In Tasmania (28 page)

REPORTS EXTOLLING NORTH MOTTON'S
‘
WONDERFUL FERTILITY
'
WERE
of recent origin. Among the first white men to set eyes on this landscape were Kemp's shipmates Bass and Flinders, sailing by in 1798. In 1824, another sailor, Captain Hardwicke, made a bald assessment: ‘The land is mountainous, extremely barren and totally unfit for habitation' – an opinion shared by a surveyor for the Van Diemen's Land Company, who in 1826 left George Town to explore the coast. ‘So entirely wretched is the country in this neighbourhood that were I to attempt to describe to you the dreary and desolate tract which extends along the coast 40 to 50 miles as far as Rocky Cape and thence to Circular Head, it would cost you more time to read than the whole place is worth.' Two of Devon's earliest pioneers ignored these warnings to their cost and suffered the peremptory fate of the convict who had given the name to Skeleton Creek. The sensitive surveyor Henry Hellyer committed suicide and Captain Bartholomew Thomas, veteran of Bolivar's army in Peru, was speared to death by Aborigines.

The settler who did most to open up the area was an Irish immigrant, James Fenton. He had spent part of his childhood on the east coast, in Swansea, and first came to the Forth Valley in September 1839. ‘We saw no vestige or mark of anything that indicated the existence of mortal man, unless it were a few little heaps of time-worn shells on the sandbanks, left there by the aborigines in former times …' The country was densely scrubbed, broken by hills and gullies: ‘In short, a desolate, howling wilderness.' Tempted into speculation, Fenton bought 640 acres in North Motton, but sold his land after spending a long day walking through the scrub and getting ‘fearfully stung with nettles, which were indigenous to that quarter'. His death in 1901 coincided with Hordern's arrival.

Louisa Meredith had also, many years before, lived in the neighbourhood, and her experience was not more pleasant. In 1845, she left Swansea for Port Sorell – about 20 miles north-east of North Motton – where her husband had been offered the post of police magistrate. Her glass and china from England arrived in fragments, and she spent her first winter shivering in a split timber cottage through which the wind snarled. Stepping outside, she was hemmed in by an oppressive screen of gigantic trees covered in fungi, and when she followed a cattle path ‘the shrubs gave way on being pushed, but instantly closed again'. Her husband was unable to afford to rip down this tangled curtain. ‘The mere clearing of the timber from such land usually costs at least £10 an acre and the impracticality of a man without capital clearing it, paying rent for it all the while, and maintaining himself and family till the crop comes in, is too evident to any rational mind to need a comment.' Until she arrived in this district, ‘I could not conceive such poverty as I saw there to be possible in this land of plenteousness; nor is there, I imagine, in the whole island a similarly conditioned neighbourhood.' Nor was that all. It rained for nine months out of twelve, turning the roads into bogs and planting hostile surprises in the undergrowth. The nastiest of these were the nettles that had tormented Fenton, and also Kemp in York Town, 40 miles east. ‘The nettles in the colony are the most formidable I have ever encountered, both in size and venom,' she wrote. ‘A friend's horse threw himself down to roll in them. The creature was rendered mad and furious by pain, and in a short time died in convulsions.'

Little had changed by the time a bullock cart crashed through the gums in a 100-acre title of drenched scrub. Through the dripping leaves Hordern could see that he had come to a halt right under the Dial Range and a cliff-face known as Old Sawn-Off. He heard the traffic roar of a distant river and down many hundreds of feet glimpsed a stream winding through a dense tangle of forest dogwood, sassafras and musk. It was the kind of place which the Doones might have chosen as their hideout. On summer days the scenery was awe-inspiring, but it looked in the rain more like Wizards Slough, the slimy dreadful bog through which Carver Doone, having shot Lorna, disappeared.

THERE WAS SO MUCH I DID NOT KNOW. WHERE HE STAYED-IN TENTS
or a bark hut. Where he kept his possessions while the house was being built. Who built it.

Seventy years earlier, Kemp had put together the stone walls of Mount Vernon with the assistance of 18 assigned convict servants who cost him nothing but food and clothing. Hordern most likely erected Stoke Rivers with his bare hands.

First, the land had to be scrubbed and the timber cut. The dogwoods grew to a density of 3,000 an acre. The choice that faced him was to let the trees fall over and rot; or axe them; or follow the example established by Fenton and cut a narrow circle in the trunk when the sap was up in the tree, a procedure known as ‘ring-barking'. To judge from Ivy's photograph, this was Hordern's preference. He then needed a team of bullocks to drag out the wattle scrub by the roots, but he had his sons to help him. They bought palings and cut posts and sank them into the red soil.

Only after the skillion roof had been nailed into place did Hordern unpack his trunk. He took out the two silver cups, the rosettes, the wine salver awarded for his pure-Devon sires, and arranged them on a blackwood shelf. Behind the cups he stacked his books –
Lorna Doone
;
Westward Ho!
;
Stalky & Co
;
Tom Brown's Schooldays
. And on the wall he pinned photographs of Boode and Yarde. Plus one of Mr Eastbrook, his stockman, dressed in a bowler hat and poking a stick at his prize bull Union Jack outside one of Boode's ever-open windows. The force of the wind barrelling up the Leven meant that the windows of his new home he had to keep fastened. I pictured the former ‘Lord of Gratton', his pious wife and seven children struggling to cope in their remote surroundings. Because Stoke Rivers was certainly remote.

On still days, three cracks could be heard from the top of a hill – a bullock-whip signal to settlers that a ship had arrived on the Leven. But on most other days the wind that swept over North Motton was the only sound, gusting clouds of heavy rain from Bass Strait. More than 40 inches fell on average each year, turning the fields into a thick chocolate spread and making next to impassable the rough tracks that linked the outlying farms. Louisa Meredith's horse had disappeared in a broad stream of dark liquid in a creek called Dead Cow. North Motton's mud was celebrated. There was a saying: North Mutton mud ‘sticketh closer than a brother'. Hordern's children walked across the paddocks to get to school and often plunged up to their knees in it.

Even on dry days, the bush track to Ulverstone had, according to the locals, ‘to be used to be understood'. Part of the way was ‘corduroy', constructed from felled trees that were placed side by side and had a ridged surface like corduroy velvet. There were no cars and it was a common sight to see a woman on foot carrying a baby. Ivy's great-grandmother used to walk from North Motton into Ulverstone, a basket of butter on one arm and a basket of eggs on the other, singing ‘It's the Army and Navy for ever, three cheers for the Red, White and Blue.'

The Tasmanian author Pete Hay had a grandmother who lived on the Gawler Road. He wrote in
Vandiemonian Essays
: ‘One of the tasks of the women of the north-west was to keep the stories, the stories that bind the generations one to the other … “Story”, then, was the new story of one's immediate family.' But Mrs Hordern's story was a hot, smouldering coal that nothing could bring her to touch.

Hordern had flown through his wife's money, too. In England, she was accustomed to servants: in Tasmania she had none. ‘People don't here,' Ivy said. ‘Poor old Granny, it was terrible for her. She used to bring us a jelly bean at night, poor old Granny.'

In Devon, she had watched Mrs Eastbrook in the dairy. She now threw herself into milking the cows. The woman who had loved dancing taught herself how to skim cream, adding hot water to speed up the turning. She reared poultry, cultivated vegetables, kept the house warm. Their four-roomed ‘Castle Dismal' was so cold in winter that her son Nigel went down with rheumatic fever and had to spend seven months in Launceston hospital, an experience that left him with a twisted foot.

Life at Stoke Rivers was never so unforgiving as in those early months. Provisions had to be punted from Ulverstone to Mannings Jetty and the expense of bringing them upriver was prohibitive. Candles cost one shilling and six pence, tea three shillings and sixpence to five shillings, treacly sugar sixpence. Hardly any currency was in circulation and the normal method of paying for purchases was by barter. But first Hordern had to produce something.

Once the underwood was cleared and burned, he sowed potatoes in the ashes between the skeletons of the dying trees. He took out his laurel cutting and planted a hedge of laurel bushes in imitation of the drive at Boode. The rest of his fast-draining energies he put to the service of his sheep and cattle.

I assumed that I would find him mentioned in the annals of local organisations like the West Devon Agricultural Association (ex-President: Colonel Crawford). Hordern was fêted throughout England as a ‘well-known agriculturalist and successful stock breeder'. Yet at the Ulverstone museum he appeared in none of the records for agricultural shows. He was nowhere listed as a breeder, buyer, steward or judge.

‘I've never seen his name in anything,' said a woman who worked at the museum. She had researched the history of the area. I need not bother to look in the Historical Families of Ulverstone series – the Horderns did not feature there either. Even so, she had gained a definite impression of them.

‘I thought they were a very funny family.'

‘In what way?'

‘They were very private. They kept their mouths shut.'

 

United in their indebtedness, Hordern was in most other respects the reverse of Kemp: generous, kind, romantic. And determined at all costs to maintain a low profile. But why? I questioned Ivy.

I had started to notice that she was keeping stuff up her sleeve, and that whenever I came to the farm, she produced a new scrap of information. To my delight, she brought out a letter that had been stamped at North Motton post office in 1907, and which offered a tantalising glimpse into Hordern's circumstances.

The letter was posted from North Molton, England, and was written by Mrs Eastbrook, the wife of Hordern's former stockman, in reply to a letter from SPB's favourite cousin Brodie, Hordern's fifth son. ‘We were all getting ready to take Annie to the station when your letter arrived and of course must drop everything to see its contents. After that we had a good cry for we felt it a bit.' Evidently, Brodie had painted a sorrowful picture of the family's first seven years in Tasmania. Mrs Eastbrook wrote: ‘It makes the tears come in my eyes when I think how hard your mother must work to keep all straight, and no girl. It does seem a shame. I wish I could fly and help her a bit, but that's no good for I can't help over at the farm owing to the fits.' She went on, as the English do, about her medication (‘no meat') and the weather: ‘It has been very wet and cold, very sharp frost and snow as it has not been for many years. Outside our door is a perfect glitter just now.' She makes no reference to her former employer. The only mention of Hordern I was able to find was a postscript in a letter to Brodie. ‘PS Had a letter from your father. He was not too well.'

Brodie's father must have suffered extremely from the moment he set foot in Tasmania. Consumed by the disgrace and poverty he had brought upon his family, he could not even look his sons in the face. The truth was that his hopes of founding a new life on the model of Colonel Crawford's settlement up the road had gone the way of Castra.

FORTY-ONE RETIRED OFFICERS HAD FORMED THE BUDDING NUCLEUS
of Crawford's utopia. They had paid £640 each for a 300-acre plot, sight unseen, but when they disembarked from India to enjoy their retirement they discovered that the promised tramway remained but a chimera and they were expected to bust their guts ‘reclaiming the jungles of Tasmania', as one Calcutta newspaper described the enterprise. ‘Settlers with the hearts and muscles of lions were able to clear a small acreage in their lifetime.' So recorded Frank Penn-Smith in his autobiography. Even after he had cleared the jungle, he could not guarantee that crops would flourish. A woman whom he met in Paradise told him: ‘Every bit of food has to be dragged in.'

The spectacle of elderly Indian officers in the backwoods with their hatchets and saws, vainly clearing land that they had purchased cheap, suggested to one commentator that the Castra scheme had been a sad disappointment if not an absolute failure. Often unable to cut down the bush themselves, they found it too expensive to hire servants. ‘They are a poor dirty lot when you do get them,' a disgruntled officer complained. ‘And mostly thieves.' Another officer wrote: ‘Some of the inhabitants here deem the settler from India much in the light of a good milch cow to be cleaned out whenever the opportunity arose.' One retired General erupted when consulted by his sister-in-law for his overall impression of Castra: ‘Jungle, my dear, nothing but jungle.'

By 1880, only 20 of the original nucleus remained. It was not enough after a hard day's tree-felling to play tennis at Captain Sage's or to admire Miss Hodder's shell collection or to reminisce with Colonel Crawford on his veranda at ‘Deyrah' over a cup of Kangra Valley tea. For most, the old days had been immeasurably superior. Today, all that remains of Central Castra is one purply-brown brick bungalow, and, inside, the objects tumbled high as if a burglar had ransacked the house and found nothing.

 

Ten miles away, Hordern's experience was no less disconsolate. Stoke Rivers never developed beyond a subsistence farm. Strewn among the papers in his trunk, I came across the bill for the sale of his ten ‘fat sheep' at the Tasmanian Auction Rooms on March 5, 1903. Hordern had been so delighted to receive £61 that he made certain the news reached England, where his sisters had had it printed in the local newspaper – evidence to his many friends there that he had found his feet. But the sale was Hordern's last.

His early hopes had been to start a dairy herd, supplying milk to the Tongs' butter factory in North Motton. But this was not the soil that he had been accustomed to in England. Though good for potatoes, it lacked the minerals necessary for his livestock's health, and the deficiency resulted in some unexpected behaviour. It baffled Hordern to observe his cows and sheep chewing the bones of dead possums and rabbits. He did not realise that they were desperate for zinc. What they swallowed instead tended to make his sheep a liability at auction. Louisa Meredith steered clear of eating mutton that came from her neighbourhood, as it had a ‘particularly unpleasant flavour, probably from some prevailing plant eaten by the sheep'.

Then there was the mysterious disease that swept through Hordern's district and was reported in the
North-West Post
. ‘The first symptoms appear to be shivering, with frothing at the mouth, and the course of the disease (locally called diphtheria) is so rapid that there seems to be no effectual remedy and death very speedily ensues.' The disease was fatal to calves. I wondered how quickly Hordern's Herefords had succumbed, whether the calf in Ivy's photograph was the only animal left.