Let me tell you about the Count’s Tree. It grew near the road to Cradle Mountain and was chopped down in the 1970s, much to the annoyance of local tourist guides.
The tree, being huge and hollow, offered convenient shelter to Count Paul Strzelecki on his journey from Launceston to Stanley in 1841. It was a journey into the history books because Strzelecki’s geological and topographical measurements around Cradle Mountain contributed to his famous book, A Physical Description of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land. After its publication, the author received an honorary degree from Oxford.
His observations were received less triumphally by the manager of the Van Diemen’s Land company, Edward Curr. From Strzelecki’s altitude readings, Curr realised the VDL’s holdings around Cradle were worthless. “It is the elevation, more than anything else that diminishes the value of these districts … This fact is the chief reason for our want of success,” Curr wrote.
It was at Cradle that I heard about the “Count’s Tree”, from the grandson of one of the disgruntled guides. In September 2020, my partner and I and some of our friends from Hobart, booked cabins at Cradle Mountain for a weekend. Rafael and I had recently moved from Hobart to the north-west, where I grew up. We had already visited Cradle several times together. He was still thrilled at how close it was. But this trip, over a couple of nights with several people, was new for us. The pandemic had closed Tasmania to outsiders and locked Tasmanians in. Unable to travel off the island, we turned inwards, travelling to wild places as if the fresh air might keep the plague away. These were places many Tasmanians had not visited since they were children. The motto of this wave of internal travelling was purity and innocence.
That Cradle Valley was filled with a new demographic was immediately obvious. Fewer of those at the restaurant or in the shuttle bus had that look of single-minded determination so characteristic of people who travel to hike. They look right through other people and close them out, as if being so proximate to others is a kind of purgatory one must endure before being released into holy solitude.
That disdainful gaze had been replaced by its opposite, an open expression inviting new experiences and connections, or at least searching for something that might evoke nostalgia. These were people who might have been in Fiji or Rome had something not gone awry in Wuhan. They brought to Cradle the same hope for novelty and amiable conversation they would have taken to a foreign resort or ruined ancient city.
. . .
We hadn’t parked before I recognised someone I knew. A former boyfriend walked past the car as we were driving in. Just moments later a friend from high school popped out of her cabin. Connections multiplied from there. On the King Billy walk, an elderly woman leaning on a tree called me over to inform me we were third cousins through my mother. A gentle climate scientist from the gym introduced me to his girlfriend in the restaurant that night and his mother on the Cradle Valley walk the next day. His mother, I discovered, had been at school in Launceston with my mother. I crossed paths with an acquaintance from Hobart who is both my second and third cousin, thanks to two generations of sisters from one family marrying brothers from another in a 19th century north-west district where families were large and few in number.
This level of interconnection is often called “so Tasmanian”, which is absurd given almost everyone has third cousins. What is Tasmanian is that we know who they are. I’ve known since childhood that I am connected by generations of rural life to many of the people around me. My parents’ brains carried complex family trees that blossomed with stories about joy, resentment, generosity, jealousy, eccentricity, indebtedness and love, all of which were tied to features of the landscape to make them easier to remember. But it wasn’t until I returned to the north-west coast, and made an effort to locate ancestors whose stories I had not been told, that I began to see these links run even deeper than I realised. They wind back further than my parents’ and grandparent’s memory to the time of white immigration, and back further to village life in the Old World.
Similarly, by comparing different versions of the same Tasmanian stories, I found many of the tales I learnt as a child have more layers of meaning than I imagined when I first heard them. I guess all this is inevitable when people from the same British village boarded the same ship to Launceston, or were emancipated from the same cruel convict station in the Midlands, slogged through the mud to the same hidden valley in the Western Tiers, and farmed there with little change for 150 years.
Still, every new connection discovered is fascinating, or at least it is for me. Many Tasmanians who share these links brush them off or deliberately turn away from them. When they say the many connections between us are “so Tasmanian”, they speak with contempt. I understand this. For young people intense interconnection can be claustrophobic, as if the enveloping sea and vigilant mountains aren’t limiting enough. Islands are for those who look inward for meaning, not out.
Stigma also plays its role: for generations continental Australians have projected their self-loathing on to us with slurs like “inbred”, “two-head” and “third-generation morons”. Indeed, Tasmanian interconnectedness was an affront to the entire 20th century, that restless time when roads that led to great, lonely cities were glorified as paths to fulfilment.
I attribute my embrace of our connections to the way in which prejudice tried to slice through them when I was younger. The fierce, organised homophobia that surfaced in Tasmania in the 1980s and 90s and was centred on the north-west coast, tried to excise me from the place that had made me who I was. My refusal to be made a sexual refugee, and my subsequent attempts to mend hate’s rifts in the name of belonging, heightened my appreciation of the tapestry I was trying to repair. Now, I think of that tapestry as something Tasmanians should all value, not just for ourselves but as the tonic for a rootless age. In a world searching for meaning through connection, Tasmania has connection in abundance. That abundance is as astonishing and remedial as the natural beauty and diversity so many people come to Tasmania to enjoy.
But it is more than that. Like Tasmania’s natural diversity, its social interconnection poses a radical challenge to those who would divide us from the land and from each other. Informers in convict gaols, estate owners setting white shepherds against black warriors, gothic descriptions of the land that alienate us from nature, moral panic about sexuality and gender – they are all tactics by those in power to divide and rule. Tasmania’s deep interconnection has the potential to promote solidarity in the face of division.
I’ve seen this at work. When my gay colleagues and I travelled across Tasmania to tell our personal stories in response to the homophobia I mentioned, transformation of attitudes was all the quicker because of the interconnections between us and those we spoke to. That is why Tasmania now leads the nation on gay and trans rights, and why Sydney, the nation’s most anonymous, 20th-century city, lags far behind.
As my partner, friends, cousins and I gazed in wonder at Cradle’s soaring peaks and mossy bowers, as we each felt lucky to reclaim for a short time a precious wildness the rest of the world has lost and travels to Tasmania to find, I imagined I could see the invisible threads that run between us and felt those threads to be an equally precious asset. If only all Tasmanians could recognise and value our deep interconnection and find ways to offer the benefits of that connection to the world beyond our shores.
That evening, the grandson of the Cradle guide hailed me at the bar. He had been a grade or two below me at Sheffield school. He told me about the Count’s Tree, a story I later found written down by the great chronicler of Kentish, Alan Dyer. In Dyer’s version, Strzelecki’s tree died in the 1930s but visitor interest was so great another tree was found to take its place. The tree demolished in 1976 was the substitute. If that seems to lessen the crime, consider that Strzelecki’s story is no longer told at Cradle now the mnemonic has vanished.
I gave back with a story that fitted my mood. In 1916, a University of Tasmania biology professor, Theodore Flynn, and his seven-year-old son, Errol, visited Cradle so the professor could collect native animals. The Flynns were met at the Deloraine railway station by Gustav Weindorfer, today widely known as the Austrian botanist whose advocacy would lead to the creation of the Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair National Park and who, when the Flynns arrived, was living at Cradle in the chalet he and his wife Kate had built four years earlier.
Weindorfer was intimately connected to the people of the north-west, through farming, Kate’s family and Cradle Mountain. His farm was next to that of my great grandparents at Kindred. My grandmother remembered him asking her, across their shared boundary fence, why she wasn’t at school although she was eight. After he talked to her parents, she found herself the eldest and tallest girl in grade one.
My grandfather, Norm Croome, ran the skin and wool store in Sheffield and recounted his visits to Weindorfer’s chalet to buy skins from the Austrian and dry out by his fire before heading over to Cradle, with horse, money and shotgun, to buy more skins.
Weindorfer was linked to those around him by hundreds of such threads until most were severed by prejudice against German speakers during World War I, prejudice that was even deeper in Tasmania, according to historian Marilyn Lake, than elsewhere in the British Empire.
Weindorfer was pushed out of the Ulverstone Club in 1916. His retreat to Cradle after Kate’s death the same year set tongues wagging. When he bought wire for a clothes line, it was said he was radioing Vienna. Some threads were not cut completely. For the rest of his life my grandfather refused to stay in the same room as a German, but made an exception for Austrians in deference to Weindorfer. The warmth of Weindorfer’s highland hearth kept some of the chill of bias at bay. For the most part, however, the charming immigrant became a threatening alien.
On the way out of Deloraine, Professor Flynn asked Weindorfer to stop so he could examine some rare grasses by the side of the road. Weindorfer saw a curtain move in a house opposite and knew what it meant. He knocked on the door and said, “You know who I am. Professor Flynn is just collecting botanical specimens.” But it didn’t make any difference. The next day a constable knocked on the chalet door to say there had been a complaint of suspicious activity.
My friend was quick to draw what he saw as the life-shaping lesson for a child who went on to scandalise Hobart and the world: people will say whatever they want no matter what you do, so feel free to do whatever you want no matter what they say.
I responded with the opposite lesson Weindorfer might have drawn: if people are intent on cutting all ties to you, create new ties to them and their descendants with a legacy they will prize forever.
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.
