'Prima di morire, vedete la Tasmania; e un paradiso eterno.' Although I am a native of Launceston, I am told that our native flora is in many respects similar to those of the Fatherland. We have our moss-covered hills with tufted ferns feathering deep little stony brooks, rosy prodigality of briers and summer scented broom.
JOHN FITZGERALD
The Tasmanian writer C.J. Koch maintains that Tasmania is different from the rest of Australia.
'The entire land-mass of Australia, most of it flat and very dry, lies north of latitude forty. Tasmania, filled with mountains and hills, lies south of latitude forty, directly in the path of the Roaring Forties. It genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent: in the upside-down frame of the Antipodes, it duplicates North-western Europe, while the continent is Mediterranean and then African. So it was very easy, in what was once Van Diemen's Land, for our great-grandfathers to put together the lost totality of England.'
It is not clear to me at least why C.J. Koch's German ancestors should have wanted 'to put together the lost totality of England'. Australians might imagine a totality of England for the same reason that Englishmen imagine a totality of Australia, sheer ignorance. The exiles took their scraps of wilderness and did their best to turn them, not into a simulacrum of a nation state, but into home. They cleared the native trees and scrub, tried to grow the food that they knew both how to grow and how to cook. If they became prosperous they built houses like the ones successful people inhabited in the regions they had left. The names the early settlers chose were not connected with 'England', or even the home counties or Cockney London, but with provincial Britain, the depressed areas which supplied not only the convicts, but the soldiers who guarded the convicts, and the free settlers and the miners. The map-makers went by superficial similarities of topography and climate; if an estuary reminded them fleetingly of Devon, they called the river the Tamar and the new town above the estuary they called Launceston.
Most of the settlers had small reason to love something called 'England', their first colonial master; one of the reasons they hated England was that its draconian economic policies had driven them into exile from Devonport and Bridport, from Swansea and Melton Mowbray, from Sheffield and Derby, from Deloraine and Queenstown, and they brought the names and their provincial accents with them to the far south side of the world. C.J. Koch plays down the predominant Scots-Irish-Welsh character of the life they tried to build. Australia was not principally 'another Kent, another Dorset, another Cumberland for the free settlers': it was a mosaic of tiny bits of Ulster, Wales. Cornwall, the Scottish Highlands, Norfolk, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derbyshire. It was the later suburbanites who called places Brighton and Beaumaris and Dover Heights.
Australians like to pretend that Tasmania is their Norway. They go there to eat venison and buy smoked salmon, and call Tasmanians Taswegians. It is in the interests of tourism, Tasmania's only growth industry, to pretend that Tasmania is exotic and antique but any real differences between Tasmania and the mainland are minimal. While it is true that Tasmania lies south of latitude forty, it is also true that the effect of the Roaring Forties is felt on the southern shore of the mainland, where the climatic type of southern Victoria, called 'cool temperate west coast' in the geography books, is the same. Cape Otway and Wilson's Promontory, like King Island and the Furneaux Islands, are tassels on the end of the chain of the Great Dividing Range.
A Tasmanian who abandoned Tasmania for Sydney might be impressed by the contrast, but no Victorian facing into the Tasmanian wind has any feeling of novelty. The seal-grey clouds that roll across the sky are the self-same ones that cancelled most of the tennis when I was at school in Melbourne. The wind has the same rawness; it delivers a slap like a wet towel, with no hint of the crispness of frost. I knew well the massive blue-grey sea that shifted its surface like sliding plates of rock, uneasy to the horizon and beyond. I remembered the old shiver, when I read
Great waves looked over others coming in
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
I have stood on the coast of New England where those lines were written and felt nothing like the coldness that creeps into the bowels when looking south from the western Victorian coast towards a heaving horizon beyond which there is only Antarctica and the dark blue sky. The polar ice-cap only has to warm up a fraction of a degree and that vast indifferent water whose temperature never changes will in its huge inertia do something to the shore. It will not be like aqua alta in Venice, slopping over the mosaic floor of San Marco; it will be dark, implacable, dreadful. This, with its grinding shift of dark water by the ton, is not a sea to swim in; instead I waded in the rock pools with the other creatures that sheltered from its thumping roar, or dug myself a hole in which to hide from the stinging sand spray and read my inevitable book. I learned to swim in Port Philip Bay, practically land-locked and warmed with sewage; on the blue-black ocean on the see-saw slopes of the westerlies I learned to fish. And, like all fishermen, I learned to fear the sea.
Tasmania and the remoter parts of southern Victoria show the same pattern of attempts at intensive agriculture and sporadic mining activity, now mostly abandoned. The eastern half of the island is the same rolling parkland cleared of native vegetation and striped with massive bulwarks of spreading conifers planted a hundred years ago for windbreaks, now dense black arcades sucking light from the air.
The conifers are Cupressus macrocarpa, native to Monterey, California, like that other arboreal scourge of Southern Australia, Pinus radiata. Once the settlers had realised that the cypresses, first identified in 1838, grew rapidly and were unbowed in the very teeth of the gales that batter the Californian coast, they could not wait to import them. As fast as they ringbarked, burnt and grubbed up the native tree cover, they propagated and planted out long lines of Cupressus macrocarpa, to stop their newly naked soil from blowing away. They planted them round their houses, and alongside the home paddocks. They defined driveways and entrances and boundaries with fast-growing walls of fresh green, lemon-scented when crushed. The trees grew fast, and kept on growing fast, upwards until they reached their full height of forty metres or so, and then, ominously, outwards. As they spread they turned a darker colour, a bitter green, atrabilious, the black of the vegetable world. The lateral branches pushed sideways and kept on pushing, until the great black base of the tree was broader than the tree was high.
Nobody could have imagined that in their new environment, suckled on the sweet water borne on the southwesterlies, unscorched by frost, the cypresses would grow so enormous. They engulfed houses, knocked over walls, squeezed cart tracks out of existence, and created tracts of desert strewn with their shed scales. The native eucalypts are leggy and shallow-rooting but these titanic trees have their tap roots sunk in the bedrock; nothing can uproot them nor can their sawn stumps decay. They never sprout or coppice but stand impenetrable as stupas for a hundred years. The native birds avoid their funereal branches. No orchid, no mushroom, no climber will grow in this driest of dry shade. Here and there householders tired of living in the roaring darkness underneath them have assaulted their flinty branches with chain saws, laying open the creaking skeletons beneath their green-black raiment. The amputated arms do not bud but display their nakedness like a curse.
In a cemetery outside the western district town of Birregurra, I was trying to read gravestones for someone else's family with the wind that always accompanied me whipping my wet hair into my eyes, when a groan came from somewhere under my feet and a limb of one of these black trees crashed to earth a few feet away. The tree was one of a double file which had originally marked the road to a little stone church, which now lay in ruins. Left to themselves the trees will soon uproot the headstones and crack open the graves. Most of the farmers are long gone; the village schools and churches and church halls that they built are ruinous, but the black trees will be there forever.
The Australian belief that Tasmania is unlike the rest of Australia and very like England is rather like the impression that most people had of my father, namely that he was English. He did not trouble to deny that he was English, although he was careful not to overdo it, chooms being fairly universally detested. He was English, born in South Africa, brought up in Tasmania. This scenario combined all that was acceptable about Englishness without the negative elements of whingeing pommery. A man with this quaint insular background would be more charming, more olde worlde than a brash mainlander. This corresponds with the view that Tasmania takes of itself, as a tiny, picturesque, friendly sort of place. In fact Tasmania is dirt poor and struggling to survive. The centrifugal pull of the great cities of the mainland is, has been, and will always be, too much for it.
The free settlers and the emancipists shared a dream of rich farmland serving pleasant market towns, each with handsome churches, a library, a couple of schools, a shire hall and a mechanics' institute, and the usual flotilla of shoemakers, clothiers, jewellers, pastrycooks, saddlers, fodder merchants, blacksmiths, a lawyer or two, all within easy distance of their farms. It was not to be. Although the churches were built and still stand, because they were built with love and lavishness of real stone or solid brick, the towns have collapsed around them. The farmers could not generate enough economic activity to sustain such an infrastructure. The land was simply not productive enough. If the cropping was good, Australia was too far away from the great markets of Europe and there were not sufficient ships to carry the produce there in time. Tasmanian apples sold in London until they were pushed out by cheaper and better American produce. Anything Tasmania could grow, Victoria could grow and sell, without the expense of crossing Bass Strait. Though the settlers may have had a dream of becoming a sturdy yeomanry, the historical epoch for such a development was over. Only commercial farming of cheap foodstuffs for the urban masses was to be viable. The small farmers of Australia struggled for generations. Even today, one in three of all Australian farms is without income of any kind.
When I was born Australia had one of the most urbanised populations in the world; since then centralisation has intensified. More and more the countryside becomes a resort for trippers from the capitals; as the motorways streak out from the cities, the city dwellers travel further and further to create 'sophisticated recreational lifestyles'. On remote Cape Otway, after half an hour driving on a sand track, I came across a kind of private zoo for urbanites, where houses made of glass and western red cedar were to be tastefully hidden among the stringybarks and heather, affording an unimpeded view of wombats and blue-tongued lizards, as well as the golf club tucked away at the end of the drive. We may scoff at the settlers who broke their hearts trying to turn this ancient, implacable continent into a granary, and we may execrate their memory for inflicting upon us sparrows and rabbits and blackberries to destroy the native flora and fauna, but at least they did not use the countryside as entertainment. They did not trifle with it, but gave it all they had.
When my father was a boy in Launceston, it was still a live city, supporting two good newspapers, churches of every denomination, two public schools for rich boys, half a dozen local primary schools, half a dozen clothing and drapery stores, a number of cricket clubs, rowing clubs, a football league. There was hardly such a thing as 'leisure', let alone a mass of people 'leading sophisticated recreational lifestyles'. Everyone was busy at school or at work, for long hours; once a week at the end of their ten-hour work-day, all the boys had to do cadet drill.
The Launcestonians created their own entertainment, and were not simply spectators of entertainment generated in faraway Sydney, or further-away Hollywood. In their spare time they went to church, and then trained for the sports events which happened every week, rehearsed for the church choir, the band, the annual concert, the amateur theatricals, the Gilbert and Sullivan, the smoking concert. They arranged fêtes, bazaars, raffles, contests, made cakes, garments, bibelots, etcetera for the fêtes, bazaars and so forth, attended race meetings, cricket matches, regattas, football, cycling, hockey, rifle shoots, lectures on theosophy, hypnotism, spiritualism, exotic religions, gave parties for engagements, weddings, anniversaries, visitors from the mainland, retiring dignitaries, grew things, cooked, embroidered and preserved things for the local show, and competed in practically every human activity including rabbit-skinning, sheep-shearing and the wood-chop. The Launceston newspapers carried long lists of names of everyone who took part in anything, including parties given for visiting or retiring clergymen in outlying districts; obscure indeed must have been the individual whose name never appeared in any such list.
Reg Greer's name does not appear in any such list. Neither does any Greer except W., who won some of the cycling races at the annual Caledonian Games on New Year's Day in 1910. I was sure I had found Daddy's elder brother.
Doubtless the entertainments thus provided were rather rustic; the dresses at the parties and the race meetings were probably years behind the Paris fashions, and more beer was drunk than claret, and the singing and dancing and acting were probably downright laughable, but everybody on the street had somewhere to go and something to do, and people to appreciate it when it was done. With such satisfactions there was hardly any reason to go in search of more sophisticated (and costly) professional entertainment. The advent of the movies changed all that.
Launceston was a port, and the principal supply depot for the miners of the north-west. In 1871 James 'Philosopher' Smith had found the greatest lode of tin ever at Mount Bischoff, eight miles from Burnie on the northern coast of Tasmania from where it was shipped to smelters in Launceston; by 1889, under its manager H.W.F. Kayser from the mining town of Clausthal in the Harz mountains, the Mount Bischoff Tin Mining Company had paid ￡1,000,000 in dividends. More tin was found in Scottsdale and Ringarooma to the east of Launceston together with zircons and sapphires. Then gold was found in the vicinity of Beaconsfield, on the Tamar estuary north of Launceston, and silver at Zeehan and gold at Mount Lyell. The population of the town grew from 20,000 to 60,000.
The mining boom of the eighties relieved twenty years of depression; the see-saw kept moving. Speculation was repeatedly followed by inflation and collapse. The great days of Tasmanian tin, gold, copper and lead were followed by the spasm of Tasmanian scheelite, but the lodes could not compete with more accessible lodes in other parts of Australia and money ceased to be available for development of Tasmanian mining. Tasmania is now permanently depressed. Most successful Tasmanians, like C.J. Koch, leave Tasmania and go to the mainland. Unsuccessful Tasmanians also leave. Gone are the days when Tasmanian mining shares were quoted on the stock exchanges of the world and when Tasmanian apples were shipped around the world to London, the only apples available in the early English spring. The damp air and low cloud brought on by the incessant westerlies do put one in mind of Somerset, and apples used to be the result, but when I drove all around the eastern part of the island in December I saw not a single apple tree. Instead I saw tiny towns of a street or two of recognisably Victorian houses, some built in stone, with signs begging rich mainlanders to visit them, although their souvenir shops were closed and only the pub stood open for the convenience of a drinker or two. I passed dozens of tiny churches and dozens of graveyards full of surnames that had vanished from Tasmania, one of which was Greer.
A William Greer died in Tasmania in 1832, and a James Greer in 1849. A Mrs Greer lived at Perth in 1881, a James Greer farmed in New Norfolk in 1896–7, and a Frances Greer died at Longford in 1895, unmarried, aged sixty-five, of dropsy of the lungs. In each case the trail ended right there; none of these people had issue living in Tasmania. As I was looking for Greers who arrived in Tasmania in 1907 or 1908, I gave no importance to the Perth-Longford-Campbelltown Greers. However, one Greer family kept turning up like King Charles's head. They were three brothers from Maghera, who emigrated in 1854. All the brothers used their mother's name Shaw as well as their surname Greer. The first to be associated with Tasmania is the middle brother, John Shaw Greer, who was born in Maghera in 1834. In 1863 John Shaw Greer entered the Methodist ministry. He married a girl called Elizabeth Bennett, who bore him a son, Mansley John, in Deloraine in 1873. He was based at Campbelltown from 1875 to 1878, and his baby daughter, Millicent Laura, died there in March 1878 of teething and diarrhoea. By 1880, when his son Claude was born, the family was living in Launceston and appears in Manning's Directory for 1881–2. Some time after that the family moved to Victoria, and never came back to Tasmania.
The primal elder's curse made sure not only that I brought my bad weather with me to Tasmania, but that, when I opened my spectacles case to read on the plane, it was inexplicably empty. Although the Sunday evening was damp and blustery, I explored the tiny grid of streets lined with two-storey shops in the hope of finding an optician: there was no one about. The cinema was closed; all the cafés and fast-food bars were closed. The shop fa?ades were supplied with metal awnings, on which hung illuminated signs advertising the 'House of this' and 'exclusive that'. I saw a tiny boutique (pronounced bo-teek in Australian) that advertised 'Pret a Porte'; another was the home of Comfoot-Plus Footwear; Casa Mondé sold lamps, a few doors along from the Lets-B-Crafty Craft Shop. Only the pharmacy was open.
In twenty minutes I had walked the length and breadth of the town centre, where there were almost no office buildings; it was no more than a shopping centre after all. I was amazed at the number of opportunity shops which sold cast-offs in aid of the Salvation Army, St Vincent de Paul, and the Red Cross. It seemed hardly possible that the people of Launceston had so much clothing to discard; I wondered if the clothes had been shipped from elsewhere to the poor of northern Tasmania, for the other shops were thinly stocked and the goods shoddy. In the centre of the noughts-and-crosses grid of one-way streets designed to force the motorist to pull up and pay attention to down-town Launceston, there was a pedestrian plaza. Its two telephone boxes had been vandalised. Over the whole lay the smell of frying beef dripping which characterises Australian cities, where fish-and-chip shops are more often encountered than stockbrokers.
Launceston is potentially a pretty town, with the wide river moving sleepily to its serpentine estuary, kept snug by tight blue hills. The few thousand houses nestle in the river valley like sugar crystals in the cupped palm of a hand. Launceston is but a mill town after all, but a mill town tormented by the dreams of avarice. Boom threw up the huge churches and Romanesque emporiums, and built tall houses with intricate gables and barge boards, sweeping stairs and elaborate verandahs. Bust sold off the gardens of the big houses for sub-division. Launceston has neither the poetry of workmen's houses marching in egalitarian rows up and down, nor the leafy elegance of a spa town, but an uncomfortable mixture of the two. Clots of suburbia have coagulated in the valley and grabbed the heights, with wasteland and pasture cropping out in between. Cheap brick veneer cuddles up to the great Victorian houses, compromising their dignity, revealing them as simply monstrous. Flowers splurt out of gardens too small to hold them, spilling on to streets absurdly wide, up which cars occasionally wander, adrift on a sea of tarmac.
Poor and draggle-tail though it is, Launceston has charm. When the town woke up the next morning I discovered that, though the telephone boxes might be vandalised, traders are happy to offer the use of the telephone. The optician could not sell me magnifying spectacles, but he lent me a pair of heavy hornrims without asking for a deposit. Nobody stared, nobody badgered, nobody bullied or hurried.
In the Local History Room at the Launceston Public Library a lady in rose consulted the biographical index and handed me a clipping. It was the death notice from the Launceston Examiner dated the 24th of August, 1908, of William Lyons Shaw Greer. (My father would have been nearly four years old.) It carried the imposing addendum 'Interstate papers please copy'; among the personal notes on another page was a longer account of how William Lyons Shaw Greer had 'died suddenly early on Saturday morning' at his residence, 'The Hollies', in Youngtown. 'The event cast a gloom over the district,' wrote the anonymous correspondent. William Lyons Shaw, or W.L.S., as I quickly came to call him, was the youngest of the three brothers. He had been in Tasmania about twenty-five years, for most of them as resident Secretary of the Victorian Mutual Life Assurance Association. He had abandoned his Methodist religion and was lay-reader at St Leonard's Church of England, superintendent of the Sunday School and church treasurer. He had eight children, who were listed as Arthur, Harold, Millie, Olive, Clara, Kathleen, Gertrude and William. No Reg. No Eric. No Eric Reginald.
The rose lady (whose name turned out to be Mrs Rosemann) did not doubt, and neither did I, that we had found my family. It was only a question of finding the missing link. My father could have been the child of Arthur or Harold or William. I didn't take to the picture of the patriarch in the weekly pictorial. He seemed short and bumptious to me, with his round bald forehead surrounded by a black froth of beard and whisker and a smug little smile laying round his mouth. I liked him even less when I discovered that he had died intestate. Over the weeks that followed I got to know W.L.S. better and to dislike him more.
W.L.S. went originally to the Victorian goldfields at Maldon: there he married another member of the Methodist congregation, Christina Symons. She gave him four children, the Millie, Olive, Clara and Harold of the announcement, before she died in 1884. I gazed at the photograph of Harold William Greer for a long time. He was dressed in the uniform of a lance-corporal of the second contingent of Imperial Bushmen which had sailed for the Transvaal on the Chicago in 1901, when he was nineteen. It may have been simply his youth, but the face that gazed out of the photograph was artless, finer than his father's smug and shining bonce, more like my Daddy I thought.
At the time of his father's death, Harold William was a schoolteacher on King Island in Bass Strait. I could find no indication that he had ever been married, or fathered a child in South Africa. Upon hearing of his father's death he resigned and left the windy isolation of King Island for Launceston, confident, I daresay, that he was his father's heir and the years of drudgery in one-room schools were over.
Harold William was the first-born son, but he had two half-brothers and two half-sisters. W.L.S. re-married very soon after the death of his first wife, when Harold William was still a baby. The second wife, Annie Elizabeth Martin, came with him to Tasmania in November 1883 and bore her first child, Arthur Edmund Greer, in March 1884. Her second, Kate, was born a year later; her third, another boy, William Martin, was born four years after that, and her last, Gertrude, was born in June 1893, eighteen months before her mother's death from 'tuberculosis and convulsions' at the age of forty-one.
After Annie Elizabeth's death, W.L.S. had resigned from his position with the insurance company, although he was offered promotion to company secretary when it amalgamated with another society. He justified his early retirement for 'family reasons', but it seems likely that the hapless Annie Elizabeth had brought money with her and had left it behind. In 1888 he had acquired the finest house in Franklin Village, on the south side of Launceston. It had been built as a speculation in 1838 by a brewer, in the best, if already outmoded, Ulster Georgian style with Australian cedar panelling and marble fireplaces. W.L.S. called the house 'The Hollies' and planted a cherry orchard and brewed cherry wine. He and his wife were patrons of the little church of St James which stood like their own private chapel just across the road. He sent Annie's boys to public school. In 1895 he acquired Clifton Park, 1,200 acres on the Supply River north of Launceston, with a further 262 acres adjoining. In 1899 he bought an allotment of three and a quarter acres at Wivenhoe as a speculation.
The day W.L.S. failed to wake up his empire fell apart. Harold William had to appoint the Permanent Trustees' Association executors of his father's estate, which was, unknown to the children, encumbered with a large mortgage. Nobody seemed to want to stay at 'The Hollies'; Harold William took over immediately and charged the Trustees ten shillings a week for the eleven weeks that he stayed. Then a Miss Greer 'minor' took over and did the job for two and six a week until April 1909. 'The Hollies' was becoming dilapidated when in 1910 it was sold for ￡500 to a Mr Hughes to give to his daughter for a wedding present. The allotment at Wivenhoe went in 1913 for ￡200.
Harold William applied for another teaching job but was refused. All the children, except Clara, Mrs Bryan, who stayed in Bismarck, and Gertrude, who lived all her life in Tasmania, keeping herself by teaching school, and died unmarried in 1963, left for the mainland. I considered the possibility that my father might have been the illegitimate son of one of the Greer girls, two of whom went nursing after their father's death, but no trace of an illegitimate birth could be found for any of them.
Clifton Park was no colonnaded mansion standing in rolling parkland with woolly sheep safely grazing. The only building on the land was a 'paling house of four rooms with iron roof besides kitchen, pantry and storeroom'; the pasture, dry in summer, flooded and cold in winter, was considered 'unsuitable for cattle or sheep'. It needed clearing, fencing, ditching and draining. In December 1908, the surveyor was already recommending a quick sale before the property could deteriorate further. Instead it was leased, but the lessee was unable to make his crops pay. In 1911 he had to sell his engine and his wagon to pay the rent. In 1917 the crops failed altogether and the tenant farmer defaulted on his rent. The property was split up and separately occupied by various farmers of the neighbouring district until in 1933 it was sold to pay costs. The children got nothing.
The first of the Shaw Greers to leave Tasmania seems to have been Arthur Edmund, whom I found after a long search, managing a station in western Queensland. Harold William also tried his luck in Queensland but after seventeen years he gave up and came south again. He stopped in Melbourne where he died, aged fifty, of a brain tumour and was buried in Burwood Cemetery, in June 1932. He had never married.
William's name is entered on the honour roll in St James's, Franklin Village, as having been wounded in the Great War. In 1933 William came to the Trustees' office to collect the family bible, so it seems that not only his half-brother but his elder brother too was dead. He married and went to New Guinea, probably when cattle were introduced there. Eventually he retired to Launceston where he lived from 1943 until he shot himself in 1968. He like his brothers had no child.
The trail was cold. I hired a car and drove out to Winkleigh, to look at Clifton Park for myself. The road wound northwards along the western bank of the Tamar estuary, which lay shimmering and tranquil in the lee of the hills to the south. At first I drove among suburban gardens choked with rampant blossoming plants. Hot pink and iridescent orange pelargoniums tumbled down concrete escarpments and frothed on to the road. Alyssum crawled out from under fences and rooted in the tarmac.
Gradually the suburban phantasmagoria faded away and rolling green paddocks took over, horses, cows, a few sheep, hobby farming country. I turned west from the estuary in the direction of Beaconsfield, driving through dappled sunlight under tall stringybarks. Cattle dreamed in the shoulder-high grass of the Supply River flats. In rolling fields above them on the other side of the river tractors were mowing or turning the cut grass over in long satiny swathes, filling the air with the scent of new-made hay. A sign creaked on the breeze, suddenly grown gentle, 'Clifton Park Hereford Stud' it read. Someone had done the ditching and draining, and poisoned the bulrushes. Someone had built calving sheds and grain stores and hay-ricks. I passed several old weatherboard houses with tin roofs, but the long drive of Clifton Park led to a red brick something I felt too shy to look more closely at. I dreaded being hailed by one of the tractor drivers, so I quickly turned and drove away. I was glad poor Harold William had been spared the sight of what nearly was his.
The only other thing I wanted to see was W.L.S.'s grave in Franklin Village. At first I couldn't find the village which seemed to have been shouldered aside by the main north-south motorway. I was driving back southwards along a road I had travelled on my way from the airport and several times since, when my eye fell on a green sandwich-board on the pavement. 'The Hollies' it read, diagonally. 'Tea-room'. I pulled up with a bump and ducked into a gravelled parking space, which turned out to be the car park of Franklin House, the first property acquired and restored by the Tasmanian National Trust. I was hungry and thirsty so I made for the tea-room called 'The Hollies' and ordered a salad and a cuppa.
'Is there a house called "The Hollies" hereabouts?' I asked, with a face red as fire.
'You're in it,' said the manageress. 'Franklin House used to be called "The Hollies" so they used the name for the tea-room.'
I didn't want to say that it was my forebear who had called the house by that name, or that it was simply someone with the same surname as mine. And I didn't want to explain my absurd situation, prying as I was into matters that may have been none of my business. But, like most Launcestonians, the manageress was expressing a kindly interest, so I told her of my miserable state of not-knowing.
'Take a look around.' she said. 'You never know. There might be a clue.'
I walked up the wide cedar staircase, and looked out over what used to be W.L.S.'s six-acre garden with its cherry orchard, and the gravelled sweep round to the stables and the carriage house. Except that all was just as I myself would like a house, there was nothing. None of the books or pictures in the house had been given by a Greer although there were pictures of the Hawkes family who had lived in the house before them, sent by their descendants from New Zealand. On the street side the house looked over a busy highroad; the once-salubrious residential area around it had been taken over by the noxious trades. Tanks of solvents and lakes of grease stood amongst chain-link fences, which crowded the island of sick yellow grass on which stood the tiny pink stone church of St James.
The manageress gave me the key to the little church, and I poked in the cupboards looking for the parish register, but it was not there, being in fact lost. The church is still used for baptisms, marriages and funerals of the descendants of the old parishioners, but none of the Greer children had chosen to be buried there, although W.L.S. lay alongside Annie Elizabeth under an imposing headstone. The old schoolfriend who collected William Martin's ashes was buried there. The man whose family firm lent the money on W.L.S.'s mortgage was buried there. But the children of William Lyons Shaw had spurned the family plot. I eventually traced every one and replaced it in its order, with its affines and its progeny, but even as I worked I knew my father was not a Shaw Greer.
There was nothing for it but to go to the Registrar-General's office in Hobart. I pointed my rented car towards the South Pole and set off under lowering skies.
In Hobart everything was different. A bitter wind knifed through the streets, forcing the citizens to scuttle from shop to shop. Everyone I spoke to seemed fractious and hurried, and I found myself becoming fulsomely apologetic. Thoroughly cowed, I crept into the Registrar-General's department, expecting to see something like St Katherine's House, where anyone may consult the index to the registers in privacy if not in peace and quiet. Instead I found a counter with booths, like a pawnbroker's shop.
'I should like to consult the index to the register,' I said to a blue crimplene lady.
She gave me a look that asked plainly, 'Who does she think she is?' 'Well, you can't,' was what she said.
'Why not?'
The silly question got the usual answer, 'It's not allowed.'
In the interests of people with something to hide, the indexes to the registers are closed to the public, by law. What I could do was, I could pay the staff of the Registrar-General's department ten dollars to search on my behalf. 'Give us a name, and we'll search for the entry for ten years for ten dollars.' On a system like this I could have been haemorrhaging ten-dollar bills. I demanded to see Mr Christie, the Registrar.
'That's been the law since the thirties. We can't make the records from 1900 onwards public, no, even though virtually all the people concerned are dead. That's right. Yes, the law probably does need to be up-dated. Well, no, I'm not exactly sure it's a law. What's the point of marriage registration if it doesn't make the marriage public? Yes, I see your point, but no, you can't see the indexes, and yes, I know it's a few minutes' work to check a relatively uncommon name over a ten-year period but that's what it costs.'
He withdrew behind his safety barrier. He had not said that his office would withhold the information I was seeking if they thought it bad for me, but if they didn't demand the right of censorship it was hard to see what justification their interference could possibly have had. Unless of course it was merely a way to squeeze money out of the public that was already paying their salaries. The message was plain; I could only have verification of information if I already had the information. In half an hour I could have done the work they were offering to charge me a fortune for; now it would take months and probably hundreds of dollars just to verify the fact that no member of my father's family was born, married or buried in Tasmania. And even then I couldn't be sure that the search had been done properly, or that information had not been withheld. If every other keeper of public records in Australia was to play the same game, my search for my grandparents was going to cost thousands of dollars. And so in fact it proved.
The Archives Office of Tasmania is a small and uncomfortable place. Here there was no lady in rose to take an interest or make helpful suggestions; a series of irritable young women and one languid young man vied with each other to avoid dealing with enquiries from the counter. I was not surprised that the librarians were sick and tired of tourist family historians anxious to prove that their convict ancestors came out with the first fleet. Their evident desire to discourage the spread of the craze, which had led to a massive increase in their work-load and no improvement in pay or conditions, had all my sympathy, but their coldness, boredom and rudeness, on what must have been a fairly slack day, for there were fewer readers than counter staff, diluted my sisterly feeling.
The system of delivery they had devised to protect the microfilm records from the far-fetched possibility of theft was cumbersome and difficult to understand, especially as they explained it so perfunctorily. Each of my mistakes produced noisy sighs and eye-rolling; every time I asked for a new microfilm, a wave of hostility surged over the counter at me. 'Are you sure you know what you're looking for?' one of them asked with a sneer.
'My grandparents,' I answered with the usual surge of shame. I wanted to ask what bloody business it was of hers, but I needed the feeble remnant of whatever good nature she had been born with, so I struggled on, determined to leave no record unturned, for I hoped fervently never to have to go that way again.
By the time they threw me out that evening my borrowed hornrims had worn a bruise on my nose and my head ached roaringly from eye-strain, so the next day I gave up the search through the records and drove by a roundabout route back to Launceston. For much of the way I drove through high banks of Shasta Daisies naturalised from some settler's long overgrown European garden. Their silvery-white stars and yellow buttons were pretty, but all wrong. Every now and then the tiny car was blasted off the road by the yodelling sirens of American-style timber lorries, carrying the forty-foot columnar trunks of Tasmanian hardwoods. I crept in among the daisies and watched sick at heart as the rigid load swung around the bends, carrying all that Tasmania has left that anybody wants.
The conservationists are all leading sophisticated recreational lifestyles elsewhere. Tasmanians have to live somehow, or leave. Perhaps they too are under a curse. For forty thousand years this tiny shield of rock supported forty thousand blacks, hunting and gathering in small, intricately woven kin-groups; in forty years they had been all but exterminated by the Cornishmen, the Irishmen, the Scotsmen, the Englishmen and the miners who came from everywhere. Beside the coast road near Triabunna I found a dead Tasmanian devil, still soft and warm in his glossy black coat with its clergyman's collar of shining white hairs.
'Forgive us,' I said to his dead smile full of needle-sharp teeth. To myself I said, 'We have no business here.'
