In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  I thought of ‘Auntie’ Furley, who two months before on Babel had sat down on a rock. ‘I felt something go across my leg, and of course I didn’t look down straight away, still daydreaming, and when I looked down there was a black snake coiled up right beside my foot.’ And I thought of the old Scottish lady gesturing at the leaves in her ‘remarkably unproductive’ strawberry patch, where, the same month, she had been taking a break from her Gaelic lessons when a four-foot tiger-snake raised its head. ‘This is where it bit me. The poor creature was stuck in the nylon netting trying to get the strawberry, foolish fellow. I was picking out weeds and I idiotically put my arm into its mouth, poor thing. It was quite like a needle and I felt pretty queer.’ The bridge to her farm was down and the ambulance had taken a while. She was eventually flown to a hospital in Launceston where she was bombarded with questions to find out just how bad she was. What was her name, how old was she, what day was it?

  She replied correctly: ‘My name is Lady Mary Mactier, I am 88 and today is February 27, 2003.’

  Most of all I thought of Fred Willis, an old birder with unlined skin and kind, unseeing eyes that shone like the oil he sipped each morning from a 44-gallon drum. He was going blind and this was the first year he had not been birding since 1920. ‘I reckon I’ve caught my last one,’ he said. ‘But if you think about snakes, you’ll never catch a bird.’

  Angus had worked in a supermarket in Alice Springs.

  ‘Did you get to know any Aborigines there?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Their smell put me off. It’s a really strong smell. Not bad BO or anything. But it put me off.’

  I stopped and looked at him. He had just told me that he came from Launceston and was 20 when he discovered that he was Aboriginal. I asked: ‘Weren’t you interested in their culture?’

  Angus stared intently at a lomandra clump. ‘They’ve got their own particular way of living. They’re different tribes and they talk in Aboriginal lingo. They virtually keep to themselves.’

  But his mind was not in Alice Springs. He fell to his knees. ‘I don’t worry about snakes, blue-tongues, spiders. All I worry about is the mutton-bird.’

  ‘Come on,’ Tas said.

  I followed him between the tussocks, my ankles sinking into the burrows.

  He approached a small opening and pushed back the grass. ‘When the parents come to feed, they regurgitate at the edge of the hole and you can smell it. It’s not real good.’

  Tas stretched out and thrust in his hand. He creased his nose. He was nine when he caught his first bird. ‘I didn’t like putting my hand down a hole like this. I still don’t. Jesus, this is a deep hole.’ Then: ‘There’s one in here. Put your ear to the ground.’

  I listened to the thump-thump-thump of the wings.

  ‘Jesus, it’s nice when you get an easy one. I hate it when there’s not a bird down the hole. I hate it. ’Cos it’s a bloody effort. Ah, you bugger.’

  He pressed his thumb and finger to the neck, and flicked. There was a squeak and a quiet clatter of wings as he whirled it. The oil oozed down and blackened the beak. Then he lifted the slack bird and pierced it through the bottom of its mouth onto the spit.

  Now my turn.

  ‘This one?’ Tas said.

  I sensed his impatience. I had rejected a dozen holes. ‘All right.’

  The opening in the sand was about four inches wide. I prayed that it would be shallow and warm. I lay on my side and inserted my right arm at a 30-degree angle, stretching forward inch by inch. The wind had frozen my hand and the air that it clutched seemed extraordinarily cold. The tips of my fingers felt for a head, but would it be a reptile’s head or a beak? I touched a stone, some roots. Had I moved past him? Or was this a ‘blind’ hole, and if so what did that suggest? My arm was in up to my shoulder and my heart was drumming.

  A peck.

  ‘Bring him out slowly so you don’t bruise him,’ Tas said.

  We were soon back at the shed. New regulations demanded that no more than 40 minutes elapsed between my catching a bird and plucking it. Tas moved with an urgency he had not shown before. He carried the spits to the gurrying rail and we ripped off the birds and squeezed them, squirting oil and undigested krill into a drum full of the viscous red fluid.

  This was the oil that cured Furley of her chest colds and gave Fred Willis’s skin the clarity of a man 50 years younger. Patricia, who leased the shed, sold the oil for $20 a litre, and she said that if I doubted its properties then I ought to speak to Bruce Binzemann in Bridport about the effect of mutton-bird oil on his angina, or Harold Hislop in Penguin about his arteries, or Lester Jones, another who, properly speaking, should not be alive this morning. Later, I rang Lester. ‘I’m still taking it,’ he said. ‘Half a cup per day.’

  ‘Spoonful in their milk makes a horse’s skin real shiny,’ Tas said. He tossed the last of the gurried birds through a sliced plastic curtain, and jumped onto Dusty’s tractor. He was going back to the rookery.

  Now that I had caught my mutton-bird I was determined to follow the process to the end. Under the guidance of an old Aborigine called Harry, I sat in the pluck-room and filled a tub with sticky black feathers. In the scalding-room, a large woman with ‘Joanna loves John’ tattooed on her arm showed me how to dip the bird in a basin of bubbling water and to rub off the fine down. Then I went into the opening-room to remove the stomach and guts, and to cut off the head, wings and feet.

  ‘My dog used to eat the legs, used to love ’em,’ Harry said, his white beard pricking through his dark skin.

  For all the mutton-bird’s anti-rachitic properties, the men and women in the shed had about them a sadness. This was their most manifest culture, and yet the very tradition that they clung to as defining them was under threat. The activity had diminished enormously in recent years. In 1978, the total harvest was 250,000. This year the number was unlikely to exceed 25,000. The industry was dying for several reasons: a decline in the bird population, the collapse of the feather market in Eastern Europe, internal politics, costly health regulations. But potentially most damaging was a shortage of people wanting to do it. Those in Patricia’s shed were distressed that a new generation had little inclination to bird or to join in what had been a significant family occasion. They felt that something vital was slipping away.

  ‘The younger ones are not interested in birding,’ Patricia said. ‘My children are. My grandchildren aren’t. It’s tragic.’

  ‘It’s not tragic,’ Joanna said. ‘I wish I’d never learned. Five weeks is a long time sitting on your arse all day.’

  Harry said glumly: ‘My son’s a good mutton-birder, but I couldn’t get him over this year.’

  ‘You can’t force ’em to come,’ Joanna said, ‘and you can’t blame ’em if they don’t.’

  I asked the blind man who had caught his last bird: ‘In ten years’ time, do you think people will still be birding?’

  Fred Willis had visited his first burrow in his mother’s womb. ‘I doubt it.’

  But Frances was excited. Pelagic shells had come in with the east wind from the open sea. She was heading down to the beach to collect them.

  ‘She gets all my shells,’ Patricia said. ‘It takes three months for her to fish them out and clean them.’

  ‘Show him, dear,’ Frances said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Show me,’ I said.

  With reluctance, Patricia produced a plastic bag and drew out a necklace. She had threaded it from green Mariner shells and I remembered that the last time I had seen such an object was in Margaret’s cutlery box. I didn’t feel that I ought to ask, but I asked anyway.

  Patricia thought about it. ‘All right.’

  It was time to go. Frances offered to walk to the end of the beach and point out a short-cut to the jetty. Within moments she had picked up a spirula covered in barnacles, and a blue and white pelagic shell. It had floated in on a raft of bubbles, and when she waved goodbye I
saw that it had stained its purple dye on her palm.

  I left her on the beach collecting shells for my wife’s necklace and hurried up the dune swale towards the boat.

  XXI

  THE CAPTAIN WAS DROPPING OFF SOME CHILDREN ON CAPE BARREN, and I took the opportunity for a walk. There was a line of ti-trees above the sand, with a matchless view over Flinders, and further back in the grass a monument.

  The war memorial commemorated 18 men from Cape Barren who had fought for King and Country in the First World War, two of them giving their lives. Reading the names of these Mansells, Browns, Everetts and Maynards, I thought of the sacrifice they had made to safeguard a society that persistently ignored them, and I remembered a story that the captain told me on the boat, about a Cape Barren lad who had worked on his farm and Viscount Montgomery of Alamein.

  As a boy, Bernard Montgomery used to visit this island with his father, ‘the mutton-bird bishop’. Bernard would climb in the hills and swim in the sea with his friend Cecil Williams, and Cecil took him birding. By the time he left Tasmania at the age of 14, Montgomery wrote, ‘I could swim like a fish and was strong, tough and very fit.’ Their paths crossed once again, in North Africa. Bernard was then a General and Cecil among one of the ranks in the ninth Australia Division that he was inspecting in Alamein. Monty walked slowly along the line of troops, stopped before Cecil, straightened his collar, looked him in the eyes, and walked on.

  We head back. A big swell thumps the boat. The sky has grown darker and I see the mutton-birds skimming the waves. I watch them dipping up and down, and I know that because of me one of them is returning to a burrow that is empty.

  XXII

  I FLEW BACK TO TASMANIA TO MEET GREG LEHMAN AT A RIVULET near Hobart. It was a hot day and he waited for me on the grass, slapping mosquitoes from his face. Ducks bobbed their heads under the water, and across the bridge was the place where all this began.

  I recognised Lehman from the debate in the Dechaineaux Theatre. I had wanted to speak to him after listening to his talk, and since no-one was able to visit this site without the community’s permission, I asked if he would be prepared to show me around Risdon Cove.

  We crossed the bridge, and I told Lehman about my mercurial ancestor and the discoveries I had made since coming to live in Tasmania: how Kemp had condemned the massacre, his travels with Bennelong, and how his long life in Tasmania had tracked the extinction of the native population.

  Lehman agreed that the Aborigines would have perceived Kemp at first as one of themselves. ‘The old fellas didn’t recognise an Other. They didn’t see a Black or a White. They lived in a world where Homo sapiens was all created out of the tail of a kangaroo.’ A guiding dictum of Lehman’s was a remark by a Cherokee Indian: There is no such thing as a non-indigenous person. ‘The basis of my belief in identity is that there was never in this land any distinction between black and white.’

  With his ghost of a grey beard and his father’s complexion Lehman was, he agreed, an improbable-looking Aborigine. His father was descended from Bavarians from the Black Forest; his mother from a convicted Irish axe-murderer called Chugg. But Lehman identified with his paternal grandmother, an Aborigine called Molly Kennedy who had lived in the hamlet of North Motton in Tasmania’s north-west. ‘I am so lucky,’ he said, ‘to be living in a landscape that my family has inhabited for 2,000 generations.’

  We stopped before a rock where a plaque commemorated the first English settlement. Somewhere not far from these trees Kemp’s regiment had shot Robert Hobart May’s parents dead.

  In his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez writes of a ‘massacre’ that took place in 1928 in the Colombian coastal town of Aracataca when soldiers protecting the American-owned United Fruit Company opened fire on striking workers from the local banana plantation. The episode came to occupy a significant place in the consciousness of his nation and in his fiction. Later, Márquez tried to piece together the events of that day. ‘I spoke with survivors and witnesses and searched through newspaper archives and official documents and I realised that the truth did not lie anywhere. Conformists said, in effect, that there had been no deaths. Those at the other extreme affirmed without a quaver in their voices that there had been more than a hundred …’ Márquez inflated this in a novel to 3,000 dead, and in the end, he wrote, real life did him justice when the speaker of the Senate asked for a moment’s silence in memory of the 3,000 anonymous martyrs ‘sacrificed by the forces of law and order’. Aracataca seemed to have a lot in common with Risdon Cove.

  ‘What does this spot mean to the Aboriginal community?’ I asked Lehman, who worked as Head of the Centre for Aboriginal Education.

  ‘For the Aborigines,’ he said, ‘it became important because of the invasion history. It was the first place where the British set up camp, the first place where there was a record of British killings.’

  Lehman was regarded in Tasmania as a leading Aboriginal voice. After taking a first-class degree in zoology, he had become one of the instigators of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, and had played a prominent role in restoring this, Tasmania’s most contentious site, to his community – although Lehman’s claims about what had occurred at Risdon had been challenged by historians, including Windschuttle. In a handout given to Aborigines attending a memorial here in 1993, Lehman had written that ‘close to a hundred were killed that day’. This was at variance with previous estimates that ranged from three to 50. Reading from his laptop in the Dechaineaux Theatre, Lehman had told the audience that he had since dropped the phrase ‘close to a hundred’ because it seemed ‘unnecessarily strident’, and had replaced it with ‘whole families were killed on that day’. He had concluded: ‘The exact number will never be known, but the exact number was never very important.’ What was important was the fact of innocent deaths.

  He kicked some bark on the ground. ‘I then saw Risdon as encapsulating injustice and the bloody manner in which the British had invaded. It was the intent rather than the extent.’

  ‘What was the intent?’

  ‘The intent of the British to establish themselves here and the action to use firearms to deal with a situation they didn’t understand. But it became a metaphor for a broader political campaign.’

  Lehman’s preference for metaphor over historical truth had fallen on stony ground in the Windschuttle camp.

  ‘Have you ever met a Pentium primitivist?’ Lehman asked. And he told me about a review in the magazine Quadrant of an essay that he had written in response to Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Entitled ‘The Pentium primitivism of Greg Lehman’, the review accused Lehman of openly rejecting the search for objective truth. It quoted him: ‘For us, the “truth” is made up of countless contradictory, ironic and provocative elements, woven together into an allegorical, sometimes fictive documentation of what it is to live our lives.’ The reviewer ended with the assertion that Lehman’s essay presented a threat ‘potentially more destructive’ than September 11.

  He led the way up the hill. There was a fine view from the summit through the cleared bush, and behind us young trees were planted in tidy rows. We sat down on the grass and I asked the same question that I had asked Edna and Jimmy and Angus:

  ‘Can you tell me how you discovered that you are an Aborigine?’

  Lehman’s parents had worked in Ulverstone, in a factory that processed peas and potatoes, and his father also bulldozed for the public works department. ‘My family didn’t talk about Aboriginality till I started asking. They were typical of a number who’d become isolated. They had done what a lot of families had done – attempted to disappear.’

  He had not known he was Aboriginal till he was ten. Again, Bill Mollison was central to the discovery. ‘Mollison was doing research, speaking to families, and people started to talk.’ Lehman remembered conversations around the kitchen table, about how his grandmother was related to ‘Dolly’ Dalrymple Briggs whose grandfather was a chieftain. ‘Th
is was amazing stuff for a ten-year-old. I got hold of Mollison’s chronology – and there was my family. Bang. This world I knew nothing about.’ He said: ‘If this conversation had come up in the 1940s it would not have been conducted at the kitchen table, but in the 1970s things started to open up.’

  Unfortunately, his grandmother Molly Kennedy was not interested in talking about it. ‘You’d say to her: “What can you tell me about Aboriginal culture in our family?” She would say: “Don’t worry about that stuff.” It wasn’t part of what she wanted to pass on – and she was fairly strident.’ Nor did he feel able to interrogate his father: ‘I was too frightened. It tended to be me going out finding things for him to read. He was aware it was a dark secret, something you kept a lid on. He wouldn’t have heard of chiefs like Mannalargenna or Tongerlongetter. He was suffering from an interruption to oral tradition. I had to go out and put together the jigsaw for myself. It’s taken 30 years.’

  ‘How did you begin?’

  ‘When I was at high school trying to make sense of this strange ethnic tension, I would describe myself as 1/64 Aboriginal. That was the best way I could make sense of it. The fact that I looked like someone who had walked out of the Black Forest didn’t prevent my peers from calling me Nigger, Coon, Abo. I got grabbed by the master of discipline and marched off to receive a caning. “Lehman, being an Aborigine is nothing to be proud of.”’

  But he was proud of it and he determined to stand up for the rights of those who had been held down as half-castes and trouble-makers. ‘The totality of my identity occurred for me when I went to Hobart – I became political. I said: “Don’t call me white, I’m black. Don’t call me part-Aborigine. I’m Aborigine.”’

  ‘So it was a political decision to say “total”?’