‘A sort of bringing of heaven and hell together’
—Mark Twain
The literature of Tasmania has made, and continues to make, a remarkable contribution to the literature of Australia. David Burn’s The Bushrangers, reputedly the first Australian play to be staged, was performed in Edinburgh in 1829. In 1830 Henry Savery published the first collection of Australian essays, The Hermit in Van Diemen’s Land, and the following year he published the first Australian novel, Quintus Servinton. Thomas Richards, who wrote extensively for various periodicals, including the Hobart Town Magazine (Australia’s first literary journal), is widely regarded as Australia’s first dramatic critic, and among the earliest Australian short-story writers and literary essayists. Charles Rowcroft’s Tales of the Colonies, or, the Adventures of an Emigrant (1843) was the first novel to explore the migrant experience in Australia. Caroline Leakey’s Broad Arrow (1859) was the first convict novel, a genre made famous by Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1874).
The short story, like poetry, has been prominent in Tasmanian literature since colonial days. Stories were published in serial form in early literary periodicals from the 1830s, such as Thomas Richards’ unfinished ‘The Bushrangers Confederate’, published across five editions of the Hobart Town Magazine in 1834 (and far too long to include in this collection). Not all the stories published in or about Tasmania in the first half-century of white settlement, when the colony was still Van Diemen’s Land, have much artistic merit today. From the 1860s on, though, there is no shortage of high-quality short fiction from the island state.
The earliest stories in this book—Theresa Tasmania’s ‘A “Model” Dream’, Marcus Clarke’s ‘The Seizure of the Cyprus’, Henry J. Goldsmith’s ‘The Hermit of the Huon’ and James Leakey’s ‘The Tasmanian Devil’—attest to this quality and give us a clear idea of the types of fiction that were being read in Tasmania and Australia in the 1860s and 1870s. Clarke’s story was published in the Australasian, while the stories by Tasmania and Goldsmith both appeared in the Australian Journal.
These periodicals, along with the Bulletin, the nation’s most famous literary and current affairs magazine, were the most important forums for short fiction in Australia in the later decades of the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth. They provided a platform for short-fiction writers, freed of imperial shackles, to develop an Australian voice—in the case of the stories in this volume, a distinctly Tasmanian one—to write about Australia, for Australians. Under the editorship of Marcus Clarke (1870–71) the Australian Journal announced a policy of publishing only fiction set in the colonies or of colonial interest, while the Bulletin cultivated an anti-British literary nationalism. To write for local periodicals was, and is, to engage with a local readership. The short story is thus the form in which many of the preoccupations of Tasmanian colonial and postcolonial literature have manifested over almost two centuries.
If the Australasian, the Australian Journal and the Bulletin provided an Australian context for writers in the nineteenth century, the launch in 1979 of the Tasmanian Review—‘a literary and arts quarterly produced in Tasmania’ that would later become Island Magazine, then the current Island—provided a specifically local context for the state’s writers. It quickly established itself as an important outlet for the work of Tasmanian and other short-story writers, and indeed four of the stories in this collection—James McQueen’s ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’, Nicholas Shakespeare’s ‘The Castle Morton Jerry’, Adrienne Eberhard’s ‘Orange Bathers’ and Danielle Wood’s ‘None of the Above’—were first published in this Tasmanian literary icon.
But back copies of journals are rarely read, and unless they are anthologised it is the fate of short stories to be quickly forgotten. This book sets out to rectify that loss, to rediscover Tasmania’s literary and cultural history through its short fiction. These twenty-four stories talk to each other; they form a narrative, and not simply a historical one (which is why we eschewed chronological order), of the way Tasmania perceives itself.
The short stories in this book can be approached as pieces in a mosaic: each is engaging on its own, but when pieced together they present a broader, historically deeper picture of Tasmania.
The devastating impact of white settlement on the Indigenous population is the starting point of our anthology. The opening story, A. Werner’s ‘Black Crows: An Episode of “Old Van Diemen”’, could almost have been in Mark Twain’s mind when in Following the Equator (1895) he wrote: ‘it was in this paradise that the yellow liveried convicts were landed, and the Corps-bandits quartered, and the wanton slaughter of the kangaroo-chasing black innocents consummated.’ Set several millennia earlier, H. W. Stewart’s ‘Nectar of the Gods’ depicts Tasmania’s first inhabitants in a lost Arcadian landscape, untouched by the brutality of colonisation that marks Werner’s narrative. Stewart’s story celebrates the innocence of the Aborigines, and its humour assiduously avoids condescension. Though the racist language used by the narrator of James McQueen’s gritty ‘Death of a Ladies’ Man’ is confronting, this story is unusual in its refusal to locate Tasmanian Aboriginality in the distant past or within a narrative of extinction. Set on Flinders Island, McQueen’s moving tale tells of family bonds strong enough to prevail over ingrained prejudice.
Place, family and identity, all important aspects of McQueen’s story, are tightly interwoven in Tasmania’s relatively small and stable population. Notions of memory and inheritance, too, pervade the fiction produced here. Hal Porter covers all this territory in ‘Great-Aunt Fanny’s Picnic’, in which the machinations of the dynastic and parochial Otterwell clan are depicted with the author’s characteristic wit. Philomena van Rijswijk’s ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’, named for the three major islands in Port Esperance in the south, delves into the darker memories of a family’s seaside holidays, while in ‘The Woodpecker Toy Fact’ Carmel Bird is appropriately bowerbird-like in her bringing together of bright bits and pieces from her narrator’s childhood, heritage and flights of fancy. Bird’s story is set in the northwest of the island, not far from Flowerdale, where Barney Roberts was born, lived and set most of his tales, including ‘A Jar of Raspberry Jam’, in which a young boy observes the impermanence of the world around him.
In many of the stories Tasmania tells to itself and to its visitors the past remains omnipresent. Perhaps the least escapable aspect of its narrative inheritance comes from the convict era, which continues to provide writers and filmmakers with opportunities for high drama and sentimentality, skulduggery and bloody violence. Price Warung’s wonderfully titled ‘How Muster-Master Stoneman Earned His Breakfast’, set in the early 1830s, may draw on the careers of the muster-master Thomas Mason (hence Stoneman) and the convict Joseph Greenwood, but here, as in the author’s other convict tales, historical accuracy does not get in the way of convict legend, in which the felon is usually the hero. Again, the author’s sympathies are on the side of the convict mutineers in Marcus Clarke’s ‘The Seizure of the Cyprus’ who are desperate to gain their freedom rather than complete the journey to incarceration at Macquarie Harbour. Theresa Tasmania’s chilling story ‘A “Model” Dream’ graphically portrays the horror of Port Arthur, in particular its panopticon, while Tasma’s deft handling of character in ‘An Old-Time Episode in Tasmania’ brings to the fore the distorted social hierarchy between free settlers and felons.
One of the pleasures of creating this anthology was bringing together stories that spoke directly to each other across the decades, as is the case with Henry J. Goldsmith’s nineteenth-century story and Nicholas Shakespeare’s recent tale. In ‘The Hermit of the Huon’—which has some of the flavour of Jerome K. Jerome’s later Three Men in a Boat (1889)—Goldsmith offers his readers a gentle account of a reformed and ultimately respected convict, while also satirising government circumlocution. More than a hundred years later Shakespeare revisits the Huon in a playful retrospective concerning the convict-era arrival of a ship of women.
As writers can usually be relied upon to move around between genres, and in particular between long and short forms of prose fiction, we had a quiet expectation that our searches in the back catalogues of Tasmanian short fiction would turn up a good number of stories by the island’s better-known novelists. Sometimes, however, we were surprised by what we did not find. Novelists such as Christopher Koch, Amanda Lohrey, Richard Flanagan, Katherine Scholes and Heather Rose have made only rare, if any, forays into the form.
For Koch, a keen observer of Tasmanian letters, sensitivity to geography is a key characteristic of the island’s literature. In his essay ‘A Tasmanian Tone’ he suggests Tasmanian writers owe much to their landscape and its cool temperate tonality. Isolation, islandness and the coastal environment are important in the stories here by Eberhard, in which a young girl experiences the ecstasy and agony of wearing her first bathing suit to the beach, and by Wood. Similarly, the island and the individual intersect in Rohan Wilson’s ‘The Needle in the Shoe’, in which an ageing author looks back—from his spectacular vantage point on the east coast—on a life in which he has failed to connect with those around him.
Tahune Linah’s ‘In the River’ takes the reader to a time when hardworking men, piners, used the fast-flowing watercourses of the west coast to transport logs of ancient Huon pine. Pining was central to the settlement era of Tasmania’s history, as was mining, the industry at the heart of A. J. O.’s ‘The Salted Claim’. Also set on Tasmania’s west coast, this cautionary tale describes how a group of larrikins separate a naïve and unsuspecting investor from his money during a period of ‘mining mania’. The tall tale is taken to greater heights by James Leakey, a brother of the novelist Caroline Leakey, in his wild colonial yarn ‘The Tasmanian Devil’, in which a hunter travels across the globe in search of the fabled marsupial carnivore.
Side by side in this collection are tales from Tasmania’s most prolific writer, Roy Bridges, and its foremost champion and practitioner of the short-story form, Geoffrey Dean. Bridges, whose name is a shortened form of the grand moniker Royal Tasman Bridges, penned thirty-six novels and numerous short stories in his career. Here we have included ‘The Magistrate’, a swashbuckling story of true love and bushranging in the Tasmanian Midlands. Dean, the author of eight collections, has elsewhere been anthologised alongside internationally renowned writers such as Margaret Atwood and Kurt Vonnegut. From his output we have selected ‘The Meat Merchant’, an apparently simple tale but one that bears out the critic Giles Hugo’s observation that beneath Dean’s ‘sunny exterior beats the maverick heart of a wry anarchist, laughing and gently mocking’ the ways of middle Australia.
One of Tasmania’s best-loved writers and public figures is Margaret Scott. Primarily a poet, she also published two novels and a number of short stories, and late in life made an unexpected crossover into television celebrity. The wit and keen observational powers that made her a national treasure are evident in her story ‘Preserves’. Set in a rural community reminiscent of Premaydena, the Tasman Peninsula hamlet where Scott lived for many years, ‘Preserves’ is the tale of the tireless home industrialist Zena Bromyard and the tragedy which forces her to recognise that not even her peerless arsenal of bottled fruits and vegetables can hold back the forces of disorder.
When we came to organise the stories we had selected we knew at once that Joan Wise’s feisty ‘The Conquest of Emmie’ should conclude the collection. Perceiving a literary kinship between Wise’s Emmie and the heroine of Rachael Treasure’s ‘The Mysterious Handbag’, we placed the two stories together. When the time came to write the biographical entries, Wise proved elusive. Her life and her achievements are undocumented in the public sphere and her books were published without a hint of personal detail. Imagine, then, our surprise: first, when we discovered that Wise is Treasure’s maternal grandmother; and second, when we found that Treasure, though she knew her grandmother was an author, had no knowledge of this story.
In selecting the stories in this collection we were governed by simple guidelines: to present excellent stories that reflect the island’s history and evoke its atmosphere, and that draw on its convict past, its isolation and its environment; not to include more than one story by any writer; to include only writers who were born in Tasmania or who settled, at least for a time, on the island; and to prefer stories with a Tasmanian setting. The only exceptions are James Leakey and A. Werner, whose stories are so quintessentially Tasmanian that they excuse the authors’ seemingly limited experience of the island.
As we made the final and most difficult decisions, we tried to maintain some balance between the number of offerings from the three centuries the collection spans, and to keep faith with the palette of the mosaic.
We believe the variety of stories in this book is testament to the dynamic life the short story has had in Tasmania over two hundred years. And, as the pieces chosen from this century affirm, the short story continues to flourish as a literary form on the island. Looking over the contents of this collection we are excited that a new generation of readers will become familiar with these great tales.
Ralph Crane & Danielle Wood
Hobart, 2012