AustLit

This subset is one of the Research Projects of the AustLit resource, and is under the direction of Professor Philip Mead, at the University of Western Australia. It aims to provide bibliographical information about Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmanian writing, and includes biographical information about authors who were born in, visited or whose writing has been substantively influenced by Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania, as well as about publishers, literary societies, relevant book history, archival holdings, and places of significance to Tasmanian writing. The AustLit resource allows you to search within these categories of ‘Tasmanian regional literature and writers.’ The subset builds on previous bibliographical work in Australian literature that, from early in the twentieth century, recognised the distinctive literary culture of colonial and modern Tasmania (see ‘Relevant bibliographical work, library and archival resources’). This introduction is designed to be used in conjunction with the database as a finding tool for ideas about the literature of Tasmania. It offers some critical outlines of authors’ careers and individual works, some thematic focuses for critical reading and research in the literature of Tasmania, some theoretical reflections on the island and literary regionalism, and some contextual references to the world literature of islands.

This critical introduction is structured around the periods of Tasmanian cultural history: the deep time of Indigenous or Palawa Tasmania (Trowenna) and its survival into the present; the first decades of British settlement from 1803 to 1854 (the end of transportation); the second period of colonial history from 1855 to Federation, beginning with the change of the colony’s name from Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania; the twentieth century, and the present. It also provides a thematic guide to the Tasmania of the mind, or Tasmanian writing as a distinctive literary imaginary, and as an identifiable regional subset of both Australian literature and the world literature of islands.

In Italo Calvino’s novel The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) there is a moment where the narrator realises that stories don’t proceed along thin, linear planes, or straight singular lines. The act of reading produces a dense forest of story in whichever direction the reader proceeds, it’s unending. This sounds like reading the literature of Tasmania: the topography is awesome and astonishingly varied, enhanced by its insular and relatively remote nature. But in the atlas of the imagination, as this introduction aims to suggest, the island is even more densely layered – Trowenna, Taprobane, Van Diemen’s Land, Tsalal, Transylvania, Tasmania. In fictions as well as real, historical experiences of the global south, Tasmania has had an exotic and multi-faceted presence for centuries, which has built up a thick narrative discourse about the island. Writers have even been prompted by this narrative density into creational linguistics, as if the place deserved an endemic language of its own – the dialect of the lost tribe in Louis Nowra’s play: The Golden Age, the regained speech of his narrator Hannah in Into That Forest, the idiolect of Peevay, one of the narrators in Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers, Richard Flanagan’s Vandemonian patois ‘dementung’ in Gould's Book of Fish, a ‘bastardised dialect that was part blackfella, part whitefelon.’ Underlying these literary inventions are remnants of the Palawa (or Parlevar) language from explorers’ and missionaries’ word lists, French place-names, contemporary Indigenous language retrieval projects, and the varieties of transported English. The genres of island writing, always relevant to the corpus of Tasmanian literature, are both foundational to the Western literary tradition and complexly instantiated through history and hemispheres. This guide, then, recognises the historical phases of ancient habitation, first contact and settlement, with its contradictory modernities, down to the present but doesn’t try to constrict the literature of Tasmania to a linear history. It doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive about a literary discourse that extends in every direction, that can be read backwards as well as forwards. It aims rather to provide a set of thematic and historical waypoints for navigating around the richly varied literary biota of this island state.

Van Diemen’s Land, the first European name for Tasmania, perhaps because of its unknown extent and its antipodean distance from Europe and North America, was also a name for the uttermost edge of the world, the southern hemisphere equivalent of Ultima Thule. That’s probably what it signified in Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘If you were coming in the Fall,’ with its lines about counting fingers in a child’s game, ‘Subtracting till my fingers dropped/ Into Van Diemens land’ (Pierce 217). The end of the world had been a convenient place for Jonathan Swift to locate his other-world islands, Lilliput and Blefuscu (‘discovered, A.D. 1699’) in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The imaginary cartography of the frontispiece to the first edition of the novel adapted the chart of Van Diemen’s Land from Tasman’s 1642 voyage, showing the incomplete coastline to the south-east of Gulliver’s ‘remote nations.’ Van Diemen’s Land’s fragmentary coastline is one of the markers, ironic and otherwise, of Gulliver’s fictional narrative of maritime exploration. Thus Tasmania, as a kind of cartographic zygote, has an embryonic presence at one of the inception points of the English novel. Some readers of Tasmanian material culture view the pre-settler association of Van Diemen’s Land and Gulliver as prefiguring a ‘collocation’ of Tasmania, island, colony and miniaturisation in terms of the exilic island imaginary (see McMahon, ‘Tasmanian Lilliputianism’). Van Diemen’s Land is also the last outpost of human settlement for Edgar Allen Poe’s hero in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) on his expedition to the Antarctic. Paul Giles reads Poe’s version of Van Diemen’s Land, Tsalal, or a disfigured Tasmania, as a sign of Poe’s anxieties, as an American northerner, about race and the violent primitivism of ‘black’ peoples of the South (Antipodean America 139). Another North American literary and voyager connection is Amasa Delano’s (1763-1823) account of his visit to Van Diemen’s Land in his Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817). In his account of sailing around the East coast of Tasmania and in Bass Strait, Delano describes rescuing Lt. John Bowen from Cape Barren Island. Bowen’s ship Integrity had lost its rudder on a return voyage from Sydney. Delano relates another episode in Bass Strait when he nearly drowned taking a barrel of fish ashore from one of his ships: 'About midway between the Pilgrim and the shore, while crossing a horse market, (a sailor’s phrase for a rough irregular sea, the waves rising all in a heap, occasioned by two tides meeting,) the water rushed so rapidly into the boat, that in less than two minutes she sunk like a stone to the bottom, leaving us floating on the surface,' (n.p.). An extract from Delano’s 1817 narrative, A Narrative of a Voyage to New Holland and Van Diemen's Land was published in facsimile by the Cat & Fiddle Press in Hobart in 1973 (see Delano). Delano’s journals were the source for Herman Melville’s 1855 novella ‘Benito Cereno,’ including his narrator in that story.

By the time of first British settlement in 1803-4, Van Diemen’s Land had been annexed to New South Wales but its old Dutch name proved resilient. In fact the island has been Van Diemen’s Land much longer than it has been Tasmania. The British colonising extension of New South Wales, following settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788, was a response to the French maritime interest in the landmass, to French territorial claims to western New Holland and the possibility of France ‘gaining a footing on the east side of these islands’ (King 249). French explorers Bruni d’Entrecasteaux (1792) and Nicolas Baudin (1802), driven by the spirit of the Enlightenment, were keen to match Cook’s successful English expeditions in the Pacific, but the French voyages that included Van Diemen’s Land exploration were disabled by the political divisions of revolutionary France they carried with them. These idealistic but troubled voyages surveyed and studied the Indian Ocean side of New Holland and its southern extension, ‘Terre Napoleon.’ But it was the perception of French territorial claims of Citizen Baudin’s mission to explore the east coast of Van Diemen’s Land, and the anxiety about ‘an Australian Pondicherry’ on the shores of Storm Bay, that galvanised the British into action (West 28; see also Carter and Hunt). English Van Diemen’s Land, then, is founded as a border-securing extension of penal New South Wales and begins its history as a notorious prison island. The French coastal interlude in Tasmanian history, though, with its encyclopaedist, botanical and artistic purposes and its sometimes happy encounters with Aboriginal people – as in D’Entrecasteaux’s second visit to Recherche Bay in 1793, in contrast to summary Dutch commercial appraisal and vicious English land-grabbing – turns into a kind of myth of alternative history. Counterfactual French Tasmania, always imaginable from the many French place-names of the southern and eastern coasts of Tasmania, as well as from the artworks of Baudin’s research team, threads its way through later representations of the island’s history and culture. Although, in the history of French encounters with Van Diemen’s Land, Marion du Fresne’s visit in 1772, with its misunderstanding and violence, is more typical of new world encounters.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Van Diemen’s Land became an island penitentiary for transportees from Britain and its colonial dominions, and a site of secondary punishment for convicts from mainland New South Wales. From this point Van Diemen’s Land becomes not just the end of the world but a legendary place of banishment and cruelty. Writing about the colonial period includes folk songs and ballads like ‘The Black Velvet Band,’ ‘The Braemar Poacher’ and ‘Maggie May’ and narratives by convicts and ex-convicts, contemporary writing about convicts and the system that ruled them, and a long and evolving tradition of literary representation of the convict past that stretches down to the present.

In 1825 Van Diemen’s Land achieved a degree of administrative and judicial autonomy from New South Wales. When self-government was established in mid-century, a parliamentary petition was sent to the English Queen requesting a new name for the colony – Tasmania – agreed to by Victoria in 1855. The reason the colonists took this step was that the name Van Diemen’s Land had become indelibly stained with the colony’s history of ‘bondage and guilt’ and with the violence of the genocidal ‘Black Wars’ of the 1820s and early 1830s (see Henry Reynolds’s important article ‘”The Hated Stain”: the Aftermath of Transportation in Tasmania’ in Historical Studies 14.53, October 1969, 19-31). The name Tasmania had, in fact, been in circulation from very early in the colony’s settler history, An Elegant Imperial Sheet Atlas, for example, published in London in 1808, included a map with both the names Van Diemen’s Land and Tasmania (see Giles, Antipodean America 139). ‘Tasmania,’ then, acknowledged Dutch maritime heritage but also facilitated the repression of ‘reminiscences of a painful nature’ (‘Editorial,’ 1856). John West deliberately chose that proleptic name for the colony in his History of Tasmania, first published in 1852, because it was popular, melodious and literary. ‘Tasmania’ meant a fresh start, a new history. The impracticality of Captain James Vetch’s suggestion for ‘geographical nomenclature’ of Australia in a 1938 paper in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society is obvious: Vetch’s map took the name ‘Tasmania’ off Tasmania, gave it to an area of north-western Australia and devolved Tasmania back to Van Diemen’s Land.

Far from being forgotten, though, Van Diemen’s Land’s convict past was revived imaginatively in the second half of the nineteenth century by writers of popular fictions like Caroline Leakey, in The Broad Arrow (1859) and Marcus Clarke, in His Natural Life (1870-4), both works that remain in print today. And Tasmania’s penal history has continued to fascinate writers up until the present. Contemporary writers such as Andrew Motion, Matthew Kneale, Bryce Courtenay, Richard Flanagan, Rohan Wilson, Christopher Koch (in his last novel, Lost Voices 2012) and Lenny Bartulin (Infamy, 2013) like many before them, continue to revisit the archive of Vandiemonian history, re-imagining the world that produced it from many different angles. This archive of Tasmanian history, like the island’s name, is a conflictual source of remembering and forgetting. This Vandiemonian theme is complex and multilayered, and proliferates across periods and forms, sometimes in extreme ‘Gothic’ inflections, sometimes in less dark, more colourful modes, sometimes functioning as an island imaginary alone, sometimes as a broader national mytheme. As this list of writers suggests, though, it is predominantly gendered as male.

A subset like this one defines a body of literary work by territorialising it. So it necessarily suggests or marks its difference, its boundaries, its exceptionalism, perhaps even its naturalness. These various effects need to be treated with critical awareness because there is only an imaginary, always mediated relationship between the geographical entity Tasmania and writing that references it. Literary territory is always a rhetorical construction. Nevertheless, space becomes valued place when it is written, place seeps into and grows around words, and spatial and geographical representations are some of the most recognisable and valued of literary effects. Regions may be uncertain, even dubious, entities but they are also beguiling (Pierce, ‘Highlands’). The thematic map to the territory of Tasmania provided by this subset will hopefully allow the kind of testing and continual rereading that this kind of ‘regional’ collectivising of authors and works tends to produce.

At the same time it’s worth recalling that the political and social reality of modern Tasmania has been formed by a population’s relation to place that is unlike anywhere else: the Australian Greens, for example, now a national political party, but begun in Tasmania, has a genealogy going back to the United Tasmania Group in the 1970s and the tragic flooding of Lake Pedder in 1972. The art of wilderness photographers Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis and painters such as Max Angus was part of environmental action for the preservation of wilderness and forests. In other words, place has a very particular real-world valency for the Tasmanian polis, it has shaped and continues to shape its political, economic and cultural institutions like no other region of Australia (see Cica). And there is a complex relation between this endemic (sometimes Edenic) reality and the political imaginary, a product of both lived, historical emplacement and the consciousness of place it has produced. The bioregional imagination has been an important contributor to community building and to the definition of polity in Tasmania, and includes ‘place-conscious literature, art, natural-history writing and thoughtful daily living’ (Robin, ‘Seasons and Nomads’ 278). For a compelling illustration of this dynamic see Richard Flanagan’s account of the public meeting of the Greens, in Hobart, at the end of his chapter ‘The Masters of History’ (Pybus and Flanagan 122-35).

Perhaps the most productive perspective on the literature of any region follows from the acknowledgement that regions are also worlds. In this sense no island is an island, no regional literature is entire of itself. As Derrida writes, we ‘do not know what it is, world, what being it is’ but one path to an understanding may be in the question of what a region is (97). To this way of thinking islands are small continents, as Henry David Thoreau sensed: ‘An island always pleases my imagination: even the smallest, as a small continent and integral part of the globe’ (258). Previous cartographies underlying ‘regional’ literatures have sometimes been distorting in their presuppositions or anxieties about metropolitan, usually national centres of cosmopolitanism and cultural density, and separate, pre-modern life-forms or temporal delays in the spread of a singular modernity in outlandish regions (see Shipway). New, less tendentious chorographies now allow us to think of regional literary worlds as mediated by the cosmopolitan, and vice versa, simultaneously local, national and international, as bioregional, sub- and/or trans-national, but with global and hemispherical networks of filiation. As sites of both cosmopolitanism and displacement, of multiple modernities, of isolation and polysituatedness (Kinsella, Polysituatedness). ‘Locality is the only universal’ (John Dewey, qtd in Giles 11). This is especially the case with Tasmania because of the pre- and co-existence of the literature of islands, a virtual sphere of historical, transcultural thematics that envelops and inflects Tasmania’s own distinctive insular discourses. This imaginary aspect of the world includes the generalised romance of islands (Ballantyne’s Coral Island), Lawrence Durrell’s islomania, from Reflections on a Marine Venus (Atlantis, Tahiti), the enigma of islands (Elysium, Rapanui, Sacks’ Pingelap and Pohnpei), the utopian or dystopian social laboratory (Utopia, Paul et Virginie’s Mauritius, Dr Moreau, Huxley), the fantasy island (Yeats’ ‘Innisfree’), island cities (Calvino), the castaway or desert island (Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson), the island home (Bergman’s F̊arö, Walcott’s St Lucia), empire islands and problematic shores (The Tempest), the prison, exilic or devil’s island (Alcatraz, St Helena, Îles du Salut, Elba, Charrière, Christmas Island), the monastery island (Lindisfarne, Skellig Michael), the quarantine island or lazaretto (Kamau Taurua, Spinalonga) and multiple imaginary and speculative cartographies, like the isolario of the fifteenth century (see Gillis 42-3; Shell, ‘Preamble’). An element of islandology, linking prison islands, is at work in the legend that all the willows in Tasmania are descended from the tree over Napoleon’s tomb on St Helena, including the one planted by Lady Jane Franklin at Willow Court, New Norfolk.

There are three Tasmanian writers I’d like to draw attention to in this introductory context: the mid-19th-century Van Diemen’s Land sojourner Tom Arnold, the early 20th-century literary historian and scholar Frederick Sefton Delmer, and the folklorist, popular historian and life-writer Patsy Adam Smith. Their times, their personal histories and their trajectories as writers are all very different but together they are emblematic of the individual and territorial heterogeneity of the literature of Tasmania, of the unpredictable relations between a writing life, a literary region and the world. They are each writers whose experience is at a tangent, in different ways, to Tasmania, sometimes self-consciously so, while, at the same time, they suggest the depth and richness of Tasmanian literary culture.