There wasn’t even a language for unconventional feelings, apart from that of contempt and punishment. For me, Renee’s story opened up new possibilities for being Tasmanian. I figured, if love and pride could shape Tasmania’s past, they could also shape its future.
The young woman in the photo on the wall looked little like the other family portraits in my grandparents’ home in Latrobe. She was young and full of life. Her features were delicate, not pronounced like my other relatives. That’s why I asked my grandmother who she was.
Looking back, I wonder why my grandmother told me the truth when decades of effort had been spent on covering it up. Perhaps she had decided enough lies had been told. Perhaps she realised all recollection of the young woman, including the lies, was fading and it was time to keep her memory alive by passing it on.
For a long time I thought I was the reason. None of my cousins were given the gift of the young woman’s story. I was what was called then a “sensitive” teenager. Maybe that made me a good listener. Or perhaps my grandmother saw a sexual non-conformity in me I was many years from admitting. Was that why she told me about the two men who lived together around the corner? But perhaps my cousins just hadn’t thought to ask. Perhaps my grandmother had reasons I couldn’t grasp. Young people assume decisions affecting them are about them and in this they are often wrong.
Westbury
It was the end of the evening and my grandmother was comfortable in one of her favourite spots, seated on a footstool by the fire. As we talked she peeled an apple deftly, in one long unbroken ribbon of skin without once looking at the fruit, guided only by the feel of it like she was playing a musical instrument.
The story she told began when her parents decided to leave their farm at Kindred for the promise of more land in Queensland. While most of her siblings relocated with their parents, my grandmother refused because she had met the man who would become my grandfather. But being a year too young to marry she was sent to bide her time in East Devonport with an older married sister, Lil.
You have already met my grandmother. I have written about her childhood visits to Forth Falls where, she was told, babies came from. For me that story is about the deep layers of ancient lore and mythology that lie secreted and forgotten below Tasmanian storytelling. For her it was simpler; she wanted a younger sister and was convinced she heard a baby crying from behind the waterfall. At Lil’s house she found such a sister in her cousin, Verena (Rene – pronounced Reen – to most people, and Renee – pronounced Ree-nee – to my grandmother). The two became the best of friends.
When she came of legal age, my grandmother married and moved to Thirlstane where her husband had taken over part of his parent’s farm. Renee moved with her parents to Ulverstone where she had a boyfriend named Roy. Renee and Roy loved each other, they got engaged and Renee fell pregnant.
One evening Renee and Roy met at my grandparent’s home in Thirlstane to talk about the pregnancy. They had no place of their own. In my grandparents’ bedroom, away from the intrusion of the household’s small children, Roy asked Renee to marry him, but she refused. He implored her: if they loved each other why not? She said she loved him and wanted to wed too. But she wanted to be free to make the decision to marry without an accident or the judgement of others forcing it. My grandparents could hear them sobbing. Their tears mingled and fell to the bedspread, staining it. My grandmother said no matter how many times she scrubbed or bleached the bedspread the stain would not come out. In the end she left it.
Not long after, Renee found an excuse to travel to Westbury where she had heard there was someone who could fix her condition. It was an unusually hot day. The road was potholed. Not long after she reached Launceston she died.
. . .
When Lil was told her daughter had died, grief drove her to frantically tear at the bedding in the house and to rip up the sheets. It was said she was never the same again. Ron was also distraught and set off north for the continent. He married and had children. But every year for the rest of his life he returned with his wife to Ulverstone on the anniversary of Renee’s death and put flowers on her grave. I know this because during his annual pilgrimage he also visited my grandparents.
When I recently visited Renee’s grave to take a photo and leave some lavender from our garden, I noticed some old, rusted sparklers planted in a flower pot that fitted perfectly in the hole made for flowers. I don’t know when they were left or by whom, but the symbolic link is obvious to a life bright and short.
“An open verdict”
Out of shame about Renee’s pregnancy and abortion, stories were invented to account for her death. I know some of these from women who were children on the north-west coast at the time and who later married into my family. By their account, it was said Renee died from appendicitis, or from food poisoning, or from a fall. They knew the truth about Renee’s abortion but still respected the mistruths by acknowledging their necessity under the circumstances. I wondered at the time why there were multiple cover stories. It seemed self-defeating. I have since learned from my acquaintance with politicians that disputes over the details of various lies are an excellent distraction from the truth.
Newspaper reports about Renee’s death, and the inquest into it, left the field open for storytellers. The Mercury headline was a good summary: “Girl’s death, peculiar circumstances, poison on mantleshelf, an open verdict”.
A bottle of unspecified poison was found in the room in Launceston where Renee died. It belonged to her fiancé Roy to whom it had been prescribed but who had not used it. There was a lot of contradictory evidence about people running for help, water being thrown on Renee, a stop in Westbury on the way to Launceston and witnesses refusing to talk to the police. The results of the autopsy were ambiguous. In the end the coroner did not rule on the cause of death. There was a vague reference in the The Mercury to “certain evidence suggesting a cause” while the inquest report in The Examiner in Launceston included second-hand information about Renee being “in a certain condition”. But they were the only suggestions in several pages of reporting to a terminated pregnancy. The impression the reader gets is of official investigations and news reports carefully constructed to obscure the real reason for Renee’s death. These documents feel like late 19th century obituaries of Tasmania’s “old colonists” in which details are carefully amended to obscure the core truth they had been convicts. Consistent with all this obfuscation and with an open verdict, no charges were laid, either in relation to Renee’s death, or to an abortion. Perhaps, in the eyes of the authorities, justice had already been served.
. . .
One certainty I took away from the newspaper reports was that my grandmother’s storytelling was exemplary. The written reports were full of dates and times, as you would expect. Reading them I realised my grandmother never placed the story in time at all. She didn’t even say what year Renee died. But she named and described every place relevant to the story. The impression this made on me as a teenager was that of a legend: a story attached closely to particular places so these places acquire deeper meanings and become mnemonics, but a story that transcends history, fashion and contingency so it becomes not only true but true for all time. I’m minded of the Icelandic sagas, which are intimately attached to specific, named valleys, mountains, farmhouses and waterfalls, but have no time stamp. This is why, when I first read the newspaper reports, I felt a kind of disenchantment. The story as a passing historical event was interesting and revealing, but less important to me than if I had first encountered it in that form. I wanted to continue to dwell on the deeper meaning, as I have done now most of my life.
Don’t get me wrong, the details of Renee’s death matter. I have written several times about her death during the campaigns to decriminalise abortion in Tasmania. It was a way to show my support for women controlling their own bodies and destinies, and to ensure no more lives are lost. But even as I wrote, I knew the story passed down to me meant more than a political campaign would allow me to express.
“Bending to the flood”
When I heard Renee’s story, it had a profound and immediate impact. It said that Tasmania is a place of high drama, where desire and love were forces that changed destinies, where pride shook its fist at the harsh judgments of others even if there was a high price to pay, and where love was powerful enough to transcend not only judgement but death itself. This mattered because the Tasmania I had experienced till then was a passionless place, one in which feelings were crammed into the tiny spaces routine, work and money allowed. Strong feelings were a moral failing in this Tasmania, and acting on them a type of insanity. There wasn’t even a language for unconventional feelings, apart from that of contempt and punishment. For me, Renee’s story opened up new possibilities for being Tasmanian. I figured, if love and pride could shape Tasmania’s past, they could also shape its future.
It was because of this impact that I shared Renee’s story with Richard Flanagan during one of our many conversations when I was a young gay rights activist and he an aspiring novelist. If my recollection is correct, the ambiguity of the story impressed him. Renee’s decisions do not fit easily into a political narrative. But he didn’t share my romantic take. Of all the isms critics hurl at Flanagan’s work, romanticism is one that sticks the least. Magic realism was a major inspiration for his early novels, so when Renee’s story appeared in Death of a River Guide, the focus was on the indelible stain.
In chapter six, Flanagan has an elderly woman tell the story of two lovers who met at a family home to discuss the young woman’s pregnancy. He describes how the young man pleaded they wed but the young woman believed their unborn baby “was the wrong reason to get married”, and how their tears fell on to the bedspread and stained it. The narrative mentions the young woman’s death after an abortion but quickly shifts to the bedspread: “Try as they might they could not wash the tear stain away. They bleached the bedspread several times … but none of it made the slightest difference.”
The indelibly stained bedspread appears several times in the novel and is one of its main symbols. It represents decisions that shape destiny: how we live with the consequences of events, and the suffering and redemption that both flow from love. It echoes Catholic conceptions of original sin and the stain of racial genocide and convictism in Tasmania.
Part of Flanagan’s story shows great fidelity to my grandmother’s. But he also diverges by attributing the young woman’s death to a car accident, omitting the bereaved partner’s annual visits to her grave and locating the story in central Europe. This latter point expresses Flanagan’s conception that Europeans have imported their failings to the New World and are also uplifted by that world. I hope I do not appear parochial when I say I was disappointed by the European provenance of Flanagan’s story. The tale is intimately tied to Tasmanian experience, reflects it and offers insight into it. For me, the Tasmanian setting adds value to the tale. But I certainly can’t fault Richard Flanagan’s literary treatment of a story essentially told as a folktale. He is a Bartok or Copland turning folk music into symphonies.
Closer to home, I understand Patrick Hall’s Quilt, a large artwork displayed to commemorate the Royal Hobart Hospital’s redevelopment, was inspired by the bedspread from Death of a River Guide. Quilt is a reminder, not least for me, that stories evolve inevitably and unpredictably and cannot be constrained.
That said, if I were to cast the lens of genre over Renee Foster’s story today it would be neither my early romanticism, nor Richard Flanagan’s magic realism. The ambiguity Flanagan spoke of is the key. For almost a hundred years, the story has invited those who knew the truth to ask was Renee’s decision right or wrong. Was she a woman of conviction or an obstinate girl? Was the prevailing moral code to blame for Renee’s death or her unbending rejection of that code? The story is a dialogue between the compromise authority demands and the sacrifice principle requires. It is a debate between freedom and necessity. It is a Greek tragedy asking perennial questions in their starkest form with no fixed answers. In this tragedy, Renee is a Tasmanian Antigone, an unyielding young woman who defied equally intractable powers-that-be despite the mortal risk. When Renee rebuffs Roy’s solution of marriage, and when Antigone’s fiancé Haemon warns, “The trees on the bank that bend to the flood survive,” we rightly fear what the gods have in store.
I can see now, after all these decades, that the ambiguity in Renee’s story, the many unanswerable questions, go back to my grandmother’s telling of the story and possibly to the events themselves. Not once did she betray to me what she felt about her niece’s decision. Perhaps this was implied. My grandmother said she was the first person Renee told about her pregnancy. Perhaps Renee divulged her plan to get an abortion at the same time? Perhaps my grandmother arranged Roy and Renee’s meeting so Roy’s case might succeed where my grandmother’s had failed?
But this is speculation. It’s just as likely my grandmother admired Renee’s stance and the meeting at Thirlstane was to convince Roy to cooperate. From the way she told the tale, I simply couldn’t tell. Her stated reason for the fateful meeting at Thirlstane was simply, as I’ve noted already, that the lovers had nowhere else to go. Perhaps that implies her view about Renee’s decision: it was hers to make. Whatever my grandmother’s view, she avoided the enormous temptation to moralise about Renee’s decision. She didn’t seal the story with an authorial commentary. There were no “if onlys” or “what could have beens”. Instead, by not giving her spin, she opened the tale to everyone who might want to invest it with their own meaning. This was a decision no less trusting and generous than her decision to finally tell the story.
Things hidden
Let’s return to her decision to finally tell.
In Scott Millwood’s book about the suspicious disappearance of Lake Pedder campaigner Brenda Hean, one of Millwood’s interviewees says, “After 10 or 15 years, mysteries are usually cleared up – eventually the truth comes out. In Tasmania it never does … keep it in the family, don’t speak of what is actually happening outside, don’t share the secrets … So there is an underlying culture of violence and abuse in one of the most beautiful places of the world.”
This is partly right but also deeply wrong.
In Tasmania, secrets and mysteries can be hidden for a very long time. But shame is not the only motive, nor inherited trauma the only outcome. Some are hidden because they are precious, meaningful, beautiful, fragile or easily damaged by the fear, ignorance or indifference of others. These secrets and mysteries are buried to protect them.
The burial of valuable things – their literal burial in the earth – is a common theme in Tasmanian folklore. Holes are dug to protect and preserve toys, liquor, books, treasure and farm children during the harvest. In the same way, conspiracies of silence or elaborate distractions are employed to protect a beautiful lost valley, a family of Thylacines, the privacy of two elderly spinsters who share their lives, the etchings of desperate convicts on crumbling plaster, the remnants of First Nations people, the memory of some deep injustice or the evidence of a soaring love. To “cover up” is to obscure, but it is also to preserve.
Often there are signs pointing to what has been hidden so it is not lost forever. I think of the axe Nicholas Shakespeare saw painted on a lonely Tasmanian road pointing to a murder committed 80 years before, or a dozen place names that both hide and hint at great injustice, profound joy or astonishing heroism. We could put the stain on my grandmother’s bedspread in the same category of subtle but inerasable signs from the past. If the reason for hiding things is simply to forget – to consign the past to oblivion – there would be no such signs.
. . .
This feature of Tasmanian storytelling echoes the same theme of the burial of precious things in British and Irish folklore. It could be traced back to convicts secreting what was valuable to them in the nooks and crannies of their prisons or First Nations Tasmanians hiding sacred objects from the invaders. It is enabled by the dampness of a land that easily yields to the spade and to the instructive silence of its dense, tangled forests. In such an interconnected place, where privacy is at a premium, secretion through burial, silence or distraction can be the best way to keep things secure or safe.
After many decades struggling with the meanings of Renee Foster’s story, I still wonder why my grandmother finally told it in a truer and fuller form. Perhaps it was not because the grief and shame had diminished, or not just because of that. Perhaps it was time to finally uncover an immensely precious and valuable artifact that had been hidden to protect it from the ravages of people’s prejudice, judgment and misunderstanding. Perhaps society was ready to grasp the spectrum of ideas and values refracted by Renee’s story, even when they are contradictory and unsettling.
Perhaps an island long hesitant about love’s potential to redeem it from the horror, cruelty and exploitation with which it is so often associated was ready for this particular love story.
Whatever the reason, in the late 20th century my grandmother trusted that Renee Foster’s story could be safely unearthed. For you and me, reciprocating that trust means approaching the story with the respect and imagination that will allow it to reflect our experience long into the future. It means each of us helping, in our own way, to build a Tasmania big enough for the worlds Renee’s story contains, a Tasmania that proves my grandmother’s trust was not misplaced.
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.
