writer BERT SPINKS photographer PEN TAYLER

Here’s an idea for your next kids’ day out, social excursion or romantic date: head to the cemetery where your ancestors are buried and wander around with a map of the plots, trying to find your surname on the headstones. With a bit of luck, it will be a bitterly cold day and your stumblings around the dead centre of town will be directly in the path of a stiff breeze. You may find that the graves of your grandparents’ grandparents are unmarked. It’ll be a splendid day out and you can follow it up with a quick swim at Preservation Beach.

Yes, it’s something I have done. The Penguin General Cemetery has a lovely hillside vantage point, looking over Bass Strait as it curves beyond the town, burdened with a jumble of volcanic rock. But it also seems to be overcast every time I visit there, and on my last visit I noticed bandicoots had dug snout holes into some grave sites, as if trying to disinter the skeletons.

Among the first whitefellas in Penguin were my forebears. If I have calculated correctly, they were my great-great-great grandparents. In 1857, John and Jemima Spinks left their home in Norfolk, England, and sailed away on the basis of a promise of land. They were the sort of poor, young tenant farmers who were recruited around this time to build Tasmania’s workforce, filling gaps made by the cessation of convict imports.

John and Jemima brought four children with them on the Southern Eagle. This can not have been an easy decision to make. Migrants’ stories are often epics.

The Spinkses were among a handful of families that were encouraged to try their luck on north-west coast. Most of them were from Norfolk and they can’t have much known what they were in for. The remote districts of the Tasmanian north-west coast had largely been avoided by colonists during the conflict period and the subsequent expansion of farming settlements. In particular, the country around Penguin was late to be cleared, due to a lack of amenable anchorages.

Timber-splitters seem to have set up camps in the area sometime in the 1850s, and boat-builders could be found at Sulphur Creek in 1857. Another boat builder, EJ Beecraft, was the first to take up land in what is now Penguin. The allotments they claimed were covered with wet eucalyptus forest. Massive gum trees would have towered over them, meshed together with thickets of robust greenery. The first inhabitants of the north-west coast had been removed by force; having gone without fire for a couple of decades, the bush there would have grown back in a welter, countless species forming dense vegetation that pressed all the way to the coastline.

It would have been unlike anything John and Jemima Spinks would have seen in the east of England. To clear it demanded an astonishing amount of manual labour. Many of the biggest trees were ringbarked – they’d die, in due course, and then come crashing down unannounced. I often wonder what stories my ancestors told late at night to fill the silence, to explain the strangeness, to make sense of it all. They had a handful of kids after all: they needed to keep them entertained and also to try and calm them down, ward off too many nightmares. No doubt the local fauna would have been a source of nuisance and terror. (Even now you might catch European acquaintances shudder at the calls of possums or native hens at midnight, let alone the ominous shrieking of masked owls or devils.)

I’ve also pondered what it was like to know that a long chapter of human history had come close to an end in that corner of the island, so recently and with such bloodshed. They probably weren’t told much by the migration agent who’d scouted them back in Norfolk, but the stories would have been bandied about – some settlers on the north-west coast were former convicts and veterans of the Black War. Yet, most likely, they thought little about it. If anything, they may merely have been relieved.

Naturally, timber was the earliest form of income for the new landholders in Penguin. They had an array of trees to chop down and cut up. Across the strait, a town called Melbourne was in the process of becoming a city, and it was desperate need of split timber. Meanwhile, as the forest was felled, crops could then be sown into the rich, coffee-coloured soil. Potatoes, wheat, oats and turnips were grown. Spuds, in particular, would become the heart of the local economy for decades.
 
Although they had neighbours in the vicinity – their surnames, such as Ling, Fielding, Lillico and Sushames are also frequent on the headstones on the hill – they were all isolated from the rest of the island’s population. They had almost no relationship with the government in Hobart. In the first years, for instance, settlers even had to travel to neighbouring towns to mill their grain – it wasn’t until 1866 that a small, water-driven flour mill was built at Sulphur Creek.

Mail came infrequently, and in delivering it, the mailmen of the day went through great duress. There was little that resembled a road. In his memoirs, early north-west coaster James Fenton described the difficulty well. “When the scrub overhanging the path was wet with rain – and it was hardly ever dry during the winter or spring – the traveller rode for miles as though he was under a shower bath.” In those days you could find a postman sitting on horseback, hugging himself, sobbing. Indeed, the first paid postman was a young man named Parsons – his body was later twisted with arthritis from being cold and wet at length. “Such was the tragic end of our young pioneer mailman in this roadless forest. In those harsh days, little mail came through,” Fenton wrote.

Another intrepid traveller was a Methodist preacher named Thomas Trebilco, who initiated the first religious services – and presided over Penguin’s first marriage – in 1864. Two years later, the original Primitive Methodist Church was built, a simple weatherboard chapel amidst the wreckage of cleared forest. Around the same time, the first police officer was stationed in Penguin, right on the waterfront, opposite the old railway station, and at last the area was being connected to the systems and governance of contemporary Tasmania.
 

At this point, I will fast forward through a selection of stories, moments scattered across half a century. In 1861, John and Jemima Spinks had a son named Charles, one of the 10 children they eventually brought into this world, although not all of them lived to adulthood. Charles married a Ling, ad one of their sons was my great-grandfather, Leslie Herbert Spinks. He was one of seven. The Primitive Methodist Church burnt down, and in 1903 a rather exotic replacement was constructed. Around the same time, another a rival cult was being born: Australian rules football had become popular on the north-west coast. In 1890, the mighty Penguin Two Blues came into being.

My great-grandfather – he was better-known as Herb – played footy for the Two Blues and sang baritone in the Methodist Church. One of his brothers, George, fought in World War I. Assigned to the 52nd battalion, Private George Spinks was killed near the village of Pozières in France.

Such stories, brief and fragmented as they are, lure me back to Penguin on a regular basis. One of my favourite buildings in Tasmania is the church where my great-grandfather belted out hymns in his deep voice. It’s now the Penguin Uniting Church, a curious amalgam of Federation and Carpenter Gothic styles, with local timbers featured in the interior.

Another of my favourite places is the old footy ground in the centre of town. It was retired a few years back; home games are now played on a swish new field up the hill, under the Dial Range. Looking at the compactness of the old ground, it’s quite a marvel to think that a footy oval, clubrooms and grandstand could all fit in here. Goals kicked at either end would land in the neighbours’ backyards. Today – for now, anyway – it’s just an empty lot, the home ground for a flock of plovers, who are as belligerent as any north-west ruck-rover from the days of yore.

In closing, I must also mention the giant ferrocement penguin that stands proudly on the esplanade. It’s about 10 times the size of the real penguins that have nested on the coast for millennia. Constructed to commemorate the town’s centenary, it has become part of the town’s history and folklore. I’m keen to proclaim it the best of Tassie’s oversized icons – much better than the Big Spud in Sassafras, for instance – but as you now know, I have some bias towards the town of Penguin.
 

Bert Spinks grew up in Beaconsfield and is now, mostly, a resident of Launceston. He is a writer, storyteller and bushwalking guide, each of which feed and reflect his interest in the way human communities interact with place and landscape. He focuses especially on journeys and movement, language and literature. Although based in Launceston, Bert spends much of his time without a home because he is in one of the world's wild or interesting places pursing local lore.

Pen Tayler is a Tasmanian writer and photographer. She photographed 12 towns for Towns of Tasmania, written by Bert Spinks, and has written and provided images for Hop Kilns of Tasmania (both Forty South Publishing). She has also written a book about Prospect House and Belmont House in the Coal River Valley.