folk literature the world over, milk is a symbol of kindness and generosity, presumably because it is given selflessly by mother to child. Withholding milk from those in need is correspondingly symbolic of parsimony and cruelty. In Irish and Scottish folk tales, the metaphor is taken further. The poor are entitled to milk that is spilt, that is surplus to the needs of the household to which it belongs, or, for whatever reason, remains unused. Those who would deny this entitlement are punished with the withering and blackening of the hand with which they didn’t offer charity. This was called the “niggared hand” from which some people say the word “niggardly” derives.
Examples of this lore can be found in some of the tales collected by Lady Jane Wilde for her, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland. In stories like The Farmer Punished and The Farmer’s Wife, the fairies share and defend the rights of the poor. They too have a right to what is spilt or unused, and make an example of those dairy-men and women who are deaf to the pleas of the poor for surplus milk. Similar references to spilt or unused milk are found in Strange Tales of the Highlands and Islands by Alisdair Alpin McGregor places more conditions on the poor’s milk entitlement than Wilde, but it is still a carefully guarded right. He also reminds us that mythical creatures like brownies are fed by pouring milk on to the ground. Some folklorists speculate that the saying “don’t cry over spilt milk” arose as a warning not to begrudge the poor or the mythical their due.
When considered in the light of these folk traditions, the din of the farm hands gathering together their pots and pans begins to echo with an ancient sense of entitlement to unused milk. Perhaps, by so deliberately spilling all the milk, as much as by his cruel remarks, the owner is mocking this sense of entitlement and the mythology around it. Defending one’s property requires determination but defending it from a customary claim requires callous and cold-blooded indifference. If the owner was deliberately challenging such a claim on his property that might help explain his exceptional hardness of heart, just as it helps explain the sudden and unexpected harshness of landlords expelling Irish and Scottish tenant farmers in the century prior.
Of course, the mythical element found in ancient lore about unused milk is absent from the Tasmanian tale as it has come down to us. Even if those who both sought and denied the milk knew the old stories, in the version we have received there are no fairies to defend the poor. Unless, that is, we count the teller of the tale, who is openly gay. I’m not being facetious. It was originally gay men who used the word “fairy” as a euphemism to describe themselves. Only later did the word decline into a pejorative. While the contemporary connotation of “fairy” as a synonym for homosexual is almost entirely about effeminacy; in former times there was a range of other meanings from elusive and care-free, through mysterious and subversive, to standing apart from the world in judgment of it. In the absence of actual fairies, the teller of this tale precisely fulfills their role of punishing parsimony.
Stories of ignorance, poverty and backwardness abound in Tasmania. We tell them because we are ashamed, to shame others, to bring that backwardness to an end, to explain why progress is hard or to congratulate ourselves on our progress. But they mean much more than this.
Stories of ignorance, poverty and backwardness abound in Tasmania. We tell them because we are ashamed, to shame others, to bring that backwardness to an end, to explain why progress is hard or to congratulate ourselves on our progress. But they mean much more than this.
They tell of political and economic crises in our past that are remarkably similar to the crises we still periodically face today. The stories speak about how our forebears responded to these crises and by implication instruct us how we might respond better. But more than that, some of our stories of backwardness carry within themselves a powerful antidote to poverty and ignorance of which they speak; hints of ancient beliefs and customs that reveal very different ways our ancestors understood the land on which they walked and the rights they claimed from the powerful.
There are more than historical lessons here, as important as they are. Beneath the grimness lies the wondrous and fantastical. At once these stories condemn and redeem us.
Certainly, they redeemed me. From the earliest years of my life, stories like the ones I’ve told you invested Tasmania’s landscape with meaning, value, dignity and purpose. The land became a home to protect, not a threat to overcome or a commodity to exploit. It became a place. If I try to imagine features of the landscape without the stories attached, what I see are things without meaning, uncoupled from us and each other, to be categorised and manipulated by whomever has the power to. I shudder to contemplate that Tasmania.
Yes, I am talking about what was originally colonial folklore, not the culture that had developed in lutruwita over many millennia. But recovering and understanding old tales can be a way for European Tasmanians to begin to grasp the value of the First Nations cultures our forebears tried to destroy. It can also show how remarkably quickly some Europeans adapted to and were changed by the Tasmanian landscape. Most of all, it will pose and answer questions about the deep cultural forces that shaped all of us.
If we are to be a mature and self-confident island people we must see ourselves for who we are, not by the glare of electric light, but by the luminous tales told of a Tasmania electricity was meant to banish. That in turn requires that we awaken those tales where they lie dormant, excavate them from where they lay hidden, brush off the dust of neglect and disdain, understand why they were told, remembered or forgotten, acknowledge and honour their deeper mythic layers, and exhibit them proudly as the gems they are.
Rodney Croome grew up on a dairy farm in Tasmania's north-west and studied European history at the University of Tasmania. He worked on the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in Tasmania, was a founder of Australian Marriage Equality, and currently serves as the spokesperson for the gay right and equality advocacy groups Just Equal and The Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group.
