Numbers often carry particular meanings or resonances. One hundred is often chosen for ‘best of’ lists—100 best novels, 100 greatest films, 100 top hotels. In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, forty-two is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. For people of a certain age who grew up almost anywhere in the western world, fifty-seven conjures up the ‘Heinz 57 Varieties’ advertising slogan. Heinz never actually sold fifty-seven products, but the number became synonymous with the notion of variety. In this book, we have brought together our ‘57 Varieties’ of the moods of Tasmania. Texts about Tasmania, many of them by Tasmanians, have been paired with objects from the collection of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), in order that they might severally and collectively provide windows onto the island’s past and present.
As we noted in our introduction to Deep South: Stories from Tasmania (2012), ‘The literature of Tasmania has made, and continues to make, a remarkable contribution to the literature of Australia.’ From Tasmania came the first Australian play, the first collection of Australian essays and the first Australian novel. Short stories and poetry began appearing in periodicals in the state in the 1830s, and they continue to make substantial contributions to Tasmanian literature today. Literature about the island state comes from countries as geographically removed as Britain and the United States, as well as those closer to home—including New Zealand and the other Australian island.
In Tasmania the major cities do not separate museums and art galleries as is common in other states of Australia: Hobart, in the south, has TMAG; Launceston, in the north, has the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery. Combining a museum, art gallery and herbarium, TMAG is the primary natural, cultural and heritage institution in Tasmania, with almost eight hundred thousand objects in its diverse collection. The sheer variety of the TMAG collection, and of the island’s literary record, afforded us the opportunity to put together what we hope is an original, distinctive and exciting anthology of Tasmania’s natural and cultural history.
Objects, whatever form they take, invite us to think about their history, the stories they contain and the stories they can tell. The objects represented here offer a way into the story of an island with a long history. By juxtaposing them with texts as diverse as the objects themselves, this book offers a history of Tasmania from fresh perspectives. Rather than reading the messages the texts or objects themselves carry, we invite the reader to discover new stories through the pairings of words and image. As Iff the Water Genie informs Haroun in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), ‘no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new combinations that make them new.’ And it is new combinations that we have sought to provide here.
The focus of this book is less on the histories of the objects themselves (though these are summarised at the back), and more on the juxtaposition of object and text. Many readers will instantly recognise the painted message in Governor Arthur’s four-strip pictogram, the Proclamation Board to the Tasmanian Aborigines, that Aboriginal people and European colonists would be treated alike before the law. We have paired this with an extract from the Tasmanian Aboriginal elder Jim Everett’s raw and powerful story ‘A Short Trip with Shorty O’Neill’, in which the Australian flag is burned during a protest in Canberra, reminding the reader about racial injustices in contemporary Australia. Object and text each tell a story; together they offer yet another story, of a history of hypocrisy and discrimination. The new combination produces the new history.
As in Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), all the objects in this book come from one collection. Some of the objects we have chosen—Flora’s shell necklace, Benjamin Duterrau’s The Conciliation, the door with stickers—are regularly on display in TMAG, or have been reproduced in other publications, and will be familiar to many readers. Others—such as the Thylacine Response Kit and the 1920s washing machine—are objects that are rarely or never displayed. The range is extraordinary in its breadth: large and small, practical and decorative, natural and cultural, crafted and manufactured.
Objects in the book are drawn from across the various TMAG collections—from Indigenous Cultures, Decorative Arts, Fine Arts, History, the Photographic Collection, Zoology, the Tasmanian Herbarium—and are from both the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal worlds, showcasing Tasmania’s cultural heritage, its biodiversity and the intersections between its cultures. While some of the objects link to lives and histories that are well documented and often repeated, others conjure less conspicuous narratives that will be unfamiliar to many: Jack Thwaites’ rucksack highlights the life of a man little known outside Tasmanian walking circles; Frances Jackson’s aviator’s coat recalls the pioneering achievements of a Tasmanian woman in the 1930s; while Thomas Bock’s portrait of Wurati (‘Woureddy’) reminds us of an often-overlooked figure in the Tasmanian Aboriginal people’s resistance to the theft of their land.
The accompanying texts are mined from literature in its broadest sense—broader than might be found in a literary anthology, though many of the major figures in Tasmanian writing nevertheless appear in this book. We have chosen fiction and non-fiction from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, including poetry and drama, travelogues and journalism, novels and short stories, memoirs and journals, petitions and speeches, and children’s stories. Like the objects, each extract carries its own artistic and cultural value. Our aim in pairing the texts with diverse objects is to allow both elements to shine but neither one to dominate.
Hannah Dyer’s sampler, paired with an extract from Caroline Leakey’s pioneering novel The Broad Arrow, and Captain Reynolds’ workbox, paired with two twentieth-century works by the celebrated Tasmanian poets Andrew Sant and Margaret Scott, are jigsaw-puzzle pieces that help us not only to imagine colonial life in Hobart in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but also to see how that past continues to echo in the present. Similarly, Ricky Maynard’s photographs and the extract from Nathan Maynard’s play The Season help us both to comprehend the depth of the Tasmanian Aboriginal past and understand what it means to be an Aboriginal person in Tasmania today.
Choosing the objects and their accompanying texts turned out to be a less-ordered process than we had imagined. While our initial intention was to choose the objects and then the texts, we found that in looking for a text to accompany one object we often came across a text that, while it didn’t fit the particular object in search of a text, we knew we wanted to include—and it became a text in search of an object. We asked the curators of each of the TMAG collections the same question: Which objects in your collection most excite you? And we called on their expertise in other various ways, too, throughout the process. Sometimes, perhaps inevitably, serendipity played a part. In search of an object to accompany Pete Hay’s poem ‘Emu Eats the Future (Dark Dreaming in the City of Light)’, we couldn’t believe our luck when Kathryn Medlock (Senior Curator, Vertebrate Zoology) told us the collection had a feather from the actual bird that had inspired Pete Hay’s poem on his visit to Paris in 2013. Other finds were accidental. Behind the scenes at the museum, on our way to see the emu feather, we discovered the taxidermied head of John Burns (a circus lion) high on a wall among other mounted animal heads. Part of his story is told in the accompanying text.
It is important for us to acknowledge that the members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Advisory Council, which advises TMAG on all matters relating to Aboriginal cultural heritage, shaped our thinking in more ways than they probably imagine—challenging us to broaden our ways of thinking about the Aboriginal material we wished to include in the book (object and text alike). And so, as the Tasmanian Aboriginal language spoken by Fanny Cochrane Smith was not a written one at the time the wax cylinder recordings of her voice were made, we decided not to pair the cylinders with a written text at all. Instead, we opted for a visual text: a photograph of Fanny Cochrane Smith and Horace Watson, which serves to remind us that the power the object possesses is both oral and aural. In this pairing, Fanny’s voice and image speak to the reader without being mediated through interpretation.
We are also grateful for the vision and guidance of TMAG’s resident photographer, Simon Cuthbert, who is responsible for the majority of the images in Island Story and who shared our enthusiasm for capturing pictures that speak to the complexity of TMAG’s purpose. Photographs taken at the Tasmanian Herbarium in Sandy Bay and at TMAG’s Rosny storehouse—of an introduced seaweed collected at an east-coast port, of the Malcolm W. Harrison Egg Collection cabinet, of a specimen drawer containing an array of endemic Tasmanian butterflies—remind us that ‘the museum’ consists of so much more than the handful of buildings in central Hobart (although they are some of the city’s oldest surviving and historically important edifices) where visitors encounter its semi-permanent and transitory displays. TMAG is a multi-campus institution with a vital and ongoing role to play in the collection, preservation, interpretation and investigation of Tasmania’s natural and cultural history.
Since time never stands still, and history continues to accumulate, the work of collecting is never done. Over the years that this book was being pieced together, TMAG’s invertebrate specialists spent nights in the field collecting insect specimens by torchlight, botanical specialists described new species of lichen and fine-arts experts kept their eyes on the auction catalogues. TMAG itself is continually writing new chapters of its own story.
When the time came for us to assemble Island Story, and to determine the order in which to present our pairings, we had first to decide on an organising principle. Although chronology was an obvious candidate, we quickly saw that the nature and diversity of the material would make it difficult to marshal the pairings into a simple timeline. The dates of the objects and their paired texts rarely match, and not all of the objects can be straightforwardly dated. How should one date a cicada specimen collected as recently as 2015, but boasting an ancient lineage stretching back to the supercontinent of Pangea? Having set aside chronology as a too-imperfect guide, we fleetingly considered TMAG’s own method of categorising its material, clustering the objects according to which curatorial collection they belong. This, however, risked swinging the emphasis of the book in favour of the objects, when we wished for the texts to carry equal weight. We also considered shaping the order through the lens of geography: according to region—north, south, east, west—or through categories such as mountain, river, farm, coast, town, prison, forest.
In the end, it was the material itself that suggested the methodology. During the many months of reading and selecting, pairing and re-pairing, we noticed the intriguing and sometimes powerful resonances that arose when we considered particular pairings in close proximity to others. This led us to organise the book through an approach that doesn’t entirely dismiss chronology, classification and geography, but instead makes them subordinate to the human desire to see, make and enjoy connections between seemingly disparate things. Thus, a well-worn travelling case that once belonged to a silent-movie actress has been positioned immediately before a photograph taken during the Salamanca gay-law-reform protests of the late 1980s. Why? The answer lies in the text that accompanies the protest photograph, a moving essay in which the activist Rodney Croome shapes a tale of pride and prejudice around his seemingly bizarre quest to shake the hand of the notoriously right-wing Queensland premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Croome wanted to shake Sir Joh’s hand not for political reasons, but because it was one of the last to touch the living hand of the Tasmanian novelist Marie Bjelke-Petersen, Sir Joh’s aunt. Among the works of Marie Bjelke-Petersen’s that Croome admires is the romance Jewelled Nights, which was made into a silent movie, filmed on location in Tasmania and starring Louise Lovely, whose travelling case is now part of the TMAG collection.
Assembly began with us printing out images of all the objects, labelling them with the names of their paired texts and spreading them out on Ralph’s living-room floor. Our goal, as we began to shuffle the contents around, was to order the pairings so that each one connected, in some way, to the pairings that immediately preceded and followed it. As we worked, there emerged in front of us a narrative that we had not been aware of compiling. Kneeling on the floor in the midst of all the pictures, we realised that we were surrounded by the scraps of animals: their skeletons, their skulls, their skins stitched into rugs, their skins stitched into coats, their bones made into pincushions, their teeth used for a blank canvas. It became clear to us that day that the keeping of our island’s stories is not in fact as human as we might have imagined. Rather, it is profoundly bound up in the bodies of animals, both whole and fragmented.
Sobered by this recognition, we worked on. Sequences of four, five or six pairings came together, and these we moved around as modules, until at last we were satisfied. When we stood back to consider our handiwork, we saw that we had inadvertently shaped the pictures into a circle, so that the pairings that we had placed first and last were not half-orphaned, after all, but connected to each other as part of an ongoing story of Tasmania, one that might subtly change with each new pass.
It seems to us on reflection that this is a very Tasmanian approach—one that honours the tight and tangled web of interconnections that characterises our island community, but also invites visitors and newcomers to connect, both with the island’s stories and the ways in which they are typically shared. Although we, as editors, have taken a hand in shaping the multidimensional narratives of Island Story through reference to our own knowledge of Tasmanian story, community and culture, we also know that readers of this book will see and make many more connections of their own, and find their own pathways into Tasmania’s history.
We hope that Island Story might stir in you a desire to visit, or revisit, TMAG, just as we hope that it may remind you how much there is to read and enjoy in the island’s rich history of letters. We hope that you will be inspired to seek out more works by the featured poets, and to revisit, or discover, the work of such writers as James McQueen, Helen Hodgman, Barney Roberts, Hesba Brinsmead-Hungerford, Roy Bridges and Charlotte Isabel Dick. Above all, we hope that the island pathways you discover in this book will lead you on journeys of discovery well beyond its pages.
Ralph Crane & Danielle Wood
Hobart, 2018
Putting the pieces in order, August 2017
