I’m a sixth-generation Tasmanian. I feel this place in my bones. I went away. For 19 years I lived in Melbourne, but all that time I longed for the island, for its wind and waters and mountains. Many of my forebears were convicts or the descendants of convicts who ended up in the Huon. The valley is in my DNA.
When I was a child, my family had a shack. Or rather, we had a small boat shed that we called a shack. The lease was with my grandmother, then my mother’s sister, who lived locally with her family. We had an old woodstove near the corrugated doors at the side of the building on which we boiled the billy or a big old enamel teapot.
We clambered over the rocks on the point and brought plastic buckets full of mussels and sometimes oysters to the stove. Mussels were boiled or placed on a sheet of metal to fizz with the brine inside them until they opened, yielding tiny pink crabs that tried to dart away.
The stove was lost with the shack. The building was barred and boarded from inside. We couldn’t see in anymore, not even a sliver of light, a hunk of dinghy, or edge of kayak or oar. We no longer knew who had the lease. No one talked about it. Yet we still came. We came in couples or small groups of friends or family, and sat outside the shack on the sandstone rock formations. We wriggled our bottoms into the indents, or sheltered in the human-sized caves where the Old People, the Melukerdee, must have gathered to eat their shellfish.
We even had the cheek to sit on the steps at the front of the shack and make our way up and down the remnants of the concrete ramp, now pearly and silvered by water, that had once eased the boat into the shallows flecked with the black spermatozoa-like fish.
On all those visits, I don’t think we encountered any of the “new owners”. They didn’t figure in our reckoning or in our dreams. They were invisible. Irrelevant. Our grandfather built the shack, and it was ours in perpetuity. Only now we had it for free. No rates. No yearly rent to pay. It was all ours as it had always been. The long beach. The darting crabs, the black fish, the sucking sand underfoot in the shallows, the swaying hair of the seagrass.
There is a square black and white photograph of my middle sister and me at the shack dated Christmas 1969. We are sitting in the warm end of the lagoon-like bay. I am smiling, my head on a coquettish angle. My sister looks sweet. I remember learning to swim there with my aunts, their hands underneath my tummy, my legs flailing and splashing. I have never been much of a swimmer, but I love being by the water.
I heard the adults talking once about how they wanted the lease back, but the person before the last person had paid a large sum for it. The message sank into me like a stone. We would never have the shack back. We could never open the door. Never go in and open the window and raise the wooden bar and open the structure on the side and sit on the log outside with the open air of the shack behind us. The best we could do was visit and sit nearby and remember.
When I was 15, I became a demon child. On family visits I refused to get out of the Datsun, then the Commodore, except to gather food and take it back to the vehicles where I would read. One day I sullenly emerged with a tape deck and played Heart of Glass by Blondie so the jangly synthy sounds echoed off the sandstone caves across the bay near the jetty where people in jet skis and motorboats were starting to build shacks. We called them “The Others”.
When I was 17, I had a boyfriend who was a little older. He was an apprentice carpenter and drove a panel van. We were together for about a year and a half until he told me, “I’m sick of you, that’s all,” and then started going out with my best friend’s cousin.
I remember one day being at the shack and hearing the crunch of his van’s tyres on the cream gravel road above, and seeing the flash of red as his car rounded the corner and I knew he was going to the other girl’s parents’ shack, a real shack this time, nearby in Verona Sands.
I wrote a maudlin short story about the shack. About my golden girlhood there. About the perfidy of teenage love. My fictional heroine drowned herself in the bay at the end of the story. But real life goes on. I went to college and studied in earnest. Then I went to university. I brought my new boyfriend to see the outside of the shack.
In the photos I am wearing one of those 1980s ribbed jumpers and playfully wielding a stick. It became part of my new adult life to share the shack with people. To visit and pick our way along the corrugations of the sandstone rocks. To marvel at the big blue sky and the water birds.
Then, a few years after I moved to Melbourne, my father was sent to palliative care. He had been diagnosed with cancer a year after I left. If only I could have my time over. I should have returned then, and greedily sucked up every moment of him in a stoppered bottle. But I was still young and unbelieving. My sisters and I had all moved away. It seemed too hard to go back except for brief trips.
Finally, we returned to spend three weeks with our mother, sitting by our father’s bedside in Davey Street. We were united, yet each suffering a separate, silent torment. My father was young, only 60, and my youngest sister was in her 20s; too young to lose a father. It hurt to see her cry.
My whole life from that point on fell into “before” and “after”. This loss was dreadful, deep and dark and bottomless, and I couldn’t run away from it. Yet my father’s death was humble and quiet, like him. When he was gone, my mother caressed his hair, saying, “Oh, my beautiful boy.”
We took some of dad’s ashes to the shack, and threw them, along with bright bundles of flowers, into the water. But the wind blew him back onto us. He would have laughed at that. Just as we still laugh about the time dad thought it was a good idea to park our orange and white caravan on a sandstone shelf there, and we awoke to find we were afloat.
In 2024, nearly 40 years after we lost the shack, I have claimed it back. My partner, who is more than a little fey, had a feeling about it. And this place, quite coincidentally, had a big role in her life-story, different to mine, but still important, and still resonating down the years.
It was she who persuaded me that we could try to get the shack back. I still thought it was impossible. We visited several times and sent futile emails to the government agency, asking who held the lease. Until one awful day we found the shack with its door wrenched off and the interior vandalised and the sign from the door stolen.
We contacted the agency again, sending pictures and pleading to know who had the lease, protesting that it would soon be just a ruin, burned down by drunken teenagers, and this humble building, this glorious piece of Tasmaniana, would be lost.
Then one day, they told us that they had contacted the owner of the lease, and he wanted to talk. I won’t bore you with all the details of transferring names and paying for the lease and rates and insurance and the interminable waiting and red tape, but a day came when we parked our car and ran (I use this term loosely, we are in our late 50s, but we were very excited) down the path and crossed the sand with keys in our hands.
And we entered that door, and we raised that wooden bar, and we opened the shutters and looked out the window at the Huon River curling into the bay. And I felt a happiness I had never known. It was like a deep intaglio incised in me, overlaid with layers of sadness.
To me, this was my home of homes. More home than my parents’ houses or my own houses. Home was the tussocks of native rushes out the front older than me, the sandstone cliffs and pebbles and ebb and flow of water and the solidity of the pockmarked rocks which did not change.
All my dead are here, at the shack. My father. My grandfather. My grandmothers. A cousin. Three aunts. Three uncles. One cousin. All my past selves. All the long ago Christmasses that will never come again. My childhood. My teenage years. My life.
One day my partner and I will be ashes and we will enter into the bay and be taken out into the forever of the Tasman Sea. But not for a long time yet, please. We and the bay are patient. We will wait on this shore within these timber walls that grandfather George built, thinking and reading and learning and resting, safe inside this shack, which has no electricity or running water but is powered by love and lit from within by memory.
Shelley O’Reilly is a sixth-generation Tasmanian, living near the banks of timtumili minanya/Derwent River in Claremont. She holds a PhD in poetry from the University of Tasmania. She is the author of Dying for Beauty, short stories published by Montpelier Press, and If I Had a Wooden Ruler, poems published by The People’s Library. In 2021 she curated The Poetry in Motion Project, supported by The City of Hobart, placing 40 poems about Hobart on 40 Metro buses. She teaches English at Claremont College and writes about place and Tasmanian history.