Two stories.

On the island of Corfu, technically part of Greece, there is a town called Palaiokastritsa that is the island’s epicentre of wild teenage tourism and tasteless Russian money. It has a monastery built in 1225, and is a beautiful sequence of enclosed bays and lucent blue water – hence all that overfed Russian flesh, and the unrestrained revelry of the beauteous young.

In one of these lambent coves, it is thought, Odysseus came ashore and there encountered Nausicaa. Not that you’d know it. No-one who comes here has any knowledge or interest in the story of Odysseus and Nausicaa, and there is nothing here that will bring such a story to mind. You’d think that the Greeks, above all, would have preserved this story in the local memory of such a place, but it seems not to have been so. We can advance cogent explanations for this. These would instance the place-obliterating power of globally mobile capital and the equally global reach of place-contemptuous popular culture. However we cut it, though, Palaiokastritsa’s connection to Odysseus and Nausicaa can only now be found in speculative history.

Second story.

On Prince Edward Island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence lives my good friend, Ed. Ed is a historian and he is also a MacDonald, which has significance on PEI, this being one of the island’s three most common surnames (the others are Arsenault and Gallant – surely a welcome change from Smith, Jones and Brown).

One of the many remarkable things about Ed is that he carries in his head a detailed genealogy extending far into time. He is a historian, but Ed claims that there are other people on the island with equivalent oral genealogies. Moreover, Ed claims not to have consciously acquired this knowledge. It seems to have been … well … just absorbed. On PEI, then, the past would seem to remain potent within the present – a living, tangible creation of collective memory.

. . .

With which of these memory templates does Tasmania accord?

Another good friend, Allan Jamieson, invited me to Burnie to talk to the local Rotary Club about Sparrow Force. That’s World War II, Asian theatre. I decided instead to talk about the most locally-relevant component of Sparrow Force, the 2/40th Battalion. The 2/40th was overwhelmingly recruited from Tasmania, and within Tasmania its recruitment profile had a pronounced leaning to the north of the island; to its farm boys and shop assistants and labourers. On February 22, 1942, the 2/40th, inappropriately trained and armed (as I have written elsewhere), stormed the slopes of Usau Ridge in what was then Dutch Timor. Holding the ridge was a division of elite and numerically superior Japanese paratroopers. The 2/40th captured the ridge in what may have been – this is disputed and can’t be conclusively asserted – the last full-battalion bayonet charge in military history. But, without air support or any prospect of relief, on the following day the “Tasmanian battalion”, its position hopeless, surrendered.

The disastrous Gallipoli landings contribute, in large part, to the construction of our collective psyche. Timor 1942, by contrast, has little purchase within Tasmanians’ understanding of themselves, though the parallels between the two events are striking.

Each was characterised by exceptional bravery and selflessness in a futile quest. In each case disaster was the tragic outcome of extraordinary ineptitude on the part of military planners and field leadership. And in each case, it is claimed, the men involved were ruthlessly expended to satisfy dubious geopolitical imperatives. Mirroring Gallipoli, the “Tasmanian battalion” fought without naval or air support. With minimal field artillery. With insufficient and obsolete weaponry. And, in the words of a respected platoon commander, “We were trained in the tactics of the First World War.”

The achievements of the 2/40th in Timor can only amaze. All the ingredients of legend are there – the same ingredients that have positioned Gallipoli so potently at the centre of the national consciousness. Within Tasmania, though, no comparable legend has grown around the achievements and fate of the 2/40th.

I knew this when I went to Burnie to speak to the Rotary Club. But surely it would be different on the coast, given that Burnie and the surrounding towns were the most significant sources of 2/40th recruitment. But, no. I was dismayed to find that almost no-one in attendance had even heard of the 2/40th, though many must have had family connections to the battalion. Uncles, grandfathers – even fathers.

. . .

It is plain that, of the two templates sketched at the beginning of my essay, it is Palaiokastritsa rather than Prince Edward Island that most fits Tasmania. Is PEI anomalous, though – does most of the world share Tasmania’s densely opaque knowing of its local past? It’s not clear that this is so – even in Greece. Palaiokastritsa is one thing, but here’s Lawrence Durrell writing of Rhodes (in Reflections on a Marine Venus – admittedly he wrote this 70 years prior to my visit to Palaiokastritsa): “Here in Rhodes … one runs across songs left behind by the Crusaders, living on side by side with a belief in a fresh-water Goddess whose antiquity stretches back beyond Plato. For us these dissimilars are not bound by calendar-time but exist side by side in the Now.”

How marvellous! Nevertheless, I’m inclined to the view that generational amnesia has become the dominant condition – and perhaps it ever was. For we citizens of the island at the end of the earth, though – what can account for our generational amnesia? I’ll posit just two among what must potentially be a multitude of factors.

The first of these we might call the de-localisation of place – the dissipation of the social and natural relationships that once embedded people within their home range, a geographic ambit in which people established place-person relationships of intimacy. New technologies of communication have meant that now we are all citizens of the world. Communities of place have been replaced by communities of interest. No longer is the range of our political concern confined to the village. Now it is the entire world.

And we might call the second factor “the new mobility”. It was once possible to take prominent Tasmanian surnames and assign them, with confidence, to specific regional localities. Kay and Grey meant Circular Head. Direen and Geeves took you to the Huon Valley and stations south. Jetson was north-east. Triffit/Triffet was upper Derwent Valley.

You can still play this game, but with far less confidence, because Tasmanians are no longer sedentary. We wander away in search of greener pastures. We are no longer embedded – we are diasporic.

And then there’s convictism. For the first quarter of its European existence, Tasmania was a vast prison, and prisons are totalitarian institutions. A leaky totalitarian system, but totalitarian notwithstanding. And as, in the second half of the 19th century, a society developed that craved respectability, we came to be dominated by what Henry Reynolds, in a seminal paper published in Tasmanian Historical Studies in 1969, labelled “the hated stain”. Under the grip of the new priggish shame, entire families denied the very existence of still-living ex-convict relatives (this occurred in my own family, and I’ve written of it elsewhere).

Imagine how it was for aging, usually penurious ex-convicts living out the last years of their lives with the cold shoulders of their ungenerous offspring firmly turned against them. Denying their very existence. Expunging their very being. This is, I think, one of the terrible, little-acknowledged tragedies of this island’s post-invasion history.

. . .

Under conditions such as these, it is little wonder that historical memory is in such short supply in Tasmania. Most of us wish it were not so. At the level of the individual, renewed concern for the past takes shape in the current obsession with genealogy, as people desperately try to find out just who they are – where they have come from and what human factors have made them. It is a search for an anchor in time – for a very identity, no less.

And there is a social dimension to this, too. Just as individuals seek to know their provenance, so also do – or should do – entire communities. Place, in both its social and physical manifestations, is ever passing from us. That’s why any attempt to understand the essence of place is imbued with sorrow. It eludes. It shape-shifts. The passing of place is inevitable, because natural and social processes, particularly those forged in technological restlessness, are always on the move. Such a process, moreover, is bound to occur even in the absence of such factors as “the de-localisation of place” and “the new mobility’’.

What we might call the ecology of community, then, can only exist in the form of a frozen moment. It is old photos of sporting teams that bring this home to me most powerfully. These unknown, hollow-eyed forgotten people once existed in complex relationships of reciprocity, affection and animosity, possessed now-obsolete skills, inhabited a technological context that has passed away. None of this can be ascertained from looking at the photos. How can we now engage with their world? We mostly can’t. Their world, their ways of doing, being, thinking, valuing and interacting – has melted away – and so have they. Their place is no more.

Can we recreate their communal universe? Mostly we cannot. The ecology of community that was theirs existed below the reach of history and archival record, too ineffable to suit documentation. Hints can be found in letters, diaries, transaction records. What teases, though, is not what is there, but what is not.

The American geographer, David Lowenthal, wrote a magisterial book in the 1980s entitled The Past is a Foreign Country. I disagree with much of the argument, but I certainly agree with the observation embodied in the title. The past may be potently with us, but it is unconsciously so – and so it is a foreign country, one we can try to imagine, but can no longer inhabit.

The memory vacancy of Palaiokastritsa is repeated throughout most of the world. It is a much more common phenomenon than the extraordinary genealogical remembrance of Prince Edward Island. Here in Tasmania it explains, but does not excuse, our incapacity to inhabit the turbulent memory-universe of the convicts, most of whom also left no written record. And it explains, but does not excuse, the absence of a memory of the 2/40th among those in attendance at that Rotary Club meeting in Burnie.

My father died young and I am custodian of three treasured mementoes. One is the billiard cue with which he once played the legendary Walter Lindrum, he who was to billiards what Bradman is to cricket. Another is a rice paper notebook that he smuggled through his long endurance on the Burma Railway and in the Japanese coal mines, and in which he diligently recorded the battalion’s deaths. And the third is his watch, a small and beautiful object, inscribed and dated on the back, and also a clandestine survivor of the Burma Railway. I have it in front of me now. I am overwhelmed with grief. It is an artefact out of time and place. It symbolises the inevitable loss of those complex and unique ecologies of community that are doomed to vanish as wisps of mist, and that point accusingly at the inadequacies of history.

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.