“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once famously observed, “it’s not even past.” Quite so. In complex ways that we can only dimly comprehend, the past moves inexorably into the present, and on into barely imaginable times to come. It shapes the now of our life and times; it remains present, in other words, in the present.

But there is a more particular sense of the past’s presence in the now that I find myself increasingly inclined to challenge.

I have long loved the word “palimpsest”. This is material, or any form of physical object for that matter, within which those with an eye to see can discern earlier forms or manifestations. I have long been fond of arguing that landscape serves as a palimpsest – that we can peer into its forms and features and see therein the contours of an unfolding history. Aboriginal people tend to be adept at this, and I intend to write of it in another essay. For the rest of us, though, I now think this is more complex; that the past is just as likely to be characterised by opacity than by the transparency that the notion of “palimpsest” assumes.

Tasmania, then.

Much of the Tasmanian landscape is amenable to a potent historical reading. Wybalenna, Port Arthur, Saltwater River and Koonya, the Cascades Female Factory, the Georgian cottage villages (quite a few of these), the coast north and south of the Arthur River, Beaconsfield, Queenstown, Waddamana, Latrobe – the list goes on and on. That marvellous Tasman Peninsula polymath, James Parker, notes (in Issue 20 of the Tasman Peninsula Chronicle) the “layered cultural landscape that is Koonya”, within which “waves of occupation are revealed … in the mix of buildings … [and] in the beautiful blend of native and exotic trees which so take the eye. Looking at those buildings and those trees, you are seeing the evolution of a place.”

Perceptively observed. But historical understandings remain potent in such places because they have been deliberately managed (sometimes officially, sometimes merely by collective residential selection) in order to foreground the nexus between place and history. The nexus – because there is usually a determination to establish a single official historical understanding within any given place. Even so, this to be resisted, and indeed, each person who looks through a place and into its past will see a different history from that read there by each other person.

But I wish to focus on a quite different aspect of this “problem”, and to do so I’ll engage with two distinctive Tasmanian geographies, the Midlands and the northern tip of Bruny Island.

I travel the Midlands Highway often and I have grown to love it. And it is true that the villages threaded along the tunnel of tar are perfectly amenable to historical interpretation via readings of the landscape and its individual features. That they are now by-passed (excepting Campbell Town) by highway re-routing has greatly assisted this, because this has siphoned off development pressures, and it has helped concentrate the sense of a geography/history nexus. We can conclude that roading decisions are a key feature in the geographical construction of a sense of history. But this is not always, or even usually, to the good.

History abounds in the Midlands. But the highway is a ribbon, and beyond its slim confines it imposes blinkers, and that abundance of history is screened from view. Opacity, not palimpsest. When we travel through the Midlands, what sense have we of prior Aboriginal occupation? Or of the presence in the land of the most viciously psychopathic convict bolter, Richard Lemon, he who wrought mayhem among the Aboriginals whom he chanced across, and who slaughtered one of his two Gaelic-speaking fellow bolters because, unable to understand Gaelic, he assumed they were plotting against him when they conversed?

Well, Lemon left a spray of names to mark his passing, but how many of us ever ponder their provenance? And what, too, of the Spring Hill convict gang, engaged in road construction under slavery conditions and dying in large numbers? Many of us know this as a fact, but can we sense the stories behind the mere fact as we race for the top of the hill? Most of us cannot.

And what of the other roads? Because, before the tunnel of tar along which we so heedlessly dash, there were several roads, all with their own histories. Who now knows of the old bush roads, or even, in the southern Midlands, Bell’s Line of Road, concerning which John Thompson has written an evocative history (A Road in Van Diemen’s Land)? Thompson observed thus: “ … much of it is preserved in its archaeological landscape [so that] despite the loss of so many trees, an early 19th century traveller, transported to our time, would recognise [it]. Conversely, we still see the landscape much as that traveller saw it. That enables us to imagine the bullock wagons, horse carts, horsemen and women … convicts, overseers, soldiers …”. It is, then, a landscape redolent with history, there to be viewed in palimpsest.

But this doesn’t happen. Bell’s Line of Road is, for the most part, on private property, and most of us are unaware of its existence. To encounter history through the prism of the land, we have to be in physical touch with it, and the tyranny of the Midlands Highway ensures that such can never be. In any case, as Thompson documents, the tangible infrastructure associated with Bell’s Line of Road is slowly passing away. Barns are demolished. Inns crumble ...

One brief instance magnifies my point. When I was a young man travelling the Midlands Highway, there was a two-storey ruin just back from the road at Antill Ponds. I now know this to have been Thomas Presnell’s White Hart Inn, but I knew it as Half-way House, and so did most travellers back then. It was a prominent landmark that, in the heyday of coaching, marked the mid-point on the main road between Launceston and Hobart. And then, just a few decades ago, the old ruin was pulled down, the more intact stone “recycled”, as I understand it, for mundane agricultural deployment. A shapeless heap of rubble-stone remains, but this is still, to my mind, Half-way House. Trouble is, it became clear to me only a few years ago that most people can no longer name it as such; in fact, for the most part they zoom past, eyes glued to the road ahead, not even registering what is left of that once-famous coach stop. The nexus between geography and history has been demolished. (And this is not even to mention the grave of one William Hawkins, accidentally killed “near this spot” in 1861, tucked into the side of the road embankment, a grave with its own forgotten story to tell, nestled there, unseen and forgotten, a few short metres from the hurtling traffic above the embankment.)

At the northern tip of Bruny Island – to the north of the Dennes Point village – you will find a featureless expanse of dun-coloured grass. Excepting the remarkable water views, it would be difficult to imagine a less interesting landscape. And yet, here is land that throbs with history, and history of great import to our story. I know this because, with a collaborator (Daniela Brozek), I was commissioned to produce and install a series of storyboards that document this extraordinary, concentrated history.

This tract of country is of profound Aboriginal significance, it being the place where the Nuenone gathered before crossing to the mainland, and where Aboriginal groups from over the channel made landfall on their regular Bruny visits. A midden here dates from the time of the final settling of the post-glaciation shoreline. Here the D’Entrecasteaux and Baudin expeditions made important early contacts with the first people, and here they carried out crucial scientific studies. Here, too, was the site of Captain James Kelly’s farm, and many dramatic characters and incidents were associated therewith, some of which concern the early shore-whaling industry, of which Kelly was a pioneer. There was a marine police station, and the first trans-channel vehicular ferry installation. And much more beside.

Is this a history revealed in palimpsest, though? Impossible. The landscape is entirely featureless, the dry cup of Bottom Lagoon, the place of gathering for the Aboriginal people, excepted. Unless you are possessed of psychic powers, there is nothing in the present landscape through which you can search for layers of past use and meaning. Not, at least without those storyboards (readers are urged to go and see this for themselves).

History as amenable to discovery in palimpsest, then? I don’t think so.

Is there a take-home message here? I suppose there is, and it is this. Beware of easy claims (such as I myself have been wont to make) of the accessibility of the past. Where we have deliberately chosen to make it so, and very occasionally where we have not, the past is approachable through insightful engagement with the land or specific features therein (though this accessibility is often crafted to suit conservative cultural imperatives). But we are great and thoughtless obliterators, and it as likely that where we would seek meaning in the land we are just as likely to encounter the impenetrable, the opaque.

Pete Hay grew up on the north-west Coast of Tasmania, and has worked as schoolteacher, storeman, truckie’s offsider, youth worker and political adviser at both state and federal tiers of government. But it was as an academic in Victoria and Tasmania that he has spent most of his waged life. He retired as Reader in Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Tasmania at the end of 2008, and turned his focus to creative writing. He has published multiple volumes of poetry and personal essays, and has twice been shortlisted for the Tasmanian Book of the Year. His book of essays, Forgotten Corners: Essays in Search of an Island’s Soul, was named the Small Press Network 2020 Book of the Year.