AN INTRODUCTION
In my Tasmanian childhood, stars fell to the streets, convicts smashed up pianos, Aborigines guffawed as they romped in flour, packs of devils bit the legs off horses, babies were found behind waterfalls, whole families dressed in sugar sacks and a lost Valley of Gold hidden by forbidding peaks revealed itself but once a year at Easter.
A swollen river of stories roared in my ears. They were told by my parents and grandparents, and other farmers of the Kentish Plain. Sometimes, their story-telling was prompted by the boredom of farm work. I could tell you a suite of astounding tales about baling twine that I absorbed as I helped my father feed the cows. But most often the stories were evoked by the drives we took and the land rolling by, so that each field, stream and mountainside became associated in my mind with people and deeds long gone. This investment of the landscape with meaning and memory suspended me in a web of connection. It was impossible for me to know where the muddy land ended and my small body began.
These stories could tell of yesterday or a hundred years before. When my father was 10 he heard stories from his 100 year old great aunt who had seen chain gangs in the street and thylacines disappear into the woods. The great disjunctures in Tasmanian history – all the destruction, forgetting and renaming - make our short European past seem unusually ancient, disorderly and distant. But the marvels our stories describe give the impression these stories are spoken with a single voice. They weave the Island and its past together into a continuous whole connecting us all.
It is the same in the books hardly anyone reads. Tasmania has been blessed with hundreds of local chroniclers. “Unreliable historians” I have heard them called. But they are very reliable folklorists. They recorded the ghost stories, the whispered horrors, the sudden joys, the moral dilemmas, the feats, tribulations, jokes, dialects, unlikely coincidences and inconsolable sufferings of their localities, all in the same way they would write down the year the town hall was built. What mattered to these chroniclers was not the lesser truth of fact, but whether what they wrote was true to who their people were.
During school holidays I would find these books on sale for almost nothing in second-hand shops. It was the 1970s and Tasmania still adhered, officially at least, to its particular antipodean style of futurism. But I looked backward. With the high purpose of a child, I once took a spade to the far corner of our farm, near where the Don River rises, to find the lost city I knew must be there. As I retreated to our barn to read the books I’d bought, among the bales of hay and sacks of Algerian oats, I discovered others had done the digging for me. These books spoke in the same voice I heard on our long drives, a voice that treated the marvellous like it was the everyday. I loved them.
Only later, in the small, intense intellectual circles of Hobart after the Franklin Dam blockade, did I begin to lay these stories out and see the links between them. There’s a willow-plate dump on South Arm where, after hours of discovery, the hundreds of sherds one spreads out on a table begin to reveal how the long-smashed crockery looked. So it was with my universe of Tasmanian stories. They began to fit together unexpectedly: I found the one event retold many very different ways; a singular idea running through dozens of very different stories; the deliberate miss-telling of stories to portray Tasmania in a particular way; a substratum of Old World folklore beneath stories that are ostensibly about something quite different; a confirmation of genocidal violence against First Nations, mistreatment of women, and cruelty towards ethnic and sexual minorities, but in unexpected and self-critical ways; and always the same revealing absences and silences. For me, these patterns began to answer the question: who are we Tasmanians?
Obviously, there are many different ways to answer that question. Geographers measure the land, demographers the population. Historians tell us what actually happened, and what is just myth. Novelists tell truths through their fictions. By laying out the patterns I see in Tasmania’s folklore, I seek to do something different. My interest is not in the truth of what once definitely occurred, nor the truth in what is entirely made up, but the truths revealed by what is remembered, how it is remembered and why. What I recall about my life, and what I don’t, tells me as much about myself as what I actually did. So it is with entire societies. Until we reflect on what is remembered, by whom and to what end, are we fully people, let alone a people? Aren’t we just objects to ourselves? I want to look into the mirror of Tasmanian memory with the same disabused and sympathetic self-conscious gaze I look at my own aging face.
And I want to do it now because the question of who we are matters to me more than ever. In the past we rarely saw ourselves represented and into that void fell our self-regard. How unimportant we must be to so rarely be looked at, or so we thought. When other Australians did “look” at us it was as a screen upon which they projected, and exonerated themselves from, their own racism, homophobia and fear of being backward. Today, there is an additional problem. We are commodified as a quaint, quirky and quiet backyard for Victorians, or politicised as a straw-person for successive federal governments and as a welfare hole for the nation. In nationally-made film and television we know ourselves only as curtly-spoken extras in a beanie-wearing, mist-exhaling version of the continent. We are seen now, but as much less than we actually are.
The more we see ourselves through the eyes of others, the steadily poorer, unhappier and easier to exploit we become, until that point where we cease to exist altogether in any meaningful sense. Our 19th century forebears used the word “nation” to describe us, but after a century of sitting on the federal naughty step, few of us feel so confident today.
How do we reclaim some of that confidence? My answer is to harken to the rivers of stories that roar in my ears and try to hear what they really say. It is to help make my small contribution to the great project of releasing those obstructed rivers to the sea so they quench a world thirsty for wonder.
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.
