The Potato Factory

by Bryce Courtenay

  Degraves sighed and dismissed Mary with a backward wave of his hand. 'As you wish, Miss Abacus, I can see you do not surrender easily.'

  Mary smiled and lowered her eyes to show her respect, though she laughed inwardly, thinking of the motto inscribed on her Waterloo medal. 'Thank you, sir, you have been most gracious,' she replied.

  Degraves threw back his head and laughed. 'Prudent, Miss Abacus! Prudent to the tune of thirty pounds a week! I shall not think well of you if this turns out badly, and there will be little graciousness about my manner as I dismiss you from service.'

  Mary continued to work for the brewery after its completion and by the time she had served out her ticket of leave she was intimate with every step in the process of making beer. She had been correct. Good men came from everywhere to seek employment at the new brewery where the practice of issuing ration chits had been continued and, as had also been the case on the work site, pilfering was reduced to insignificant proportions.

  Written into the wrought-iron gate of the brewery were the words 'Happy workers make happy beer' and this motto also appeared on the labels of the bottled product. The beer they produced at the Cascades Brewery was of a light colour and very pure and, while there were a dozen other breweries in Hobart, none could match the quality of Peter Degraves' excellent light ale and pilsener-style beer. Such was its superiority that it quickly became popular all over the island and ships carrying the company's timber to New South Wales increasingly came also to carry barrels of Cascade beer to Sydney.

  Mary soon realised that the difference in the beer was the quality of the malt they used and the pure mountain water. Peter Degraves had sited his mill near the confluence of the Hobart and the Guy Fawkes rivulets, damming them both to make a series of small lakes of pure mountain water. In addition to this he ran a pipeline from Strickland Falls, about a mile further upstream, which was the source of the purest water of all. The crystal-clear waters fed from a spring which began near the summit of the great mountain, well above its winter snowline.

  Strickland Falls was not far from Mary's secret rock and she was determined to own the land on which the rock stood and also have access to the water in the falls. In the third year of her employment at the brewery she marked out approximately ten acres which included her beloved rock, and which led down to the bank on the opposite side of the falls to the brewery pipeline.

  In 1824 Governor Arthur had granted Peter Degraves two thousand acres on the side of the mountain for saw milling, and with a further grant taken together with several judicious purchases, he and his brother-in-law Hugh Mclntosh now owned the entire side of Mount Wellington. Mary was resolute that she must somehow purchase these ten acres from Degraves and his ailing brother-in-law, though even if they should agree to sell it to her, she was still a ticket of leave convict and could not legally own property.

  Once again Mary went to see Mr Emmett. They stood in his garden while she explained what she wanted.

  'Mary, by all accounts you have done exceedingly well and Mr Degraves has often enough thanked me for recommending you to him. I daresay, if I can find a plausible reason for the purchase of this land, he may be friendly enough disposed to sell it, always supposing that he should receive a good price. But what possible reason could I have to purchase ten acres of useless land on the slopes of Mount Wellington?'

  'You could tell him that you want some day to build a home and wish to secure a small part of the creek bank below the falls, sir.'

  Mr Emmett shook his head. 'I have been to the falls but once. It is quite an expedition and, as I recall, they make a fearful racket. I should be the laughing stock of the free settlers and no one in their right mind would build among the trees so far from civilisation with the din of a waterfall drowning all conversation. Besides, I am known for the excellence of my garden and you know as well as I do that the soil under gum trees is leached of all its goodness and is infertile and not in the least suitable for the cultivation of an English garden.'

  'A retreat, a place in nature to go to, sir?' Mary suggested a little lamely.

  Mr Emmett ignored this remark. He was still taken up with the absurdity of the whole notion. 'Furthermore, the big trees in the area you speak of have already been cut. I would be buying a pig in a poke, half-grown trees and red gum scrub. People, who already count me odd, would think me gone quite mad! My wife would not be able to tolerate the shame of so foolish a decision.'

  'Could you not do the transaction in secret, sir? Mr Degraves knows you not to be a fool and would not judge you one for this!' Mary brightened with a sudden thought. 'You could offer him a little more than what the land be worth and ask him to stay stum, I mean, remain silent. He is a man with a good eye for an extra shilling made and, as you say, he has already made his profit from the area we speaks of.'

  Mr Emmett scratched the top of his head and looked vexed. 'Can you not wait, my dear? It is only a year before you obtain your freedom, and it is most unlikely that land so far from the town will prove any more attractive to a buyer in the meantime.'

  Mary's eyes welled with tears. 'It be the rock, sir!' she suddenly announced.

  Mr Emmett was unaffected by Mary's distress – he had seen Mary's tears before when she wanted something from him. 'The rock? What on earth are you talking about?'

  Mary knuckled the tears from her large green eyes and sniffed. 'It be a rock on the mountain, a magic rock, I simply must own it!'

  'A rock! Own a rock! Magic? You really do try my patience, Mary Abacus!' But she could see that Mr Emmett was curious and prepared to listen to her explanation.

  With a fair degree of sniffing, Mary began, swearing Mr Emmett to secrecy for the silliness of it. She told him how she often went to the rock for comfort and how, when the blossom was out and the berries ripe, she would lie on the rock and watch the green parakeets feeding and squabbling in the trees and surrounding bush. 'Not parakeets,' Mr Emmett corrected, 'rosellas, my dear, green rosellas, they are native to this island.' Finally Mary told him how she had slept upon the rock under the stars the first night she had been released from the Female Factory.

  This last pronouncement astonished Mr Emmett who, though a nature lover, had acquired a healthy respect for the Tasmanian wilderness. Mary's admission filled him with alarm. It was not uncommon for people who were inexperienced in the ways of the bush to be lost on the mountain slopes, some even perishing in a fall of rock or a sudden snowstorm. Besides the slopes were used by dangerous men who hid from the law during the day and crept down into the town at night.

  It had already been noted that Mr Emmett was an unusual man and something of a dreamer, and now he listened attentively as though Mary's preposterous story made more sense to him than any logical reasons she might have. Finally, though cautioning her against the notion, he agreed to approach Peter Degraves and attempt to purchase the ten acres on the mountain on Mary's behalf.

  Degraves drove a hard bargain, for despite their friendship, Emmett was a government man and no settler would wish to be bested by the government, even in a private transaction. He finally agreed to sell the title to the ten acres of light timber and scrub for forty pounds, a sum somewhat in advance of the current value of the land.

  Mr Emmett had confided in him that as he grew older and the mountain became safer a small cottage in the woods seemed an attractive place for a retreat, where he might stay for short periods alone to read and write. Degraves, aware of the gossip to which such a peculiar notion might give rise in the society of the pure merinos, agreed to keep the land transaction secret and asked surprisingly few questions.

  Mr Emmett handled the registration of the title deeds himself so that the purchase was not published in the Government Gazette until two years later, when it was transferred into the name of Mary Abacus, emancipist, resident, Mount Wellington Allotment No HT6784, Hobart Town District, Van Diemen's Land. With the property came the rights to use the pathway created along the Cascade Brewery pipeline in perpetuity.
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br />   In digging up and breaking open her clay pot to give Mr Emmett the forty pounds, plus two more for stamp and registration duty, Mary had taken the first proprietorial step in her new life. The money made from the Potato Factory not only allowed her to acquire a small piece of her magic mountain, but with it came the purest commercial source of water for the brewing of beer available in the colony.

  Mary determined that, when the time came, she would clear and use only what land she needed for a water mill, malt house and small brewery. Though this dream was well beyond the resources she ever seemed likely to acquire, she could see the brewery clearly in her imagination, the stone buildings sitting among the trees. The rest of the land would be left as nature intended, so that tree and bush would grow to splendid maturity, giving an abundance of blossom and fruit to attract the flocks of green parakeets Mr Emmett called rosellas.

  Mary remained with the Cascade Brewery for another year after she had obtained her freedom. Peter Degraves was not concerned when he eventually heard that Mr Emmett had sold his land on the mountain to Mary. He had long since decided that Mary was rather strange and that she should wish to live alone on the mountain did not greatly surprise him. With the brewery's reputation established, he had turned to another grand adventure, building a theatre for the benefit of the citizens of the town, and he was also expanding into shipbuilding and flour milling.

  Degraves was happy to know that Mary was the bookkeeper and accountant at the brewery as he had come to absolutely trust her financial judgement in all matters. But he did not estimate her above his own needs. And, if he thought about it at all, he would have expected Mary to regard her security of employment at the brewery as above the price of rubies, and consequently to show her gratitude in a lifetime of faithful and uncomplaining service to him.

  He was greatly surprised, therefore, when in the spring of 1836 Mary resigned. The previous year, that is the year she had gained her freedom, had been a busy one for her. She had cleared the land for almost a quarter of an acre around as a fire break, leaving some of the tallest trees in place. With a fast-running stream fronting the clearing and the rush of water over rock, the leafy glade Mary had created for herself was to her mind as close as she was likely to get to heaven on earth.

  In truth the mountain, while a paradise of nature, was a dangerous place for a lone woman. Fire was always a threat and could sweep through the forest without warning. The weather on the mountain was unpredictable; sudden mists could move down the slopes, closing in the mountain and making visibility impossible. As the felling of the tall timber increased, mud slides and falling rocks became commonplace during winter storms.

  But it was from man that the greatest danger lay. The mountain was also home to desperate men, the dregs of the colony's society who were frequently on the run from the law. In the summer months they would sleep on the mountain during the day and creep back into town at night to rob and steal so that they might frequent the drinking dens, sly grog shops and brothels. There they were served with raw spirits made on the premises which often enough killed them and more usually sent them mad.

  Those who could still walk when daylight came would drag themselves into the bush on the slopes of the mountains to sleep until nightfall when they would re-emerge. Though most were harmless enough, their brains addled with alcohol, pathetic, shambling creatures, some were dangerous. Mary could not hope to construct a hut on her property where she might safely live, even though she had taken the precaution of learning how to fire a pistol which she always carried in her bag when she visited her clearing among the trees.

  Mary was tempted to call her idyllic surrounding by some romantic name gathered from a book or taken from her native England, but in the end she chose, for reasons of sentiment and luck, to call her brewery The Potato Factory.

  Mary argued to herself that the poteen still had been the true start of her great good luck. It had earned her a reputation for a quality product. Most of the sly grog available in the drinking dens and brothels of Hobart Town was more likely to kill the customer than to send him on his way happily inebriated. Her experience at the Cascade Brewery had shown her once again that quality was of the utmost importance, and she was adamant that it would become the hallmark of everything she did. When the time came to build the second Potato Factory she would boast that her beer was made from the finest hops and malt available, and brewed from the purest mountain water in the world.

  If the association with the humble potato was a peculiar inheritance for a beer of quality this did not occur to Mary. While she had a very tidy mind she was still a creature of intuition, and she did what felt right to her even when logic might suggest she do otherwise. Mary was wise enough to know that few things in this world are wrought by logic alone, and that where men are often shackled by its strict parameters, women can harness the power of their intuition to create both surprising and original results.

  In her mind Mary saw the chiselled stone of her malt house and the larger building of the brewery beside it with its enormous brick chimney rising above the trees. She would sometimes stand beside the falls which thundered so loudly they drowned out all other sound, and within the silence created by this singular roar, she would conjure up the entire vision. Mary could plainly see the drays lined up around the loading dock, hear the shouts of the drivers to make the great Clydesdale horses move forward, their gleaming brasses jingling as they left the Potato Factory to take her barrels of ale and beer to tavern and dockside. She looked into the bubbling water which rushed over smooth stones at her feet and saw it passing through imaginary sluice gates and along some elevated fluming and into the buckets of a giant iron water wheel which would power the brewery machinery. And sometimes, when the dream was complete, she would smack her lips and, with the back of her hand, wipe imagined froth from her mouth as though she could truly taste the liquid amber of her own future creation.

  This world is not short of dreamers, but to the dreamer in Mary was added a clever, practical and innovative mind which once committed would never surrender. All grand schemes, she told herself, may be broken down to small beginnings. Each step she took, no matter how tentative it might seem, would be linked to her grand design and would always be moving towards it, if only a fraction of an inch each time. This was a simple and perhaps naive philosophy based on perseverance, on knowing that the grandest tapestry begins with a single silken thread. And so the first thing Mary did upon leaving the Cascade Brewery was to apply for a licence to sell beer. And here, once again, she had prevailed on the long-suffering Mr Emmett to help her with the recommendations she needed to obtain it.

  Mary decided that even though she lacked the resources to start her own brewery she had sufficient to rent a smallish building which had once been a corn mill at the mountain end of Collins Street and which backed directly onto the banks of the rivulet. She named it the Potato Factory and converted it into a home brewery. In the front room she created a shop where citizens could buy a bottle of beer to take home. She used a small rear room in the building as her sleeping chamber and paid one of the mechanics at the Cascade Brewery to construct a small lean-to kitchen at the back. The remainder of the space in the old mill was given over to making beer.

  The malt and yeast Mary used were of the highest quality, and she bought her hops from a wholesale merchant who imported it from England, as the product grown in the Derwent Valley was not yet of the highest standard. She made a light beer with a clean taste which was much favoured by the better class of drinker among the labouring classes, tradesmen and the respectable poor, and she soon attracted the favourable attention of the Temperance Society. Temperance members agreed to abstain entirely from the use of distilled spirits, except for medicinal purposes, so the society actively encouraged the drinking of beer, though in the home and not in public houses where, in the boisterous company of fellow drinkers, they might enter into the numerous evils, both moral and physical, which follow the use of spirits.

 
Her beer did not have 'the wallop' to appeal to the majority of drinkers, but the Temperance movement was growing rapidly in numbers, and right from the outset Mary prospered. She soon put a product on the market which she labelled 'Temperance Ale', and in six months it had become her mainstay. Mary, if only in the smallest way, was up to her eyes in the beer business, and at the same time she was favoured by the authorities for the quality of her product and the prompt manner in which she paid her taxes. There were even those within the third class, the tradesmen, clerks and smaller merchants, who considered that some day she might be admitted into their lofty and hallowed ranks.

  But if Mary's great good luck had well and truly begun, the opposite to it lay waiting at her doorstep. Hannah and, eighteen months later, Ikey, were released into the community as ticket of leave convicts.

  • • •

  Ikey barely survived his seven years until he received his ticket of leave. He had neither hate nor dreams but only greed to keep him from despair.

  Money had never meant anything to Ikey except as a means to an end. He played for the sake of the game – money was simply the barometer to show when he had won. He wasn't a gambler, for he figured his chances most carefully, weighing the odds to the most finite degree. Now, with seven years of penal servitude behind him, the game was no longer worth the candle. If he should return to his old life of crime and be caught again he knew he would certainly die, either in servitude or by means of the dreadful knotted loop.

  Ikey told himself that, should he obtain the second half of the combination to the Whitechapel safe, he would retire to some far haven where he would live in peace and run a small tobacco business, with perhaps a little dabble here and a little negotiation there. But secretly he knew that he was a creature of London and captive to its crepuscular ways. He had disliked New York, and Rio even more, and judged the world outside England by these two unfortunate experiences. He knew that a return to crime in any significant way in Hobart Town would be both foolish and short-lived. Ikey was a marked man in the colony.