In 1920, when Eric was approaching his sixteenth birthday, Emma’s household comprised, as well as Ernie, Eric, and Eli, five smaller children. There were two eleven-year-old schoolboys, both of whose mothers had absconded, leaving their fathers to look after them. George’s father was incapacitated by miners’ pthisis. Raymond’s father was a shepherd, who had no way of caring for his three little boys. The Department official who collected them from Longford added a compassionate note to their file, ‘They seem nice, decent little fellows.’ Then there were the girls, seven-year-old Dulcie, who had been with Mrs Greeney from the age of twelve months, three-year-old Gwendoline, and another little girl called Hazel, whose name cannot be found in the files of state wards, because like Eric she was privately adopted and brought up at the Greeneys’ expense.
Even with all the tumult of such a large household around her, Emma did not forget her older children. At the same time we find her writing for news of Edgar, now eighteen. ‘I am writing to know when Edgar is coming home as he was 18 years of age the 3rd Sept of this year and I have written two letters to him but I have received no answer, and I feel terribly broke up through his not answering. I think as much of him now as I did when he went away.’ She included a letter for Edgar, which was not forwarded but remained in the Department file. Instead Edgar was to visit the office for an interview, which he did, saying that he was very contented at his place of work. A few weeks later a telegram arrived at the Inspector’s office, ‘Edgar Wm Thow, barefooted, left employment of Wm Richardson, Sandford, yesterday, having decided not to stay owing to the young children of Richardson being permitted to throw things at him, and ill-treat him.’ Emma’s concern was justified.
Edgar did not come back to Mrs Greeney; instead he found lodgings in Cascade and went to work as a milkman. He wrote to the Department and asked them to tell Mrs Greeney to send him his Sunday School prize books. It was a final breach. Others of her children were to take this step, which signified that they no longer regarded Emma’s house as their home. The files of the State Children’s Department do not carry any indication of Emma’s reaction to this rejection.
In 1920 a comprehensive law regarding fostering and adoption was finally passed. Emma made use of it in 1923 to give her name to two of her little girls, Dulcie and Gwendoline; her application was contested on the grounds that the children were both over ten years of age, but an exception was made because Emma was the only mother they had ever known. In 1928, Dulcie’s mother wrote to the Department, asking for Dulcie to be sent to her in Melbourne, ‘as ther is know prosects for a girl in Tasmania. I have wrot servel letters to Mrs Green the lady that got her but got know answer.’ Dulcie was then older than her mother when she bore her, and had never heard from her. The Department informed her mother that Dulcie had been adopted, and she had no further right of access to her.
Mrs Greeney did lose Dulcie eventually. In 1931 Dulcie’s future mother-in-law wrote to the Department, asking for her ‘real’ name. ‘Dulcie does not know her name, other than Dulcie Greeney. She is not friendly with Mrs Greeney and has not lived home for some months.’ The answer from the Department told her in no uncertain terms that Dulcie’s name was Greeney and she would be married as such. In fact Dulcie went to Mrs Greeney’s house and got down the register from the top of the wardrobe and read her own name. Painstakingly recorded there was every payment that had been received and made on her account and the accounts of all Emma’s children over the years. It must have been an impressive document, for altogether more than twenty-five children were brought up by Emma and Robert Greeney. The record would have showed that she never gave up on a child, never rejected any of them no matter how naughty or stupid or ugly, never did as so many other foster-mothers did, sent them back to the Department because they fancied a relief from the toil of looking after a mob of kids.
In 1931 Emma fell foul of the CSD over her last foster-child, Kathleen, who had been apprenticed to her in order to stay on at school. When she was unable to find a job for Kathleen in the deepening Depression, Emma was ordered to send her away into service. The new Inspecting Nurse was disgusted when Emma came to her, ‘shed tears and said she did not want Kathleen to leave her, she was a bonser kiddie, etc’ and told her curtly that she was not entitled to Kathleen’s unpaid labour. Ernest Greeney then came to his mother’s aid; he explained in a letter that she would keep Kathleen in food and clothes and all necessities but she could only afford to give her two shillings a week. Kathleen was small, and suffered from eczema and a speech impediment. If her experiences in service were to be anything like those of Emma’s other children she could hardly have been expected to survive it, but Emma was too poor to be able to keep her. Nurse Plummer’s reaction to her low offer was scathing. Emma promised to pay the extra money into Kathleen’s trust fund, and set about finding her a job at the woollen mills. Kathleen never worked more than a few weeks before being laid off, and poor Emma suddenly found herself being carpeted by Nurse Plummer and ordered to pay three weeks’ arrears on Kathleen’s fund. Actually Kathleen was much better off than Emma, for her mother had had the foresight to name as her father a man who went off to the Great War with the twelfth battalion of the AIF. Contributions to her support were taken out of his soldier’s allotment and, when he was killed three months after her birth, a trust fund had been set up for her. When her trust fund matured in 1939, Kathleen was richer than Emma had ever been in her life. By then Robert was dead, and Emma had not long to live.
I should have been so proud to have inherited Emma Greeney’s genes. She had in abundance all the human characteristics I most prize, tenderness, energy, intelligence, resource, constancy, honesty, courage, imagination, endurance, compassion…. She was true blue, dinki-di. I have made up for myself a private name, that seems to me to fit better than the ridiculous name my parents gave me, of which half is a remembrance of a character in The Countess of Rudolstadt and the other half my father’s shonky alias. ‘Germaine Greer’ indeed. I call myself Frances Greeney, and realise glumly that I am simply carrying on the Reg Greer tradition of aliases. There is no bucking the genes.
It had not occurred to me to look for a reason why Emma Greeney didn’t marry one of her fellow parishioners in Longford and live happily ever after on a dairy farm. I came across the entry in the parish register of Christchurch, Longford, quite by chance. On 15 May, 1887, at Christchurch, a newborn was christened George; his mother was given as ‘Emma Wise, domestic servant’. That night George died of obstruction of the bowels, probably because he was born prematurely. Emma’s brother Charles registered the birth and death for her, and probably took the ailing infant to the church for his christening and burial. I thought it typical of Emma that regardless of her own shame she would have wanted her tiny boy to be properly christened and buried. She never named the father of her child but bore the brunt of the scandal alone. This catastrophe deflected the course of her life, drove her out of Longford and eventually to the Manse of the Baptist Church where she agreed to share her destiny with silent Robert Greeney. She won back, by sheer deserving, the esteem and social standing she had lost; when she died, four years after Robert, on 20 October, 1940, the Examiner printed her obituary.
What Daddy Never Knew
‘I got thinking of the time Dad come ’ome. Walked out of the asylum ’e did, wiv a coat over his asylum cloves. He come ’ome to the residential where Mum was stayin’ wiv me and the other kids. I was twelve. He come ’ome on the Friday, and Saturday afternoon, when we was at the pi’tures, he cut her throat, and then he cut his own throat afterwards. The landlady made me go wiv a mop and a bucket and clean up the floor. Bled to death he had, all over it. And me wringin’ out the mop wiv me own farver’s blood on it. The landlady said they was my parents and I had to do it.’
KYLIE TENNANT, THE BATTLERS
‘Yes!’ said Mr Peggotty, with a hopeful smile. ‘No one can’t reproach my darling in Australia. We will begin a new life over theer!’
W
hy Mr Peggotty should have supposed in 1850 that Australia was a paradise of fallen women where he should take not only Little Emily but Martha Endell as well is a mystery. The respectable people who paid their own passages to the other side of the world were as anxious to demonstrate their superiority to the criminal classes as ever respectable people were. If Charles Dickens had travelled to Australia he would have found a more bigoted middle class than he left behind. He might have been shocked to find Mr Peggotty struggling to survive as a labourer, having been too poor to acquire land of his own, and the two women married to violent men who drank their wages and cared not at all that their children had no shoes. Mr Peggotty, prevented by his poverty from acquiring the wherewithal to live, might have succumbed to gold fever and tried vainly to live cleanly in the frenetic battlefields where most succeeded in finding only a show and those who found more were penniless again within months. Or they may all have gone into service in the houses of the great, an outcome which no one associates with Australia, in which case the women would have been more at risk than ever.
On 30 December, 1856, a few years after Mr Peggotty set out with Martha and Little Emily, David King, aged twenty-eight, a farmer from Lincolnshire, and his wife Elizabeth, aged twenty-five, arrived in Tasmania aboard the Alice Walton. They brought with them their four small children, John, seven, Mary Ann, five, David, three, and the baby, Elizabeth. Perhaps they expected to take up a sizeable land grant in Tasmania, in which case they were disappointed. Rather than moving out into the new districts that were being opened up, David King found work as a tenant farmer on a 150-acre subdivision of a large estate at Dairy Plains, near Deloraine.
Dairy Plains might have reminded them of Lincolnshire, for the alluvial soil is deep for Australia, and comparatively rich. Like Lincolnshire, Dairy Plains is drained by man-made canals, emptying into Leith’s Brook; even in the drought of 1988, the grass on the flats was still green, or rather not quite ash-blond. On every side stand blue hills, and to the west the land is protected by the massive bulwark of the Western Tiers. King was farming at Kingsdon, one of two large estates that made up Dairy Plains. Kingsdon was subdivided into nine farms, and three smaller allotments were set aside for labourers’ cottages and kitchen gardens. The owner of the whole 1,762-acre spread did not himself live in the big house, but in the pleasant township of Deloraine, enjoying the fruits of his farsighted investment in the development of the soggy plain so that it was suitable for intensive dairying. Both landlords tolerated their tenants for long periods, so that the tenancies passed from father to son, but there was never any chance of the farmers’ acquiring land of their own in the district, unless they went out to the margins where the land rose steeply to the hills. The old class structure was well in place at Dairy Plains, and none of the farmers ever succeeded in bucking it. After nineteen years, although the landlord was dead and the property being managed by the public trustees, David King was still a tenant farmer on 150 acres at Kingsdon. His grown sons were existing as labourers; John had the right to farm a mere twenty acres on the edge of Dairy Plains, opposite the handsome house of Kingsdon, with its steep gables and pierced bargeboards, where his father lived. There he raised a few bushels of wheat or oats, and a few tons of potatoes, kept a couple of horses, three cows and a pig.
This is the reality behind the rather imposing statement on the wedding certificate of John King, my great-grandfather, who was married in 1873, ‘in the house of Mr David King at Kingsdon’. The bride was Harriett Smith, daughter of William Smith and Ellen Donovan. Her parents were both convicts, who had been married, with special government permission because they were still serving their sentences, in Christchurch, Longford, in 1838. Thus in one generation the distinction between bond and free was wiped out: King and Smith were joined in the great fellowship of the poor, where the distinction between deserving and non-deserving has never been clear.
The two-roomed weatherboard cottage where my grandmother was born still stands, and its tin roof still keeps out water well enough for it to be used for the occasional lambing. Against the sprung planking of the walls, sacking has been stretched. In the old days, the walls would have been papered with layer upon layer of newspaper, but even so they would have kept out precious little of the cold. In their two rooms, one for cooking and one for sleeping, the Kings would have been so huddled together that cold was probably the least of their problems.
When I visited the house the poppy seed in the long field behind it was ready for threshing. On such narrow fields as these the only sensible cultivation is a high yield crop. Tasmanians told me that the poppyseed is grown for the hot bread shops of the Australian capitals; in fact the crop is none other than Papaver somniferum. Tasmania is the world’s third largest producer of alkaloids for the pharmaceutical industry, after India and Turkey, despite the pleas of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to reduce the world stockpile of opium and the seriousness of Australia’s heroin problem.
The dry seed capsules of the poppies shone pink-silver in the afternoon sun as I climbed over the rotten gate and walked through the sheep shit to the door of the tiny house, where first Selina was born, in 1874, and then Ada, in 1877, and then Albert John, in 1880. In 1880, Selina died, probably of typhus.
John’s family seems to have been growing more slowly than is usual for an Australian farm labourer in the 1880s, but not all the children’s births were registered. Given the extreme hardships they endured the parents may have felt that there was little point in travelling to Deloraine to register children so likely to die. Though Dairy Plains is beautiful, its beauty must have become sinister for the Kings as they realised that they would never succeed to one of the bigger tenancies. They were ignorant, poor, virtual serfs on the estate. There was no chance of rising in the world unless they left the district, but without capital they had no hope of acquiring an appreciable amount of land anywhere. The bitterest irony is that they had less chance of acquiring land than the early convicts who were given a hundred acres or so upon their release.
The Kings were farm labourers who had come to the other side of the world only to continue being farm labourers. When David King arrived in Tasmania he could read and write; when his son married the daughter of convicts, neither of them, nor their witness, could sign the register. This was the reality behind the myth of the new world. The Kings joined the vast majority of Australians who called themselves ‘battlers’. For some reason, David King relinquished his tenancy at Kingsdon and moved to another on the neighbouring estate of Keanefield; within ten years he had lost that too.
Although Harriett was a member of the Church of England, she was married using the forms of the Methodist Church. The ceremony was performed by John Shaw Greer and this is as near as my father ever got to being a genuine Greer. Harriett’s religion soon became dominant, however, and most of her children were christened and married in the Church of England. The King family made several attempts to find a more adequate provision for its growing numbers; the Davids senior and junior took up tenancies in more than one of the new areas being opened up in the eighties, but they also clung to the twenty acres in Dairy Plains, living in the tiny cottage by turns, which was as well, because none of their new tenancies lasted.
My grandmother, Rhoda Elizabeth King, was born in the Dairy Plains cottage on 28 January, 1885.
To the north-west, the hills behind Forth were being opened up, and land was being sold for clearing and intensive planting of vegetable crops. John’s brother David had tried his hand at tenant farming in near-by Sassafras and New Ground for speculative landlords without conspicuous success, for as soon as the land was cleared it was, predictably, sold out from under him at a profit. The family pooled its meagre resources and acquired ten acres at a place called Sprent. In 1895 they left old David King in the cottage at Dairy Plains and took the children with them to Sprent.
This was very different country from the idyllic river meadows of Dairy Plains. The thickly wooded hills though not high wer
e spectacularly steep, crushed one upon another in a succession of crazy folds; in the deep gullies tree ferns showed the soil to be rich and sweet, but the clearing of the stands of eucalypts from the slopes was back-breaking work. Once the native hardwoods had been ringbarked and left to fall in their own time, for there was little point in blunting good axeheads on them, the farmers planted potatoes and kept pigs, much as they had in the old country, and for much the same return.
The Kings would have knocked up some kind of dwelling on whatever level land they could find; it was probably much like other selectors’ houses: ‘with four slab-sides and a top, a place to get in at and two small, square holes, one on each side of the door, to look out through. The whole was guarded by a dandy-looking dog-leg fence, that kept everything off except cattle, goannas, kangaroo-rats, snakes and death adders. Inside, tidy and natty. Curtains on the bed, a cloth on the table, the legs of which were screwed into the earth; two gin-cases that served as chairs wore crochet coverings, while the holes in the floor, in and out of which snakes used to chase mice, were covered with bags and a heavy round block was placed on them for additional safety.’
Steele Rudd’s selection was a corner of a degraded cattle run in Queensland, but the newly cleared land in Sprent must have been similarly infested with nocturnal wild life. Potatoes are unlikely to be eaten by cockatoos, but wombats and bandicoots would enjoy rootling in them, and kangaroos and wallabies would have grazed them down to the soil, whether the Kings fenced their ten acres or no. There was no way the grown children could be supported on the yield of ten acres, supposing the caterpillars and borers held off and there was a yield. The Kings however had more serious problems than flood, drought or infestation by plant pests. John William, Rhoda’s father, was losing or had lost his mind.
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You Page 32