In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  In North Motton church, the Honour Roll committee had met to organise the unveiling ceremony for the 14 men who had passed into the Great Beyond, and to plant memorial trees. At the ceremony on August 29, the Reverend R. H. Roberts urged parents whose sons had fallen not to sorrow because with them it was not night but the morning of Glory (applause). After the singing of ‘God Bless Our Splendid Men’, an old soldier got up to say that the lion was stirring and would soon give the Kaiser all the fight he wanted. Not a mention of Hordern.

  Up until a few months before, I had never heard of Hordern. But it upset me to think that this distant relative had died utterly forgotten, not even his religious wife seeing fit to mark his passing with a notice. Out of habit, I went back through the newspapers for the month prior to his death. The very least I could do was to try and put his final days into context.

  As he lay dying, Hordern’s neighbours were preoccupied with a blackberry pest that was spreading up the Leven at such an alarming rate that they had formed a Pest Committee and raised almost £600 to eradicate blackberries. The amount matched the value of Hordern’s worldly possessions: his lands, goods, chattels, rights and credits not exceeding in value ‘the sum of £592’.

  Hordern had not merited an obituary. All the same, the old stockbreeder in him might have appreciated the lamentation in all quarters that greeted the passing of the mammoth Tasmanian bullock Stock and Hand, who had died of tick disease shortly before appearing at a show in Queensland (‘he was fattened to the limit’). The weather, too, I thought, would have reminded him of home. The worst gales in twenty years had felled the wall of the Gaiety Theatre in Zeehan, blocked roads, killed stock and caused three inches of snow in Paradise. ‘There is a decided “nip” in the atmosphere.’

  And not looking for it, I found it. I was reading about the progress of the War – ‘Never before in the world’s history has so much been at stake …’ – when my eyes strayed, and there, sandwiched between advertisements for Mount Lyell manure and a Russian hair restorer, was the name of my great-great-uncle.

  ‘Saturday July 20 1918

  ‘The funeral of the late Mr P. Hordern took place on Wednesday, the Reverend E.A. Salisbury, Anglican minister, officiating. The late Mr Hordern was a native of Devonshire, England, where he followed grazing pursuits before coming to Tasmania some years ago. Although of a retiring disposition, he was an excellent companion, being well educated and endowed with intelligence above the ordinary. The sympathy of the community is extended to the widow and bereaved family.’

  He had died a month earlier than Ivy had thought. Swallowed into Fitzroy’s crack.

  XXI

  BRODIE WAS ON THE BATTLEFIELD IN FRANCE. HE WROTE TO HIS brother Petre, who had been invalided home with ruptured eardrums: ‘You ought to have seen some of the bombing raids we get mixed up in here at times, Petre. Talk about Ypres, it was a “wasp fight” to the raids now. I have had the “wind up” in the true sense since then. Such awful great things they carry. You would think it was an ammo dump.’ He was sorry to learn of their father’s death and ‘that things were not a little brighter’, but at least it would free the family to sell up Stoke Rivers. Unable to bring himself to write the name of the house, he called it, as if it were a curse, ‘that place’. He wrote: ‘It is time all were away where they can get a little encouragement for what they are doing. A change away from everything is what our dear old mater wants.’

  Back in Stoke Rivers with her wounded sons, the widowed Mrs Hordern was never separated from her Bible.

  Ivy showed it to me, plus the three pieces of paper that her grandmother had tucked into it. Her grandmother was always taking them out and reading them for consolation.

  – A sermon delivered two months after Hordern’s death: ‘When people are “dead” they are able to see what is taking place in this world. They are really more alive than ever they were when they were with us. They watch us most tenderly.’

  – A quote from Patience Strong: ‘Forgive! The years are slipping by and Life is all too brief.’

  ‘Did she ever talk about her husband’s drinking?’ I asked.

  ‘Granny Hordern wouldn’t say anything nasty,’ Ivy said. ‘She’d make excuses for anyone, not like me. I’d say something horrible if they need it.’

  After the funeral, Hordern’s widow stayed with Ivy’s mother on Mannings Jetty Road not far from the riverbank where she had landed in the mud 17 years before; and then, in 1921, when Ivy’s mother got married, she went to live in Devonport with her widowed daughter Ethel.

  ‘Poor old Granny, she used to keep us going in clothes,’ said Ivy, who recalled a reserved, sedate woman, not saying much except ‘My dear’ and permanently dressed in black. ‘If Maud puts on black, I don’t like it.’ When not in church, her grandmother sat knitting in the dining room in East Devonport, straight-backed, and the high neck of her dress fastened with a mourning brooch inlaid with seed pearls. ‘She had plenty to think about, plenty of regrets, poor Granny. You couldn’t have fun with her. What happened in her life made her like it.’ Ivy folded back the sermon between the gilt-edged pages and looked at me. ‘You see, when she was young, she would go out dancing.’ As a child, Ivy had been allowed to touch it: a black silk dancer’s shoe streaked with gold. After her Bible, her grandmother’s most precious possession.

  In old age, Mrs Hordern could be observed striding up Preston Road with her walking stick, one hand in the pocket of her wind-whipped long black coat, and lamenting the state of the orchard at Stoke Rivers which her husband had laid out with such patience and into which the new owner had disgracefully allowed his cattle. In 1921, Stoke Rivers was sold to the Owens and subdivided into five plots. The Owen bullocks had crashed through the cyclamen and cardoon, trampling the ‘John Ridd’ vines to smithereens.

  The lines on the third piece of paper read: ‘Oh! That my eyes might closed be/To what becomes me not to see!’

  XXII

  ‘IS THERE ANYONE ALIVE WHO MIGHT REMEMBER STOKE RIVERS?’

  Ivy had a telephone number in Melbourne for Brodie’s son and I called him.

  ‘They reckon I look like my father,’ he said.

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘Not a bad-looking bloke. Tall for the time, about five foot eleven. Brown hair, greeny-blue eyes, and a fair-sized bit of sniffing gear.’

  He was describing SPB, I told him.

  In 1938, when he was nine years old, Brodie’s son visited Stoke Rivers with his father, who had taken over the property on his return from the trenches until it could be sold. They had met Granny Hordern, ‘a real English lady’, and then they walked to the farm, Brodie hacking a path ahead through the bush and killing a four-foot tiger-snake that he hung over the fence. They emerged into a clearing where there was a small bush cottage made of sawn timber. ‘I don’t think it had ever seen paint.’ Brodie pointed out to his son a horse trough that he had carved from a log, and a large table in the kitchen where the family used to eat their meals. Brodie was not a backward-glancing man – ‘the past held nothing for him’ – but the experience of returning to his adolescent home flushed out an unwelcome memory: the memory of Brodie’s father, Petre Hordern, eating his meals in this cramped space, separate from the children. The kind, gregarious John Ridd had become a tetchy recluse.

  Brodie’s son said: ‘My old man wouldn’t run his father down to me, but he announced – which I thought odd – that he counted on both hands the number of times that he sat down to a meal with him.’ He went on: ‘My father didn’t have much time for Petre Hordern. He was a pompous bloke that hadn’t realised circs had changed. He didn’t adapt to the new life. He still liked to play the image of a country squire and it didn’t work. When you’re in Rome you ought to adjust a fair bit to what Romans do.’ And then he said: ‘I think Petre Hordern was unlamented, much so. I don’t think any of the sons had much time for him.’

  After his death, Hordern’s sons scattered as pigeons from a blast. Brodie sold S
toke Rivers within three years and went to live in Melbourne, becoming a salesman of sewing machines; his deaf brother Petre worked as a dairyman on King Island and became known as ‘the old hermit’. The club-footed Nigel went to live in Queensland where he grew tomatoes and was eventually buried in the biggest cemetery in Australia; the quiet, gentle Joe worked in a munitions factory in Footscray, marrying the woman who ran his boarding house. He died in his eighties, of liver cancer. Ivy said: ‘You could hear him I don’t know how far off, trying to breathe, and he didn’t deserve it, poor Uncle Joe.’

  But Hordern’s daughters stayed on in Tasmania.

  I spoke to a woman married to a Hordern descendant who had made a distressing visit to Stoke Rivers. One day in the 1950s her husband decided that he wanted to show off his family’s first home in Tasmania. He drove her in a green and cream Holden along the Arnoll Road where the long arm of the Leven Blackberry Pest Committee had failed to reach. She said: ‘We came to the end. And there was this four-room sort of verandaed house covered in blackberries – just overgrown with them. It was a shocking sight.’ Her husband had known the original Boode from when he was a Lancaster pilot stationed in England during the Second World War. ‘It upset him to think what they came to from that. It was a big step down. Definitely a big step.’

  ‘Did you see inside the house?’ I asked.

  She said: ‘He was so upset that we didn’t get out of the car.’

  I wanted to see Stoke Rivers for myself, but Ivy said that it had been razed to the ground, and she could not be sure whether she would remember the site, even though it was only a few miles away. She telephoned her brother-in-law, Teddy, who lived in the next field. As a boy, he had worked on Hordern’s farm, planting potatoes for its new owners. Teddy was probably the one person alive who knew the exact spot where the Horderns had lived.

  Teddy arrived moments later, a tall, cheerful man with red-veined cheeks who told me that his family had once owned a grand hotel in Cairo.

  I followed his car in the Peugeot through North Motton, past the cemetery and along Arnoll Road. After a few miles we passed a blue board nailed to a tree that read ‘Not far now’. The fields rose steeply into the Dial Range and I recognised the shape of Old Sawn-Off from Ivy’s photograph, but that was all I recognised.

  Then Teddy drove through a gate and came to a halt in the middle of a grassed-over field on the summit of a hill. I parked beside him and he called through the window: ‘Here we are.’

  I climbed out, looked around. The field sloped down to Library Creek where Teddy had once overturned his tractor when ploughing potatoes. It made me wonder if Hordern’s books had anything to do with the name. All that remained of the forest of ring-barked white gums was a line of four macrocarpa and two pines. All that remained of Hordern’s proud garden and orchard was an old laurel tree fenced in with galvanised tin.

  We paused beside the laurel and Teddy pointed to a bump in the grass 50 yards away. ‘That’s where the house used to be,’ and I saw that it was right here, under this laurel, that the photographer had stood to take his picture of Hordern’s wife and children.

  I walked over to the bump – covered in dandelions and cowpats – and stood for a minute, looking down to Library Creek, and imagined SPB’s cousins playing hide-and-seek in the shadow of the dying gums and stopping to remove thorns from their bare feet. I was reminded again of Somerset Maugham: ‘It seems to me that the places where men have loved or suffered keep about them always some faint aroma of something that has not wholly died.’

  I plucked a small branch off the laurel tree and left.

  XXIII

  A MILE BACK DOWN THE ROAD WAS A SIGN: PURTON’S CORNER. THE name rang a bell – and I remembered that Jimmy, the Aborigine who once lived in my shed, had mentioned that his grandmother was a Purton.

  I only grasped after visiting Stoke Rivers that Hordern had settled – unwittingly, I am sure – in the heart of a significant Aboriginal community. Next to the Purtons were the Hearps family, and next to them – in a property directly opposite Hordern’s house – the Kennedys.

  I could not wait to tell Greg Lehman.

  It was hardly surprising that the families along Arnoll Road should have intermarried and formed a tight community, working on each other’s land and helping out with washing and cooking. The Hordern children were no exception. Disgrace and bankruptcy had pushed them from Devon and down this road. Stoke Rivers lay at the very end. It was not the back of beyond: it was further. But here, in the middle of nowhere, where the red track petered out in the bush, Hordern’s son Brodie was thrown together with Greg’s grandmother Molly Kennedy and her brothers Cyril and Gilbert.

  The pursuit of a lost uncle had led me into a territory where family earned me, in my head, the right to ask more questions. If I was not able to tell my grandfather, at least I could share with Greg what I had learned. How his uncles had supplanted SPB in Brodie’s affections. How right up until 1916, when Brodie went to fight in France, the Kennedys were Brodie’s best mates. And how they were drawn closer still by the violent death of Chrissie Venn.

  XXIV

  ‘MUM SAID IT CHANGED THEM WHEN THEY CAME BACK FROM THE war. They were different people.’

  Still, it did mystify me. Why so soon after Hordern’s death did all four of his surviving sons plus his widow abandon the district? Had they really so hated living in North Motton? Ivy’s answer did not make sense. In the Ulverstone museum a casual enquiry threw up an explanation.

  ‘Is North Motton famous for anything?’ I asked the archivist.

  ‘There’s the North Motton murder,’ and she brought out a newspaper, 80 years old, in which not one headline but four were stacked above each other:

  ‘MURDER MOST FOUL’

  ‘SHOCKING NORTH MOTTON TRAGEDY’

  ‘GIRL’S BODY FOUND IN STUMP’

  ‘GAGGED AND HORRIBLY MUTILATED’

  Ivy had not mentioned this.

  ‘Thought you knew all about that,’ she muttered.

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘She’s related, and the one they reckon did it is related too,’ and went to fetch something.

  There is the Tasmanian light, and then, all over the island, there are pockets of extraordinary darkness. If a single reason determined Brodie once and for all to get rid of Stoke Rivers, and mobilised the Hordern diaspora, it was the desire of SPB’s cousins to flee a place that had become inseparably linked to a shocking event. What occurred on Hordern’s road in the space of a few minutes one February afternoon in 1921 was, for months afterwards, the main topic of conversation in the north-west. Mention of ‘North Motton’ carried the same impact as would the words ‘Port Arthur’ in 1996 when Tasmania woke up to the news that Martin Bryant had coolly mowed down 35 people outside the Broad Arrow Café. The Advocate of March 3, 1921, put it in context: ‘It has been reserved for the quiet and peaceful hamlet of North Motton to place upon the criminal records one of the most cruel and brutal of the murders that stain the annals of crime in Tasmania.’ The crime, in the reporter’s opinion, was a ghastly exhibition of how low civilisation could stoop and how much the human could be made to resemble the lowest beast of creation.

  Lorna Doone begins with a murder. It was apt that a murder should put a full stop to the precarious existence that the Horderns had carved for themselves in North Motton.

  It happened on the Arnoll Road, down which Hordern used to amble to collect his mail. He had known the victim well: the young girl had lived less than a mile away. Shortly after 5 p.m. on Saturday, February 26, 1921, she left her two-windowed, shingle-roof shack, waved her mother goodbye and set off on an errand to North Motton, three miles away. She headed downhill along the horse-and-cart track, running her hand against a bank overgrown with bracken and blackberries, and was entering a thickly timbered gully when a man stepped into the road.

  The following afternoon, Brodie pulled up on his motorbike at the house of Chrissie Venn’s mother, Eva Dawes, who lived in the nex
t property to Stoke Rivers. Eva was separated from her husband, who had belted her ‘from the day he met her until the day he left’. Chrissie was their daughter. To Brodie, who had watched her grow up, she was more younger sister than neighbour.

  A distressed Eva told Brodie that Chrissie was missing.

  Chrissie Venn

  To begin with, Eva had hoped that she might have spent the night at her uncle’s house. She was now less certain. Chrissie was 13 years old and, as the doctor observed at the inquest, ‘a particularly well-developed girl’. When she left home the day before – to get some meat and groceries, and to fetch the post – she was wearing a cream-coloured dress with a green sash around it, a white calico petticoat, white stockings, black shoes, black garters, and a gold bar brooch. It would have been impossible to miss her.

  Brodie offered to drive to the post office where his sister – Ivy’s mother – used to work behind the counter and send a message to the police. Just then John Hearps appeared, who owned a farm above the Arnoll Road. He, too, was worried about Chrissie. His son Jack had said something the night before that he could not stop thinking about:

  The previous afternoon Hearps’s son was ploughing a steep paddock with a team of horses when, about a hundred yards below, he noticed Chrissie coming along the lane towards Dead Horse Gully. She ‘had a lean on her’ and seemed in a hurry. That was the last Jack saw of her.