‘Mrs Greeney was a great homebody. She did everything herself.’
‘She even soused her own eels. You had to eat up before you could have your sweet or leave the table. The children really hated the soused eel nights. Dulcie used to hide them in her stockings.’
‘The old man was very strict; all the children had jobs to do around the house and they really got into trouble if they didn’t do them.’ (Nevertheless Reg Greer never so much as made his own bed or rinsed a cup. His children would all have sworn that he had never washed a sock or ironed a shirt in his life.)
We all laughed about the no speaking at the table rule, which had survived the Greeney era and afflicted all the next generation.
‘You know the children weren’t all poor. Some of them came from very rich families.’
‘But that was the way of it then. If you were expecting an illegitimate child you went to the Salvation Army Home to have it. Didn’t matter who you were. And it became a ward of court. And was given away.’
‘My mother, Dulcie, found out who her mother was,’ said Geraldine. ‘Her mother was seduced by a lay preacher at her church when she was only sixteen. She got married later and had eight or nine legitimate children.’
There was a lot more talk, as is proper among families. I was glad I had them, proud of them, and flattered by their kindness to me. I was jealous of the Greeneys, who turned their lonely house into a noisy place, with young ones racing in and out to school, to the Tamar Rowing Club, to choir practice, playing cards on their evenings off. The Greeneys never had a house of their own. They invested their time and ambition, their love and their money in people. I’d have liked nothing better than such a well-organised houseful of busy children at Mill Farm. Funny, isn’t it, that I should take after my fostermother, as if Eric Greeney aka Reg Greer had passed on her genes by spiritual osmosis? I suppose it was evidence of the success of Emma Greeney’s childrearing strategies that, when the time came, he could walk away. The Greeney family didn’t suit him, obviously. But then it’s doubtful whether the Greer family suited him either. He certainly spent very little time in it.
I went back to Hobart by an extremely circuitous route, because it was Sunday, and there was nothing else to do. I whizzed up into the rainforest, to be appalled once more by miles of Monterey pine, inexcusable even after I had seen the apologetic notice: ‘Highly productive SOFTWOOD on this selected area is replacing low quality vegetation to supplement HARDWOOD supplies from permanent better quality Eucalypt forests.’ How confidently they dismiss the mountain vegetation as low quality, I fumed, just because they haven’t found a way to make money out of it. Further from the metalled highway, reachable only by the Australian Paper Mills’ private roads, were more tracts of devastation. After the ‘No Dams’ riots it would be foolhardy to clear the land right up to the road, but from the air the gross distortion of many square miles of landscape is easily visible.
A pocket of real rainforest had been left as a public amenity by the paper mills. I walked there on sphagnum moss as thick and springy as a mattress, and marvelled how the blackberries could grow even here, anywhere a bird’s shit can fall. The leatherwood petals drifted on to my face but they brought no blessing. I stood watching the laden bees dropping like stones from the treetops to the tall white beehives that stood in every glade and saw only pointless insect lives fraught with struggle, toil and self-sacrifice. The thought of the honey inside the white-washed wooden ziggurats made me feel sick. My hair was full of tiny waterdrops, but my skin was dry, harsh and sore. I went restlessly on to Zeehan, where once they found gold, and grieved for the wild graveyard there, bedraggled head-stones on an unvisited hill where the charred pines leaned like drunken mutes. There were fire-scars all round Zeehan, where some inhabitant crazed by the incessant wind blowing from Africa had decided to blot himself and Zeehan, ruined for a hatful of gold, out of human memory forever. Over the bald hills to Strahan I went and watched the ocean rollers battering the dunes as I ate my pie and sauce and drank a stubby. I did not notice that the stuff I was putting in my mouth was tasteless, ersatz, chemical. The world itself had lost its savour. Months after the shock of unmasking my father, I still could not taste what I ate or what I cooked.
The Heroine of This Story
Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.
HART CRANE, ‘MY GRANDMOTHER’S LOVE LETTERS’
Emma Wise, my grandmother Greeney, was born on 10 August, 1867, on the family dairy farm at Norfolk Plains East, nowadays Pateena, a hamlet three or four miles due north of Longford, between the meandering South Esk River and Mount Arnon. She was the twelfth of the fourteen children of Robert Wise and Mary Ann Lucas. Her father was the second son of Richard Wise, who was sentenced to transportation for life at Middlesex in 1812. His wife and children joined him in Port Jackson in 1815. In 1821 after Richard was freed the family travelled to Tasmania and took up a hundred acres of prime land in New Norfolk. Later generations of Wises believed that the first of the Longford Wises had been a free settler; the children may never have been told of their family’s ordeal. Richard’s sons Robert and Richard acquired more land in the same district. Emma’s mother was the granddaughter of Nathaniel Lucas, who was transported to Port Jackson on the First Fleet.
Besides his own land Robert farmed a hundred acres of rented land. He and his brother, who inherited the original property at Arundale, were substantial members of the Longford community and devout members of the Church of England. In 1877 Mary Ann Wise died, worn out by hard work and continual childbearing. As one of the youngest children of such a large family, Emma seems to have been allowed to run wild; she had no education, and probably very little supervision of any kind even after her father found another wife. Her age is never given correctly, possibly because she was not sure of it herself. She was twenty-one when she married in 1889, but her age was given approximately as twenty-three. When Emma married, on 26 March, 1889, the ceremony was not carried out in the Church of England but in the Manse of the Baptist Church in York Street, Launceston, probably because Robert Greeney refused to give even lip service to the Church of England. Emma must have known something of the bitter suffering that Robert Greeney and his parents had endured, and prayed that her husband would be given the consolation of her kind of faith.
Robert was the only son of another Robert Greeney who was tried for robbery with violence at Chelsea Crown Court on 26 October, 1846, and sentenced to fifteen years. He admitted to highway robbery and stealing nine pounds and three shillings from a Mr Clements at Whitechapel. Although he was only nineteen years old he had already served three months for stealing a handkerchief and three months for attempting to steal. He was sent to Gibraltar and imprisoned on a hulk. Eight unimaginable years later, on 26 May, 1853, he arrived in Tasmania aboard the Saint Vincent. The physical description of convicts is unusually precise, for it may be needed to identify absconders; Robert was five feet two inches in height, dark complexioned, with a small head, black hair, no whiskers, an oval face, a high forehead, black eyebrows and blue eyes and a small nose, mouth and chin. He was put to three years’ bonded service, which he served without mishap, and was granted his conditional pardon on 16 September, 1856. In July 1858 he was in trouble again, and tried for assault, but this time he was acquitted. A month later he was tried at Hobart General Sessions for stealing a box worth a shilling together with seventy pounds from one Joseph Rogers, and for this he drew the dreadful sentence of six years at Port Arthur. Twice he was placed in solitary confinement, once for neglect of duty, and once for ‘misconduct’. He was released on 28 July, 1863, and must soon after have encountered Elizabeth Smith, who became Robert’s mother on 8 September, 1864. Despite the best efforts of Mary Nicholls and Shirley Eldershaw at the Tasmanian Archives Office, no trace of a marriage has
been found for Robert and Elizabeth, but they lived together and she used his name for the rest of her life.
Try as he might have to keep out of trouble for the sake of his wife and son, Robert Greeney was sentenced again to three months’ hard labour on 4 April, 1870, for larceny. He survived this ordeal and returned to his family in the small house in Launceston that he rented from David Dell. For seven years he kept out of trouble but greater anguish than any he had known in a life full of pain and trouble came to him and his family notwithstanding.
Four days before the Christmas of 1877 Robert Greeney was working in the bark-grinding mill belonging to Mr Sidebottom. What happened is probably best told in the dispassionate words of the Examiner: ‘On Friday last at about 2 o’clock, [Greeney] was occupied at the mill; the belt of the wheel fell off and [Greeney] leaned over to put it on, his feet being still on the truck. As he was going to start the wheel, being in danger, [Walter Leslie] who was employed as the feeder, caught hold and pulled him back, when he fell sideways, and his trousers were caught by the cog-wheels which were working close to the truck, and the leg being drawn in the thigh was lacerated and crushed between the wheels; the belt then flew off and the wheel stopped.’ By the time the wheel had stopped, Greeney was grievously wounded. When he arrived at the hospital he was found to be ‘suffering from an enormous wound in the left buttock, and upper part of the back part of the thigh. The muscles were completely torn away, the hip joint exposed….’ Unfortunately for Robert the femoral artery had not been ruptured, and death was many hours away. ‘The man was quite sensible, but was suffering from the shock and was very weak.’ They drew the edges of the terrible wound together and bound them close. Tough as he was, Robert Greeney had come almost to the end of his endurance. For two days and three nights he suffered, until death released him on Monday morning. It was Christmas Eve. His son, my adoptive grandfather, was thirteen years old.
The coroner did not want to cast blame on Mr Sidebottom, but he did suggest that investing a few pence in a board to protect workers from the cogwheels might be a good idea. The verdict of the inquest was that ‘accidentally, casually, and by misfortune, the trousers of the said Robert Greeney became entangled in the cog wheels of the machine, whereof the thigh and buttocks of the said Robert Greeney were seriously torn and lacerated of which said injury the said Robert Greeney languished, and languishing lived until the twenty-fourth day of December… when the said Robert Greeney did die’.
Though the coroner might not have blamed Mr Sidebottom, the verdict of history is different. Sidebottom committed a worse crime against Robert Greeney than ever he had inflicted upon society. Sidebottom did not simply kill Robert Greeney; rather, by lack of imagination and foresight, he tortured him to death. In a world so unjust, how bitterly must Robert Greeney have reviled himself for struggling so desperately to obey other men’s rules? Better by far to be a desperate criminal and renegade than a drudge in a filthy industry that enriched only those who did not dirty their own hands, an expendable drudge whose life was not worth protecting.
Perhaps Elizabeth Greeney sat in the court with her boy and heard the coroner’s verdict. Perhaps that unforgettable Christmas taught Robert how unforgiving life is and how tough he would have to be to survive. It would be nice to think that Mr Sidebottom made some gesture towards Mrs Greeney and her son, but so much more interesting are the affairs of the gentry than those of the poor that we would probably have heard of it if he did. The next year David Dell’s house was rented to someone else. The widow Greeney and her son vanished from the record, probably because she went into service.
All his life the convict’s son was clean-living and hard-working. He was also withdrawn and taciturn. He was illiterate and had only a vague idea of his age when he married Emma, who was then a domestic servant. They were both determined to survive by hard work and rigorous self-discipline in a merciless world.
Robert earned a small but steady living driving a dray for the Launceston City Council, moving earth away from the new building sites and roadways. For thirteen years he and Emma lived together without the arrival of any child, which for Emma, who had grown up in a big country household, must have been very difficult to bear.
Under the provisions of the Destitute and Neglected Children’s Act, the cities of Hobart and Launceston ran a boarding-out system for children whose parents could not take care of them. Married ladies of good character could earn twenty-one shillings and sixpence a month for each child they took in. Out of that they were expected to feed, clothe and bring the children up to be useful members of society. The law required that the children go only to households of the same religion, that they go to church regularly, and that they go to school until they turned thirteen. Then they were to be apprenticed to learn a useful trade. In the first year of their apprenticeship they were to be paid five shillings a week, two shillings to be given to them as pocket money and the rest placed in a trust fund kept by the Department of Neglected Children, which retained jurisdiction over the children until they were twenty-one. Children who were uncontrollable or got into trouble with the police were sent to reformatory schools where a combination of hard rations and harsh discipline effectively suppressed their anti-social behaviour.
In September 1903, Emma took her courage in both hands and approached the Neglected Children’s Department. One of her neighbours was giving up a four-month-old baby boy whom she had taken for fostering, because she had been ill and felt unequal to the work. On the application, shakily written in her own hand, Emma called herself ‘Emma Amelia Greeney’ by way of gentrifying her name, for much the same reasons that her boy Eric was later to call her Emma Rachel Wise. It was an affectation of which she soon had no need. Robert had jibbed at being described as Church of England, and so she put him down as Presbyterian, to explain why he was not seen to attend church with her. Her application was endorsed by the Rector of her local church, St John’s.
Her application was successful. Henry Ernest Millhouse was ‘handed to’ Emma as the department jargon has it. She brought him home and sat up all night holding him in her arms, as she did with all the children who came to her as babies. Emma was tall and sturdy and buxom; she knew instinctively about babies and bonding and the anguish of children. She worked hard to build real relationships with her children, giving them physical closeness, real affection, support and unfailing loyalty. Her first little boy never left her, never asked what his ‘real’ name was, and closed her eyes when she died. He was my father’s brother, ‘Ernie’.
Emma’s first year of motherhood was an anguished and uncertain time. Ernie’s genetic mother, Florence Millhouse, was never very far away. Florence was a lucky girl, for although she had been foolish and easy and had got herself into the family way, kind Mrs Groves had offered to take her into her service, without her bastard, needless to say. With heaven knows what anguish, Florence handed her baby over to the state and went off to ‘better herself in the world’. Out of her tiny wages, she was expected to pay two shillings and sixpence a week towards the child’s keep, which she conspicuously failed to do, mainly because she did not often succeed in getting paid at all. She lost her position at Mrs Groves’s because of her ‘bad temper and want of self-control’. There were no allowances made for her distress or disorientation. Florence was known to be a bad girl, insensible of her guilt and ungrateful for the kindnesses she received. She found other positions, but something always seemed to go wrong. The Neglected Children’s Department adopted a stern tone and demanded its two and six a week. A position was found for her (possibly through Emma Greeney’s intervention) with a Mrs Simmonds at ‘The Oaks’ in Longford, and she was sent there to escape the blandishments of the boom town of Launceston.
She was told however that at the end of June 1904 she would have to take her baby back and rear it herself. Poor Florence, deprived of her baby at the very time she was supposed to have been bonding with it, now found herself about to be lumbered with a toddler. She came to Lau
nceston one day and failed to return to Longford, claiming that, as she sat in the park, her pocket was picked of the money she had been advanced by Mrs Simmonds. Then she refused to go back to Longford, and refused to take her baby back with her to her mother’s house. Instead, she did what every persecuted Launcestonian did, she ran away to Melbourne.
At last Emma Greeney had Ernie all to herself, but it had been a worrying and uncertain time for her. She was to realise again and again that a foster mother had no rights in the child, and was merely a public amenity to be used whenever convenient by the welfare bureaucracy.
Florence Millhouse was not a cold or unnatural person, although she showed no sign of interest in her baby boy. She was cornered and fighting for survival. She was a servant in the house of a Mrs Burgess when she was seduced or raped by Jack Burgess, who gave her three pounds to cover the expenses of her lying-in and considered that he had discharged his responsibility to her. Florence kept to her part of the bargain and did not name Jack Burgess as her baby’s father. If she had given his name to the Neglected Children’s Department they might have made a claim on him for the child’s support. If he had been a working man, they certainly would have. The Department files bulge with demands for payment of child support by labouring men and instructions to the police to collect such payments or arrest the putative fathers. In the case of a working man, a mother’s word was two-thirds proof of paternity. A working man had only to fail to deny the charge to be considered to have admitted it. Gentlemen were not usually named at all and if they were the matter was not taken up.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 30