by Paul Collins
Understandably, in the working-class parish where I ministered there was not a lot of sympathy for those who were trying to prevent ‘development’, denying ordinary people jobs and forcing young Tasmanians to go to the mainland for employment. Some of the parishioners took the same aggressive stance as the Premier. There was an important branch of the Hydro-Electricity Commission just a few blocks away from our church. At first I remained a neutral onlooker, vaguely on the side of the conservationists, but keeping my own counsel in public. As it happened, however, just before the dam was completed and the whole area was flooded, I had a few days off, and I joined a group walking into Pedder to take one last look at the doomed lake. It was in the centre of the remote south-west of the island, which had largely remained a wilderness area, accessible only to walkers up until the early 1970s. Walkers, of course, were seen by the Reeces of this world as an effete ‘intellectual elite’, in contrast to real ‘workers’ who were the practical people who kept the world going. As Richard Flanagan has argued in his A Terrible Beauty (1985), environmentalists themselves must bear some responsibility for behaving in an elitist fashion and allowing themselves to be cast in this role, but it is also true that politicians are much more at fault for deliberately driving divisions through the community for short-term political gain, by derisively casting ‘greenies’ in a selfish and irresponsible light.
The day I spent at Lake Pedder was one of the most memorable in my life. It was a moment of conversion in the genuine religious sense. Here was a place of extraordinary beauty, a scene that puts you in touch with a poetic and profound spiritual dimension of life. The whole place palpitated with a living but intangible ‘presence’ that led me toward the Transcendent with a capital T! For me, as a Catholic, the Lake Pedder area was a vision of the magnificent creativity of God, manifested through nature. I was later to discover the words of the great medieval theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas that summed up what I realised existentially that day. He says simply that ‘qualibet creatura . . . demonstrat personam Patris’ (‘Every creature . . . shows forth the personality of God the Father’ (Summa Theologiae, I, q 45, a 7). The lake truly was a magnificent cathedral of nature that showed forth the splendour of God. Significantly, what highlighted this transcendent beauty for me was Pedder’s vulnerability, and the fact that it was soon going to be destroyed, its unique species lost forever. Something profound changed inside me that day, and I have been going back to Tasmania’s south-west ever since.
Since 1972, massive campaigns have been waged to try to save much of the rest of the south-west from political opportunism and the technocratic mania that drove the dam-builders, and that still drives the inane destructiveness of wood-chip loggers. Fortunately, the campaigns have been to some extent successful, and at least some of the great Tasmanian wilderness has been saved from annihilation and from the small-mindedness typified by ‘Electric Eric’ and those who obliterated the original Lake Pedder. Much, but certainly not all, of the south-west is now preserved in the World Heritage Area that will be maintained for time immemorial, or at least until future human rapaciousness finds some other reason to threaten it with destruction. Nowadays civilised humankind sees this wonderful environment as a kind of paradise, a place for nurturing the mind, and one of the great remaining untamed and remote wilderness areas left on earth.
About a decade after my Lake Pedder experience and environmental conversion, I was studying the convict system for a doctorate in Australian history and came upon the story of Alexander Pearce and his companions. It struck me that almost all of the most terrible aspects of the story were played out against the backdrop of what is now the World Heritage Area. Here was a group of men who had experienced south-western Tasmania in a very different way from how I and other twenty-first-century people know it. If it is ‘paradise’ for us, it had been ‘hell’ for Pearce and his companions, and it was to become a place where their judgements became so distorted that they killed and ate each other. It is abundantly clear that Pearce and Broughton and their fellow escapees would never have turned to cannibalism if they had not stumbled into this wilderness.
Paradoxically Macquarie Harbour was called a ‘place of secondary punishment’ in the early nineteenth century, and the whole of the south-west was viewed at the time not only as the wilderness barrier that would prevent escape, but also as an integral part of the punishment process. This was a place that had been especially set aside for the most recalcitrant of recidivist convicts by the British penal authorities of the 1820s. This all highlights the ambiguity and subjectivity of place in human culture and consciousness. We now regard the south-west as a kind of paradise where our spirits are revived and our bodies renewed by the extraordinary beauty of the rivers, rainforests and mountains. But in the 1820s they saw it as an isolated hell on earth where the bodies of the most recalcitrant could be subdued and their spirits broken so that they could be converted into submissive and useful citizens. The more I thought about this story and place, the more I was confronted with a startling and paradoxical juxtaposition: violence, murder and cannibalism in what we think of as one of the most beautiful and valuable places on earth.
Pearce and the other convicts at Macquarie Harbour were not alone in their view of the Tasmanian south-west. Their negative attitudes were shared by others who tried to penetrate the rainforests at about the same time. The Van Diemen’s Land Company surveyor, Henry Hellyer, travelled through terrain like this in 1827. His view is typical of the period: ‘The air in these dense forests is putrid and oppressive and swarms with mosquitoes and large stinging flies, the size of English bees’. Here he is describing a period in late summer, and is most probably talking about what today are called March flies, which are persistent flies that can give a nasty sting. He reports that daylight is completely shut out by the masses of foliage, which are impervious to the rays of the sun.
A similar word-picture to that of Hellyer is painted by David Burn, writing in 1842. He travelled with the then Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin, who was accompanied on a famous overland trip to Macquarie Harbour by his wife, Lady Jane Franklin. Burn vividly describes the difficulty of traversing ‘This dense, dank, unblest forest of live, dead and fallen myrtle and sassafras trees, their trunks and limbs strewed and intertwisted with the most regular irregularity, forming a complication of entanglements, to which the famous Gordian knot was simplicity itself’.
No doubt there are people today who would view these rainforests as ‘putrid and oppressive’, who still see them as dark, damp, silent, strangely alien places that retain their deep and integral sense of ‘otherness’. This response is understandable. Some of the rainforest species date back over sixty million years and, as we have seen, originally evolved from the plant-life of Gondwana. Because they are so different, the experience of these forests can be psychologically destabilising, especially when you are unused to being in them. But once you become used to them they begin to assume transformative qualities that extend your experience of cosmic history and time, and help you break out of the parochial and limited shackles of the present.They put you in touch with an age long before humankind ever evolved.There is an odd feeling of permeability: you sense that the landscape will absorb you, and that you are in touch with a period long before our remote human ancestors emerged.
Pearce, in contrast, had come from the cleared, open, soft, rolling hills of the farming country that constitutes the border between what is now the Republic of Ireland and Ulster. Certainly the escapees had already had some experience of the bush they would have to pass through on the escape attempt, in their periods at large to the north of Hobart Town, and in their work in the logging gangs on the mainland side of Macquarie Harbour. However, they must have felt these remnant forests of Gondwana were terribly ominous, menacing and destabilising. Even if Pearce had experienced a northern hemisphere forest, it would have had large trees such as oaks, elms and maples, and a more open understorey, and been crisscrossed
with established paths and roads that dated back to the Middle Ages or even further.
In some ways what is left of the south-western rainforests of Tasmania has survived precisely because it was so despised as a useless wilderness. Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, with a small number of notable exceptions, people saw the south-west as an unprofitable and unproductive jungle that if possible should be cleared for pasture. But despite desultory efforts to farm it, in the end it was perceived as useless for agriculture. Up until the mid-twentieth century ‘piners’, as they are called in Tasmania, worked the ever-decreasing supply of Huon pine, and the only other activity of any commercial consequence that developed in the area was mining, which fortunately was largely restricted to the area immediately around Queenstown and Rosebery. But until the development of modern environmentalism, the usual aim of Europeans in Australia was to ‘conquer’, ‘tame’ and ‘civilise’ the wilderness by turning it into productive farmland. There was considerable truth in the Australian quip that ‘If something moves, you shoot it; if it is still standing, you chop it down’.
The attitude of the settlers of North America was not much different from that of Europeans in Australia. Many had come to North America to escape religious persecution and had high ideals about themselves and the achievement of a more just society. But their stance toward the natural world was as destructive as that of the first European Australians. William Strickland journeyed up the Hudson River in 1794–95, and he describes the settlers in this part of New York State as having ‘an utter abhorrence for the works of creation . . . [they] drive away or destroy the more humanised Savages, the rightful proprietors of the soil . . . [they] thoughtlessly and rapaciously exterminate all living animals . . . then extirpate the woods that cloath and ornament the country . . . and finally [they] exhaust and wear out the soil’. European colonists saw the new worlds of North America and Australia fundamentally as resources to be exploited and, while this was moderated to some extent in the nineteenth century by a growing appreciation of the beauty of the wilderness, largely inspired by the romantic movement, it did not prevent the destruction of many species, including the extermination by 1915 of perhaps the most numerous species of bird ever known, the passenger pigeon, and the slaughter of sixty million buffalo in the period after the American Civil War.
After World War II the ideology of the ‘conquest’ of nature in Australia was replaced with that of ‘development’ at any cost, and this quickly came to dominate the consciousness of successive federal and state governments in Australia. So-called ‘national projects’ that diverted rivers and created hydro-electricity were all the rage. The Snowy Mountains Scheme, for example, has eventually led to the virtual death of at least two rivers (the Snowy and the Murray), and to the illusion that water-intensive crops such as cotton and rice can be grown in the dry Australian landscape. With the development mania that drove successive Australian governments, the natural world was seen merely as a continent-sized quarry for raw materials, and as a playground where technocrats and engineers could ‘harness’ the forces of nature in vast schemes of ‘national development’. The earth was a massive mineral resource to be dug up and exported to Japan and the industrialised world, and the land was to be cleared of its natural vegetation for whatever cash crop that could be grown to feed and clothe the peoples of Europe and Asia, earning ‘export dollars’.The rivers were to be harnessed so that marginal land could be brought into production through irrigation, despite the salination that inevitably followed, and the sea was to be exploited for its food resources, long before we even knew anything about the fish or the limits of their breeding cycles. For the last fifty years Australia and most Australians have been on a development binge.
It is only now that this ideology is starting to be seriously questioned. While Australia is a net exporter of food and Australian agriculture is feeding three to four times our population, the country faces massive problems of land degradation, pollution of our rivers, salination and loss of species diversity. Slowly a whole new consciousness is emerging. This involves an ethic of conservation; but we are also beginning to realise that wilderness has a value in itself as a natural icon, a symbol of a deeper presence, a sacrament of what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls the transcendent God. Macquarie Harbour and the Tasmanian south-west have become places where thoughtful people now go for contemplation, for an encounter with that which is other than us. The profound irony is that this ‘place of secondary punishment’ has now become a ‘cathedral of nature’.
Yet, as bushwalkers and those experienced in wilderness will tell you, this is not the whole story. While it is true that there is a lurking and intangible ‘presence’ in the natural world, people also have to confront the fact that the bush is utterly detached from us, from our petty concerns and relationships, from our often frustrated longings for human fulfilment and the many other absurd anxieties and illusions that we harbour about the world and our place in it. Nature is even indifferent to our worries about the destruction of the natural world, the loss of biological diversity and our efforts to develop an ‘ecological spirituality’. It is, in the truest sense, utterly Other. From the point of view of the natural world, humans are merely a tiny part of a vast cosmos. There is a way in which the convict authorities at Sarah Island and Pearce and his companions were absolutely right: when you are cast into terrible isolated objectivity against your will and without preparation, worked as a slave and pitted against the forces of nature, the wilderness really does become so totally Other that it becomes an absolute hell, especially if you are starving and exhausted.
The Pearce story points to an important ambivalence. It takes us into the heart of the wilderness and helps us discover that while the natural world should be preserved at all costs, it is not as benign as those of us brought up in the tradition of Wordsworth, Keats and nineteenth-century European romanticism tend to imagine. It is not some harmless, exotic, picturesque place where we go like new-age dilettantes ‘to discover the self’ or ‘contact the “divine spark” within’ and learn ‘to feel good about ourselves’. While it is not directly hostile to humankind, the reality of all wilderness is that it is objective, timeless, independent and completely indifferent to the vagaries of the human condition. In fact, it was precisely this stark objectivity of the wilderness, this disdain for the puny affairs of mortals, that most likely contributed to driving the Pearce party over the edge into a kind of madness that made the killing and cannibalism possible. Perhaps it is also the natural world’s complete detachment from humanity’s puny achievements that most upsets the technocratic control freaks who built the dams and the believers in the religion of development at any cost, like ‘Electric Eric’. Certainly, one can detect a kind of alienated hatred for the forest in the continuing destructive behaviour of the present-day wood-chippers.
Another question that lurks behind this whole story, and which I constantly asked myself as I was researching and writing the book, was how these men came to the point where they could become cannibals.
Over the whole of the fifteen months I was working away on the Pearce story, I got horrified and bemused responses from people when I first described for them the contents of this book. ‘How could anyone kill and eat another human being?’ was the usual question. Most people could comprehend the terrible situation in which the Pearce party found themselves, but they could not understand how they could decide to kill a man, cut him up and eat him. To tell the truth, at first I experienced a similar response, but with a slightly different focus. I was struck by how quickly the Pearce party resorted to killing and eating each other – they were only about eight days out of Macquarie Harbour when the first murder occurred, and there was not a lot of discussion about it. At first I put their apparent callousness down to the brutalising process through which they had passed as convicts. Between them these eight men had received at least 1300 lashes over a three-year period – an average of 162 lashes each.
In itself this would have had a profoundly brutalising effect. This was compounded by the near-starvation conditions under which the men worked at Macquarie Harbour, especially in the first year. But even that did not fully explain the celerity with which they resorted to murder and cannibalism.
I think the answer can only be found in the fact that in the course of their journey they had become socially and psychologically alienated from normal human conditions, even by the standards of prisoners. They were literally dislocated – that is, totally out of their normal place, physically, mentally and emotionally. They found themselves in a new and alien world and they had no way of comprehending it. They were the first Europeans ever to penetrate so deeply into the south-west, and their only known reference points were Frenchman’s Cap and the Gordon River. Everything else in the landscape was a terra incognita – an unknown and alien landscape. Even their slave labour in the rainforests of the coast around Macquarie Harbour could not have prepared them for the difficulties they faced.They would have experienced being profoundly and utterly lost. Even if, like Pearce, they had earlier absconded and lived in the bush, or worked on the edges of the settled districts, this would not have offered them any real preparation for the conditions they experienced in the southwest.
At first sight the notion of ‘place’ seems rather abstract.Yet it plays a central role in our lives.Who we are, our identity, is closely linked with the place from which we come. North-central Ireland was where Pearce was ‘at home’, the place that constituted the original geographical and social parameters of his life in which he had been born and formed, the locations and landmarks established inside his head. While Hobart Town and the surrounding countryside was a long way from his true ‘home’, even there he could at least relate to the communal and social structures enacted by the British penal authorities. In fact, some Europeans adjusted well to Australian conditions and became expert bushmen with a sympathy for the landscape. James Erskine Calder is an excellent example. But they were in the minority. Most whites remained detached from the strange southern landscape, and it took a couple of generations for their descendants to feel at home in Australia. This perhaps helps to explain why European people crowded into cities, where most of the population still lives.