AustLit

Poetry also allowed a kind of political expression not easily accommodated or visible in other early colonial writings. ‘The Native's Lament,’ for example from the Colonial Times in 1826 (5 May), begins in the first person of an Aboriginal of the Huon, lamenting the loss, after the arrival of the white convicts and settlers, of his ‘home of the free and the wild.’ The ‘stranger has found the fair clime/ And comes with the sons of misfortune and crime […] He usurps the best lands of thy native domains.’ The word ‘invasion’ was used as early as 1823 in the Hobart paper The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction: ‘the natives of Van Diemen’s Land are few in number considering the extent of country which they yet hold free from European invasion’ (Saturday, January 25, 1823, p. 194). It might be mentioned here that the acrostic sonnet on the name Van Diemen’s Land was popular in colonial newspapers presumably because of the name’s 14 letters.

The Hobart Town Magazine (1833-34) was the ‘first monthly magazine [in Australia] with definite pretensions to literature’ (Morris Miller 49) and published serials, poetry, short fiction, reviews, and ‘domestic intelligence.’ The magazine published allegories of settler dispossession like ‘Tasmania, A Poem,’ an instance of the early circulation of the non-official name, where the island long ‘slumbered! Pillow’d on the main!’ and is found by Britain and adopted, a younger brother ‘to Australia’ by ‘a few short years’ (1.11 January, 1834). James Ross published numerous articles about convict life in early papers like the The Hobart Town Courier (1827-40), some of which Marcus Clarke used as sources for His Natural Life.

Annie Maria Baxter Dawbin began a diary on her arrival in Van Diemen’s Land from England with her soldier husband in 1834. She later published extracts from the 32 volumes of these diaries as Memories of the Past (Melbourne: W.H. Williams, 1873), including her four or so years in Van Diemen’s Land. Her interests are in recording her experiences of living in a series of colonial and pioneering communities, the difficulties and tragedies of family life, and particularly her own social progress (see also Lucy Frost, A Face in the Glass: The Journal and Life of Annie Baxter Dawbin, 1992).

David Burn (1798-1875) was enraptured with the Van Diemonian landscape from his first encounter, sailing into the Derwent in 1826: ‘Talk of Killarney – the famed of legend and of song? The meanest reach of D’Entrecasteaux Channel outstrips it far in all its favourable attributes – wildness, richness, variety, or grace’ (Morris Miller 119). Burn had followed his mother to the colony and settled on a grant of land in the Ouse district. His The Bushrangers was the first Australian play to be written and performed (in Edinburgh, though, in 1829). Interested mostly in writing plays and journalism, Burn also contributed a series of lively and well written articles to the London Colonial Magazine in 1840-41, including ‘Scenery – the Derwent River,’ ‘Tasmanian Lakes’ and ‘Scenery on the Shannon River and Lake Clarence.’ These were collected in a facsimile volume in 1973, A Picture of Van Diemen's Land.

See also the AustLit entry on David Burn.

Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life has had a powerful influence on perceptions of Tasmania as a geographic location. The serialised version of the novel included a descriptive chapter ‘Hobart Town in 1830,’ later dropped from the book version. The better known passages in the novel are in the chapters ‘The Topography of Van Diemen’s Land’ (II.1) and ‘A Natural Penitentiary’ (III.xx). In the earlier chapter Clarke’s view is cartographic and metaphoric:

Viewed upon the map, the fantastic fragments of island and promontory which lie scattered between the South-West Cape and the greater Swan Port, are like the curious forms assumed by melted lead spilt into water. If the supposition was not too extravagant, one might imagine that when the Australian continent was fused, a careless giant upset the crucible, and spilt Van Diemen’s Land in the ocean. (112)

Tasman’s peninsula, Clarke also wrote, hangs ‘like a huge double-dropped earring, from the mainland’ (112). This landscape is a combination of the idyllic and the dangerous – ‘fertile, fair, and rich, rained upon by the genial showers from the clouds which, attracted by the Frenchman’s Cap, Wyld’s Crag, or the lofty peaks of the Wellington and Dromedary range – pour down upon the sheltered valleys their fertilizing streams’ (113-14) – but also surrounded by shipwrecks, the grim front of Mount Direction, and a ‘perpetual frown on the face of nature’ (114-15). The latter chapter describes how Eaglehawk Neck was low and narrow enough to allow a line of watchdogs and how the topography of the peninsulas ‘offered peculiar advantages to the signalmen’ of the semaphore system (374). In a sardonic tone, Clarke notes that these features allowed Colonel Arthur to report ‘to the Home Government that the spot which bore his name was a 'natural penitentiary' (374-75). These are some sources of the contentious descriptor 'Tasmanian Gothic' and they tend to persist in the multiple forms in which the radically variable narrative of Term has circulated – sometimes tragic, sometimes romantic – as serialized novel, revised serialization, pulp fiction, Penguin Classic, scholarly editions, Classic Illustrated comic, drama, film, musical, and tv mini-series.

See the full AustLit entry at His Natural Life.

One of the source texts for Clarke was Caroline Leakey’s The Broad Arrow (1859), convict fiction that also includes some vivid details of the Tasman Peninsula and the Port Arthur settlement. But it is equally interesting for its evocation of early Hobart town and surrounds. Leakey portrays Tasmania as a place where it is possible to escape the claustrophobia and, paradoxically, the death sentence of the English class system, where people are not condemned at birth to live meanly in thrall to their social superiors. She also portrays Tasmania as a place that needs to rise up against the imposition of the penal system in order to create a free nation, liberated from all the evils of convict transportation. The landscapes of convict fiction then, are both topographical and social.

This opening mirrors Morton’s very popular In Search of England (1927) where he turns his back on London and sets off in search of an artisanal, pre-industrial England. Tasmania by Road and Track has a kind of antiquarian style, like Morton’s, with chapter summaries like the one for Chapter 1: ‘I search for history on the Hobart-Launceston road and find it in plenty, discover a beachless Brighton, walk through an appleland and tell of a trouble-making pioneer’ (11). Later, Peter Conrad in an updated version of this kind of writing, in his Down Home : Revisiting Tasmania (1988) will describe in ambulatory, panoramic detail the long walk into Hobart and back out to his home at Goodwood. Emmett had been an executive member of the Scenery Preservation Board, when it was formed in 1915. This was a government department tasked with preserving natural heritage and was a predecessor to the Parks and Wildlife Service. Emmett went on to become the first director of the Tasmanian Government Tourist Bureau.

A journalist with the The Mercury for most of his career, Michael Sharland became secretary of the Tasmanian Scenery Preservation Board in 1947. Both he and Emmett had long family histories in Tasmania, stretching back to colonial times. In Stones of a Century (1952) and Oddity and Elegance (1966) Sharland is obsessed with discovering a landscape of illusory antiquity in the present – stone-hewn villages, Georgian mansions, old estates – that expresses a spectral continuity with the colonial past and that remains an element of fictional, heritage and touristic discourse today:

Through the Midland country where oak and elm and gum tree murmur like the sound of little, unheard voices, and the moon intensifies the shadows and silvers the surface of the streams that flow beneath the ancient bridges, dust rises from the edges of the road like that from the hoofs of horses, as if the ghosts of the stage coaches and their splendid teams still lingered amid the scenes that knew them long ago. (Stones of a Century 29)

Stones of a Century also devotes a whole chapter to Tasmanian ghosts, another rich vein of popular writing with various claims to Tasmania’s being the most haunted of Australian states (see Will Mooney, ‘Ghost Stories’ in Alexander, Companion to Tasmanian History). Other travel writing includes G. Hawley Stancombe’s Highway in Van Diemen's Land (1968; illustrations by E.V. R. Ratcliff). Like his Evandale neighbor Karl von Stieglitz, Stancombe was a farmer and local historian and Highway in Van Diemen’s Land is a unique example of regional and Australian literature of place, with its heritage strip-map of the old highway from Hobart to Launceston and the many sites imbued with history along the roadside. The title of Charles Whitham’s Rambles in Western Tasmania (2010, ed. Simon Kleinig), given the experience of escaped convicts from Macquarie Harbour, Lady Franklin on her trip to the west coast in 1842, and other walkers’ accounts of struggling with the bauera, might be considered provocative.

This imaginary, proto-Lovecraftian Highlands, with trapdoors into subterranean worlds, is a close relative of the teen horrorscape of Anna Dusk’s In-Human (Transit Lounge 2010), about a young werewolf in Oatlands – no doubt a ghost of tigers, sometimes called timber wolves, past. Also belonging to this imaginary is one of the most powerful of antipodal dream visions of the Tasmanian Midlands, the Freudian primal scene in A.D. Hope’s ‘Ascent into Hell,’ a memory of his Campbelltown childhood. In Hope’s reverse motion poem the speaker regresses from a Purgatorial Tasmania – Dante’s mount being in the Southern hemisphere – through the back door of Hell and exits out into the world through the underworld’s vestibule: ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate,’ the poem ending with this pun on Hope’s name, underlining the nightmare vision of his own birth. Hope (1907-2000) was born in Cooma, southern New South Wales, but his early childhood in Tasmania seems to have been formative of his imaginative life, if the thematics of his adult career as a poet is any guide. The insularity of Hope’s poetics is clearly traceable in his first volume The Wandering Islands(1955), which included the title poem and ‘Ascent into Hell,’ and through later poems such as ‘The Return from the Wandering Island,’ ‘Circe,’ ‘The End of a Journey,’ ‘Man Friday,’ ‘Hay Fever,’ ‘The Drifting Continent,’ ‘Tasmanian Magpies,’ and ‘In Memoriam: James Philip McAuley, 1976.’ The equation of islands, often specifically Tasmania, and dream, along with its cognates reverie, reminiscence, self-analysis, unconscious memory, and nightmare is noticeably consistent in Hope. Well aware of the significance of Freudian slips, Hope must have quite deliberately left Tasmania off the map of Australia in perhaps his most famous poem 'Australia' – but in a nice way. There are only five capitals in this poem, ‘like five teaming sores,’ and the ‘monotonous tribes’ of Australians stretch from Cairns to Perth, but not, it seems, across Bass Strait.

The Labyrinth in the Central Highlands was used as some of the background landscape in David Attenborough’s Walking with [CGI] Dinosaurs (1999). And Peter Conrad’s photography-based study At Home in Australia (2003) draws attention to the fact that the ‘first Australian daguerreotype, made in 1848 by J.W. Newland, shows Murray Street in Hobart sloping down to the wharf […] The first glimpse of an Australian city acknowledges that all cities are places of rapid transit, where the record of our existence is soon effaced’ (129). Tasmanian landscapes provided settings for periods in pre-history for Roger Scholes’ Stories from the Stone Age (2004). Tasmania has also played an ambivalent role in popular versions of the life narratives of the young Albert Einstein, Errol Flynn and Merle Oberon.