‘…the wonderful Tasmanian sunlight, which is like no other sunlight in the world!…warm and impetuous, yet not fierce; dazzling, but not glaring; full of strength, yet tender, glad, vigorous, exuberant, but often suggesting an underlying sadness.’
—Marie Bjelke-Petersen
It was 6am and I was sleepy, one degree and I wasn’t dressed for it. The horses were happy. You could tell by the way they kicked their concrete troughs and generally made a racket. Just over their fence there were so many new people, big trucks, cables, satellite dishes. It was a momentous occasion for horse and human.
While the weather was explained from a pig pen, the television crew politely drew us into a queue. Next to me was an old man and on the other side of him his burly sergeant-at-arms, guiding him, shielding him, whispering to him all the time. In what was clearly a habitual gesture the old man offered me his hand suddenly and unbidden, and without hesitation I grasped and shook it. Others might have turned away, and perhaps with good cause. But I had no doubt. I wanted to touch that hand.
A fortnight before the producer of a popular national morning breakfast program had called me to say they were broadcasting for a week from Tasmania. She said a segment on the gay law reform debate was obligatory: ‘mainland audiences are fascinated by it’. The catch was that, in an effort ‘to capture the flavour of rural life’, they were only visiting small towns.
As she read out their destination list I could picture the local characters they’d already selected to reinforce the modern, urban conceit that beautiful places breed benighted people.
‘We’ll be in Strahan, Huonville, Swansea and Sheffield. Which is best for you?’ ‘I grew up on a farm near Sheffield…’ ‘We’ll see you there.’
In five minutes of national air time the producer of the breakfast program wanted to discuss not only the United Nations decision against Tasmania’s anti-gay laws, but everything that had flowed from it: the regular pro and anti-gay rallies, the boycott of Tasmanian produce, our brush with police and of course the dramatic constitutional confrontation between Hobart and Canberra. Contradicting every point I made would be George Brookes—an anti-gay campaigner so angry about homosexuality that he refused to be in the same room as me. For today at least this was a clever strategy, for it spared him the frosty cold and the animal din.
Joining the queue to the temporary television stage put an end to my stamping and shuffling, and now I was colder than ever. Dawn had lit the sky but not yet the land and in a moment of absence I swam aloft in the sun-bathed blue. The ageing, widowed owner of the grand federation home under whose frost-laden palms and pines we had been gathered served hot tea. She passed along the line smiling amiably and I put out my hand to receive a cup, but at me her hospitality found its limit. She looked away and served the next man instead. Within a week an indignant letter appeared in the local newspaper from the same woman. Her principles, she declared, meant I was not welcomed on her land. Had she known I was to be a guest of the Today Show she would never have allowed them to broadcast from her home.
Homes and shops through Sheffield and its district are decorated by thousands of paintings and photographs of one thing, the awesome remains of a long extinct volcano which dominate the district and are now called Mount Roland. Leaf through old albums or rummage in old boxes and you will find a thousand more images of the mountain from decades past. The images vary widely in perspective, hue and mood, depicting a mountain which is everything from unyielding, angry or untouchable through demanding or melancholy to most often bright, enticing and embracing.
Mt Roland’s miles of steep soaring faces and deep weather-worn crags spoke of inconceivable antiquity and incalculable mass. In comparison the tiny human events played out at its feet seemed petty and pointless. But there is also a personal, almost benevolent Roland of thickly forested foot hills and ever changing colours—a Roland which over saw our lives, guarded us from threat and pointed the way to the world beyond its ramparts. Mt Roland existed both within me and far beyond me. It quickly came to represent the profound knowledge that as vast, unknowable and sometimes frightening as the world may be, within that world there is a place and a people for me.
This, then, is why Roland has inspired a thousand portraits. It represents a truth far greater than prejudice, menace and death. It represents love.
‘Roland shot his great rocky form high into the sky, one of the ancient, undaunted knights who always stood up for what was good and right.’
—Marie Bjelke-Petersen
The traditional unadorned wood and iron farmhouses around Sheffield are gloomy and draughty in the district’s cool, wet winter. Before oil columns and heat pumps families retreated to one room and left the tall hallways and dusty sitting rooms to mildew. Perhaps this was why one little bedroom saw so much activity on the third Thursday in July 1934. Elsie and Nell, both a few years younger than the century and the best of friends, were also both in labour. Cleaning and heating one room made more sense than preparing two. Elsie gave birth first, to a son named Ian but known all his life for his small stature as Mousy. A few hours later Nell got into the bed from which her friend had just arisen and gave birth to Donald, known to most as Peter, the name his grandmother dubbed all the men in her family.
The world into which these boys were born was old even then, and has long since passed away. Their grandparents hushed and lulled them in a great billowing language which feared and respected the depths over which it sailed; a language full of the ancient words and candid metaphors that had served their forebears well, and accented by the kind of broken, strangled vowels which sing of loss, terror and muted hope. They sat on the knees of aged aunts who had seen convict road gangs toil, bushrangers hang and thylacines disappear into the darkened forest.
Amidst the poverty, ceremony and mile long memories there was also irresistible change. Like never before, women of Nell’s wilfulness could make a life for themselves beyond their marriage. She held her own views, worked her own trade and above all ruled her own affections. She shared a deep, lifelong love with the woman who had also shared her confinement, a love much stronger than her love for her husband. Even as they grew old in body and unrelentingly rigid in their views their love persisted over endless games of euchre.
The two boys, Mousy and Peter, were to grow up thinking of each other as cousins and of each other’s parents as uncles and aunties, two farming families for generations linked by history, place and labour, linked now even more firmly by two women’s hearts.
While Peter and Mousy grew through boyhood at the foot of Mount Roland, over the range in Mole Creek their world was being chronicled in minute detail. At the end of each day’s adventures with the district’s people Marie Bjelke-Petersen would fill her notebooks with observations on their customs, language and outlook like some accomplished ethnographer. She recorded the songs of old farmers, the superstitions of young women and succeeded like no other writer in rendering the unique phonetics of old Tasmania. But this ethnographer was in fact a novelist who, out of enchantment with Mt Roland and its people, wrote romances inspired by both.
Marie regularly travelled from her home near Hobart to a favourite boarding house beneath Mt Roland, staying often for weeks at a time. Her once popular novels show that what impressed her was the sincerity of the people and the grandeur of the geography, not that she would have made so neat a distinction between humanity and nature. For her an individual’s beauty was the product of beauty in the land, and the land’s magnificence best understood as the personification of human aspiration and virtue. She believed the wilderness redeems us and she argued compellingly for its conservation. But she also knew that without the constant investment of our passion and hope the land is slowly and irreversibly drained of meaning. Most likely what attracted Marie to Mt Roland was that she was amongst folk who immediately understood that people are mountains and mountains people.
As much as Marie Bjelke-Petersen loved what Sheffield was, she also represented what it was becoming. The ideal of women’s self-determination inspired her to advocate for everything from an extension of the franchise to greater access to bicycles. But most of all she believed a woman should be free to give her heart to whomever she chose. That Tasmania was the stage she selected to play out this idea was not surprising. Compared, she believed, to the artificiality and shallowness of Sydney or Melbourne, unaffected Tasmania was the obvious place to find true, passionate, lasting love. For Marie Tasmania represented progress and freedom, much as it does for the state’s social and environmental activists today, and just as strongly as it symbolises constriction and death to others. With Tasmania to inspire her she wrote of love freed from the bonds of class, history, duty and convention. Her life, spent passionately and lovingly with her companion Sylvia Mills, spoke the same message.
Jewelled Nights is probably Bjelke-Petersen’s best-known work. In 1925 it was made into a movie by an Australian-born Hollywood actor, Louise Lovely, who had returned to her homeland to establish a native film industry. Modern readers looking for gay subtexts in Jewelled Nights don’t have far to go.
Of course, in the mind of almost every Australian Marie’s rare Danish surname will forever be associated with her nephew Joh, farmer, knight and long reigning Premier of Queensland. In many of these minds an assumption will be made that the notoriously conservative Sir Joh was at odds with his aunt, but this was not so. They were very close. An evangelical faith was one thing they shared. Marie believed the Almighty had sent her Sylvia—‘God’s Angels often come in human form not as strangers whose lips never touch ours…but as friends, close dear friends, whom we may fondle & caress & feel they really belong to us’—and she often compared their relationship to that of David and Jonathon. Marie and her nephew also shared conservative beliefs, at least in her later years. Like Nell, Elsie and thousands of other women who had tasted the freedoms of the early twentieth century, Marie’s political views grew staid and rigid as she grew old: her response to the civil rights movement was that the races should be equal but separate. Perhaps conservatism served to contain her passions and compensated for her unorthodox loves. For his part Joh was obviously inspired by Marie’s passions, however unorthodox; admiring her partner, frequently visiting her in Tasmania, and falling so deeply in love with Sheffield that it was the place he turned to for solace when in the mid 1980s Queensland and then the nation rejected his long since corrupted political ideals. When a few years earlier Joh’s government had criminalised the sale of alcohol to homosexuals, lesbians were conspicuously absent from the prohibition. It is said that this was Joh’s idea, in deference to the aunt he loved so dearly.
In early November 1969 in her 94th year Marie Bjelke-Petersen was dying. Despite his recent election as Queensland’s new Premier her favourite nephew travelled to Hobart to be by her side. Marie passed peacefully. She said she looked forward to the next world and to seeing Sylvia again. Close to death Marie held Joh’s hand and murmured ‘Premier’ with deep pride.
It was this hand I now grasped and shook; the hand that had signed away basic rights, sent hundreds to prison, wasted forests and cities. It had brought a thousand miseries into being. But still it was a link. When our hands unclasped Sir Joh’s minder whispered something to him and the old man turned away.