In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Louisa Meredith had also, many years before, lived in the neighbourhood, and her experience was not more pleasant. In 1845, she left Swansea for Port Sorell – about 20 miles north-east of North Motton – where her husband had been offered the post of police magistrate. Her glass and china from England arrived in fragments, and she spent her first winter shivering in a split timber cottage through which the wind snarled. Stepping outside, she was hemmed in by an oppressive screen of gigantic trees covered in fungi, and when she followed a cattle path ‘the shrubs gave way on being pushed, but instantly closed again’. Her husband was unable to afford to rip down this tangled curtain. ‘The mere clearing of the timber from such land usually costs at least £10 an acre and the impracticality of a man without capital clearing it, paying rent for it all the while, and maintaining himself and family till the crop comes in, is too evident to any rational mind to need a comment.’ Until she arrived in this district, ‘I could not conceive such poverty as I saw there to be possible in this land of plenteousness; nor is there, I imagine, in the whole island a similarly conditioned neighbourhood.’ Nor was that all. It rained for nine months out of twelve, turning the roads into bogs and planting hostile surprises in the undergrowth. The nastiest of these were the nettles that had tormented Fenton, and also Kemp in York Town, 40 miles east. ‘The nettles in the colony are the most formidable I have ever encountered, both in size and venom,’ she wrote. ‘A friend’s horse threw himself down to roll in them. The creature was rendered mad and furious by pain, and in a short time died in convulsions.’

  Little had changed by the time a bullock cart crashed through the gums in a 100-acre title of drenched scrub. Through the dripping leaves Hordern could see that he had come to a halt right under the Dial Range and a cliff-face known as Old Sawn-Off. He heard the traffic roar of a distant river and down many hundreds of feet glimpsed a stream winding through a dense tangle of forest dogwood, sassafras and musk. It was the kind of place which the Doones might have chosen as their hideout. On summer days the scenery was awe-inspiring, but it looked in the rain more like Wizards Slough, the slimy dreadful bog through which Carver Doone, having shot Lorna, disappeared.

  XV

  THERE WAS SO MUCH I DID NOT KNOW. WHERE HE STAYED-IN TENTS or a bark hut. Where he kept his possessions while the house was being built. Who built it.

  Seventy years earlier, Kemp had put together the stone walls of Mount Vernon with the assistance of 18 assigned convict servants who cost him nothing but food and clothing. Hordern most likely erected Stoke Rivers with his bare hands.

  First, the land had to be scrubbed and the timber cut. The dogwoods grew to a density of 3,000 an acre. The choice that faced him was to let the trees fall over and rot; or axe them; or follow the example established by Fenton and cut a narrow circle in the trunk when the sap was up in the tree, a procedure known as ‘ring-barking’. To judge from Ivy’s photograph, this was Hordern’s preference. He then needed a team of bullocks to drag out the wattle scrub by the roots, but he had his sons to help him. They bought palings and cut posts and sank them into the red soil.

  Only after the skillion roof had been nailed into place did Hordern unpack his trunk. He took out the two silver cups, the rosettes, the wine salver awarded for his pure-Devon sires, and arranged them on a blackwood shelf. Behind the cups he stacked his books – Lorna Doone; Westward Ho!; Stalky & Co; Tom Brown’s Schooldays. And on the wall he pinned photographs of Boode and Yarde. Plus one of Mr Eastbrook, his stockman, dressed in a bowler hat and poking a stick at his prize bull Union Jack outside one of Boode’s ever-open windows. The force of the wind barrelling up the Leven meant that the windows of his new home he had to keep fastened. I pictured the former ‘Lord of Gratton’, his pious wife and seven children struggling to cope in their remote surroundings. Because Stoke Rivers was certainly remote.

  On still days, three cracks could be heard from the top of a hill – a bullock-whip signal to settlers that a ship had arrived on the Leven. But on most other days the wind that swept over North Motton was the only sound, gusting clouds of heavy rain from Bass Strait. More than 40 inches fell on average each year, turning the fields into a thick chocolate spread and making next to impassable the rough tracks that linked the outlying farms. Louisa Meredith’s horse had disappeared in a broad stream of dark liquid in a creek called Dead Cow. North Motton’s mud was celebrated. There was a saying: North Mutton mud ‘sticketh closer than a brother’. Hordern’s children walked across the paddocks to get to school and often plunged up to their knees in it.

  Even on dry days, the bush track to Ulverstone had, according to the locals, ‘to be used to be understood’. Part of the way was ‘corduroy’, constructed from felled trees that were placed side by side and had a ridged surface like corduroy velvet. There were no cars and it was a common sight to see a woman on foot carrying a baby. Ivy’s great-grandmother used to walk from North Motton into Ulverstone, a basket of butter on one arm and a basket of eggs on the other, singing ‘It’s the Army and Navy for ever, three cheers for the Red, White and Blue.’

  The Tasmanian author Pete Hay had a grandmother who lived on the Gawler Road. He wrote in Vandiemonian Essays: ‘One of the tasks of the women of the north-west was to keep the stories, the stories that bind the generations one to the other … “Story”, then, was the new story of one’s immediate family.’ But Mrs Hordern’s story was a hot, smouldering coal that nothing could bring her to touch.

  Hordern had flown through his wife’s money, too. In England, she was accustomed to servants: in Tasmania she had none. ‘People don’t here,’ Ivy said. ‘Poor old Granny, it was terrible for her. She used to bring us a jelly bean at night, poor old Granny.’

  In Devon, she had watched Mrs Eastbrook in the dairy. She now threw herself into milking the cows. The woman who had loved dancing taught herself how to skim cream, adding hot water to speed up the turning. She reared poultry, cultivated vegetables, kept the house warm. Their four-roomed ‘Castle Dismal’ was so cold in winter that her son Nigel went down with rheumatic fever and had to spend seven months in Launceston hospital, an experience that left him with a twisted foot.

  Life at Stoke Rivers was never so unforgiving as in those early months. Provisions had to be punted from Ulverstone to Mannings Jetty and the expense of bringing them upriver was prohibitive. Candles cost one shilling and six pence, tea three shillings and sixpence to five shillings, treacly sugar sixpence. Hardly any currency was in circulation and the normal method of paying for purchases was by barter. But first Hordern had to produce something.

  Once the underwood was cleared and burned, he sowed potatoes in the ashes between the skeletons of the dying trees. He took out his laurel cutting and planted a hedge of laurel bushes in imitation of the drive at Boode. The rest of his fast-draining energies he put to the service of his sheep and cattle.

  I assumed that I would find him mentioned in the annals of local organisations like the West Devon Agricultural Association (ex-President: Colonel Crawford). Hordern was fêted throughout England as a ‘well-known agriculturalist and successful stock breeder’. Yet at the Ulverstone museum he appeared in none of the records for agricultural shows. He was nowhere listed as a breeder, buyer, steward or judge.

  ‘I’ve never seen his name in anything,’ said a woman who worked at the museum. She had researched the history of the area. I need not bother to look in the Historical Families of Ulverstone series – the Horderns did not feature there either. Even so, she had gained a definite impression of them.

  ‘I thought they were a very funny family.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘They were very private. They kept their mouths shut.’

  United in their indebtedness, Hordern was in most other respects the reverse of Kemp: generous, kind, romantic. And determined at all costs to maintain a low profile. But why? I questioned Ivy.

  I had started to notice that she was keeping stuff up her sleeve, and that whenever I came to the farm, sh
e produced a new scrap of information. To my delight, she brought out a letter that had been stamped at North Motton post office in 1907, and which offered a tantalising glimpse into Hordern’s circumstances.

  The letter was posted from North Molton, England, and was written by Mrs Eastbrook, the wife of Hordern’s former stockman, in reply to a letter from SPB’s favourite cousin Brodie, Hordern’s fifth son. ‘We were all getting ready to take Annie to the station when your letter arrived and of course must drop everything to see its contents. After that we had a good cry for we felt it a bit.’ Evidently, Brodie had painted a sorrowful picture of the family’s first seven years in Tasmania. Mrs Eastbrook wrote: ‘It makes the tears come in my eyes when I think how hard your mother must work to keep all straight, and no girl. It does seem a shame. I wish I could fly and help her a bit, but that’s no good for I can’t help over at the farm owing to the fits.’ She went on, as the English do, about her medication (‘no meat’) and the weather: ‘It has been very wet and cold, very sharp frost and snow as it has not been for many years. Outside our door is a perfect glitter just now.’ She makes no reference to her former employer. The only mention of Hordern I was able to find was a postscript in a letter to Brodie. ‘PS Had a letter from your father. He was not too well.’

  Brodie’s father must have suffered extremely from the moment he set foot in Tasmania. Consumed by the disgrace and poverty he had brought upon his family, he could not even look his sons in the face. The truth was that his hopes of founding a new life on the model of Colonel Crawford’s settlement up the road had gone the way of Castra.

  XVI

  FORTY-ONE RETIRED OFFICERS HAD FORMED THE BUDDING NUCLEUS of Crawford’s utopia. They had paid £640 each for a 300-acre plot, sight unseen, but when they disembarked from India to enjoy their retirement they discovered that the promised tramway remained but a chimera and they were expected to bust their guts ‘reclaiming the jungles of Tasmania’, as one Calcutta newspaper described the enterprise. ‘Settlers with the hearts and muscles of lions were able to clear a small acreage in their lifetime.’ So recorded Frank Penn-Smith in his autobiography. Even after he had cleared the jungle, he could not guarantee that crops would flourish. A woman whom he met in Paradise told him: ‘Every bit of food has to be dragged in.’

  The spectacle of elderly Indian officers in the backwoods with their hatchets and saws, vainly clearing land that they had purchased cheap, suggested to one commentator that the Castra scheme had been a sad disappointment if not an absolute failure. Often unable to cut down the bush themselves, they found it too expensive to hire servants. ‘They are a poor dirty lot when you do get them,’ a disgruntled officer complained. ‘And mostly thieves.’ Another officer wrote: ‘Some of the inhabitants here deem the settler from India much in the light of a good milch cow to be cleaned out whenever the opportunity arose.’ One retired General erupted when consulted by his sister-in-law for his overall impression of Castra: ‘Jungle, my dear, nothing but jungle.’

  By 1880, only 20 of the original nucleus remained. It was not enough after a hard day’s tree-felling to play tennis at Captain Sage’s or to admire Miss Hodder’s shell collection or to reminisce with Colonel Crawford on his veranda at ‘Deyrah’ over a cup of Kangra Valley tea. For most, the old days had been immeasurably superior. Today, all that remains of Central Castra is one purply-brown brick bungalow, and, inside, the objects tumbled high as if a burglar had ransacked the house and found nothing.

  Ten miles away, Hordern’s experience was no less disconsolate. Stoke Rivers never developed beyond a subsistence farm. Strewn among the papers in his trunk, I came across the bill for the sale of his ten ‘fat sheep’ at the Tasmanian Auction Rooms on March 5, 1903. Hordern had been so delighted to receive £61 that he made certain the news reached England, where his sisters had had it printed in the local newspaper – evidence to his many friends there that he had found his feet. But the sale was Hordern’s last.

  His early hopes had been to start a dairy herd, supplying milk to the Tongs’ butter factory in North Motton. But this was not the soil that he had been accustomed to in England. Though good for potatoes, it lacked the minerals necessary for his livestock’s health, and the deficiency resulted in some unexpected behaviour. It baffled Hordern to observe his cows and sheep chewing the bones of dead possums and rabbits. He did not realise that they were desperate for zinc. What they swallowed instead tended to make his sheep a liability at auction. Louisa Meredith steered clear of eating mutton that came from her neighbourhood, as it had a ‘particularly unpleasant flavour, probably from some prevailing plant eaten by the sheep’.

  Then there was the mysterious disease that swept through Hordern’s district and was reported in the North-West Post. ‘The first symptoms appear to be shivering, with frothing at the mouth, and the course of the disease (locally called diphtheria) is so rapid that there seems to be no effectual remedy and death very speedily ensues.’ The disease was fatal to calves. I wondered how quickly Hordern’s Herefords had succumbed, whether the calf in Ivy’s photograph was the only animal left.

  XVII

  HE TOOK UP MARKET GARDENING. HE HAD ALREADY FAILED AT cattle-breeding. His maxim now would be: ‘Plant pears for your heirs.’

  Hordern was 17 when, astonished by the size and quality of Tasmania’s strawberries, mulberries and cherries, Anthony Trollope proposed that Tasmania ought to make jam for the world. Hordern took for his model the author he had looked up to since childhood, his late friend Richard Blackmore who had been at his happiest when talking in his low Devon burr about young pear trees, or in his greenhouse stroking a vine. ‘Any ass can write novels,’ Blackmore said. ‘But to make a vine needs intellect.’ Blackmore’s favourite vine was a Black Hamburg, which he called a John Ridd – because of its ‘great strength and large proportions’.

  Before publishing Lorna Doone, Blackmore had laid out a market garden where he experimented with 20 varieties of peach and 79 of pears. To subsidise his writing, he raised crops of large fruit that he sold at Covent Garden ‘at profitable prices’ – sometimes earning nine shillings for a dozen peaches. This is what Hordern now attempted in North Motton. If he knew of Blackmore’s failures, he ignored them. ‘You know my opinion about “gardening for profit”,’ Blackmore wrote to his sister. ‘The profit of rogues, & the ruin of oneself.’

  In 1905, Hordern paid a deposit of £35 on a further 105 acres. He laid out 45 acres of orchards in neat divisions. An old panama on his head, he passed from tree to tree with his shears and pruning knife. He nailed up the berries and planted his John Ridd cuttings in pots. Among vegetables he preferred cardoon and Bismarck potatoes, named after a village near Hobart. He also planted apricots, strawberries and plums – lavishing them with Mount Lyell manure from the west coast. Perhaps Hordern was the mysterious, unnamed figure who endorsed their advertisement: ‘An English gardener on being asked his advice as to cultivation said the first thing essential was to manure, the second to manure and the third to manure.’

  Many of his seeds came from England: Beurré Hardy pears and Galande peaches and clumps of cyclamen and little blue scilla and pansies. ‘Mum told us he had a lovely garden,’ Ivy said. ‘People used to come for miles to look at it because it was so beautiful.’

  When the wind rakes through the casuarinas it makes the sound of people talking. Hordern hoped to earn his fortune by selling his Bismarcks and his flowers to G. & A. Ellis in Ulverstone; his fruit to Jones & Co. in Hobart, who had supplied nearly two million pounds of jam for Allied troops in the Boer war.10 Very likely he followed Blackmore’s example, collecting his pears in round wicker baskets perhaps with his name in black letters. And no doubt remembered Blackmore’s words: ‘To gather fruit a day too soon, withers it; a day too late, and behold it is gone! Also the fowls of the air drill holes.’ But North Motton was not Teddington. In place of crows, Hordern had to contend with squadrons of voracious parrots and locusts, as well as ring-tail and brush possums. His fields and o
rchards were ravaged by a plague of rabbits and, in 1913, by a potato blight. Bit by bit he came to know what Blackmore had meant when he warned: ‘It is true that I carry on the business of fruit-growing, but it never covers expenses.’

  The unique surviving record of Hordern’s fruit farming venture was an article by a journalist who visited Stoke Rivers in Hordern’s fifth year in Tasmania. The property, he wrote, ‘is situated in the prettiest part of the parish, abounding in picturesque ferny glades, which the owner is doing his best to preserve, but very often fishermen forget to put their fires out, and many beautiful places are thus destroyed.’

  The article described the owner of the property as ‘Mr P. Orden.’

  There was something poignant about Petre Hordern’s dissolution into P. Orden by way of P. Horadern, and at first I took it as a coincidence. After all, I told myself, the playwright who lent his name to a fishing-tackle manufacturer was accustomed to sign ‘Shakespeare’ in a variety of ways. Then in an old telephone book I found a third reference to my great-great-uncle. This time he is listed as P. Horde. The inference was impossible to ignore: he had not made much of an impact on the community.

  XVIII

  TASMANIA’S NORTH-WEST WAS A LATE-SETTLED FRONTIER AND A popular destination for those seeking to hide from something. ‘Much of its pioneer stock was on the run from the stigma of convictism,’ writes Pete Hay. A person of Hordern’s background and education was liable to be someone down on their luck, a remittance man or a natural outsider seeking, in Hay’s words, ‘a place beyond the hard judgment of others’ memory’.