A SPADEFUL OF RECHERCHE BAY

I'm digging. There I am out there in the paddock day after day, night after night with blistered hands pushing that old spade with its splintered handle into the ground, turning up the soil and sorting through it. What am I looking for? Earthworms? Heirlooms? No.

The sand here is white, too white, the reflection off it hurts my eyes, I can’t see a thing. Where was it, then? The other side of the river, he said – but where on the other side of the river? Cockle Creek is quiet today, the campers have all gone home, the parents back to work and the kids to school. I am alone on this beach. Alone except for the murmurings in the air, the whispers that have been following me all these years. They are relentless in their chattering and now I have set out to silence them.

Dooey Leary is a big man. He laughs easily and talks too much. His wife only ever gets a few words in. But he is a natural-born storyteller and that’s what I’m here for; I want his stories. I want them not just from him, I’ll take stories from anywhere and everywhere, but his are particularly good. Ann makes cups of tea and ham sandwiches while I take the tape recorder out of my bag and ask him if he minds me taping him. ‘Just pretend it’s not here,’ I tell him. He doesn’t mind; he’d talk underwater with a mouth full of marbles.

He remembers a lot, probably because his father, Arthur, also known as Dooey, was the last of the Learys to leave the Recherche Bay area. He lived and worked at Leprena, a place that’s all sags and ferns now. There’s an overgrown four-wheel-drive track that takes you there but you never arrive, because there’s nowhere left to arrive. Dooey tells me Leprena used to have its own football team. He and Ann live at Dover now and Dooey’s brother Ralph lives at Hastings. (Ralph has good stories too, served up to me with belgium-and-tomato-sauce sandwiches.)

‘My uncle Casey Leary,’ said Dooey, ‘well, Dad and him went to town. They had never seen a car or a tram in their life. And they were nineteen years of age. They went into a cafe to have a feed, and the girl said to him, “Would you like a serviette sir,” and ‘e said “My flamin’ oath. Bring me half a dozen, I’m starvin’.” ‘E thought you got stuck into ‘em.’ Dooey paused here and leant back in his chair to laugh a great big belly laugh. ‘I was twelve before I saw a car or a tram, I was born in Recherche. See, they were worse, they didn’t come out of there until they was eighteen, nineteen, or sometimes older and they had never been out into that world, the only world they knew was Recherche.’

There was another part to that story. He told me later that his father went past a shop window and saw a coconut; he’d never seen one before and said to his brother, ‘Look at that big hairy potato’.

Dooey drives me down to Recherche Bay over rough roads in his ute, smoking like a chimney. He’s picked me up from the now non-existent Lune River Youth Hostel. We come down the hill past a burnt clearfell coupe and Dooey shakes his head slowly: ‘Damn shame that,’ he says. ‘Look at that mess. What a bloody mess.’ I’m surprised – he comes from a long line of mill workers and timber cutters. He keeps shaking his head and, for a moment, is quiet.

We drive down over the Finn’s Bridge and he tells me that there’s a ghost lives near that bridge, lots of people have seen it, he says. Apparently a girl was waiting for her fiance to come back from a trip at sea but he never did because he drowned and so she jumped off the bridge there and drowned herself. Dooey says he’s seen her. Someone else told me this story – of the ghost at Finn’s Bridge – but they hadn’t seen it.

We used to come here and camp – at Cockle Creek – me, my mother, stepfather and brothers, aunty, uncle and cousins. At Easter time usually. I walked over the ground here, ran over it, content for it to be that – ground to run on, a place to play. And now? Everything I need to know is here; it’s in the rocks, in the ground, in the trees. I lie on the ground and try to suck answers out of the soil.

When I have exhausted ground-sucking as a research method I begin to collect maps, facts and dates. I use them to sketch an outline, an outline that later I’ll fill in with my own imagination, with the stories people tell me and with everything they don’t say – the cloudy bits that seem to drift around in their eyes.

When I have read and scribbled, read and scribbled, I find an outline that looks a little like this: whaling boomed and declined; timber mills started up, closed down; timber cutters came and went; coal mines opened and closed. For almost one hundred years there was a community of people who lived here and for most of that time their only access to Hobart, or to anywhere else, was by sea. Most of them were ex-convicts and the children and grandchildren of convicts. The first timber cutters and coal miners in the area were convict gangs and probably most of the whalers too. The whole bay, including the now debated northeast peninsula, was scattered with rudimentary houses. People eked out a living through timber-getting, hunting, fishing, gardening, whaling and, to a lesser extent, coal mining.

Mr Driscoll, the one and only policeman for the area, lived on this northeastern side – near where the French Garden has been rediscovered – near the area that was designated for logging and is now being fought over, like so many parts of the island have been fought over. I wonder if one day it’ll just rip apart from all the tug-o’-warring? And scientists will talk about the time when Tasmania was one island – before it was ripped in half by the logging debate. Although I don’t think it’s very half-half anymore – if it ever was.

Mr Driscoll found a way to settle disputes – apparently he’d give each man involved in the dispute a weapon of some kind and the other men would look on while they settled the matter with their fists or something sharper. I’d like to say that the current Recherche Bay dispute will be settled in an entirely different manner, but I’d say the main difference will be the weapons used – the media is probably the preferred weapon and he who wields it best wins. Or so it seems to go.

After all my ferreting and scavenging in bookish netherlands I emerged with a few favourite snippets. One of them was from an 1860 edition of the Evening Mail: ‘The next point is Captain Fisher’s, formerly a whaler, now one of the largest cabbage growers, he having about 12,000 in the ground ... cabbages at Recherche are like shrimps at Gravesend, everyone has his patch, large or small.’

Dooey too told me stories about cabbages. Not only did they grow a lot of cabbages at Recherche Bay – they grew really big ones. So, where have all the cabbages gone? Long time passing.

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There are friendships that come and go in life and others that are foundational. I’d been trudging around the state asking people questions and taking photos for a couple of years when my good friend Anna called to say that she was returning to Tassie for a holiday. Coming home for a while. She was someone in my life whose friendship had been heartfelt, over and over. We had lived together while we were at uni. During exam periods we’d meet in the hallway around midnight, both of us leaving the book-and-paper-saturated dens that our bedrooms had become, armed with Coca Cola and Caramello Koalas.

We bonded that way – through midnight exam-period deep-and-meaningfuls, in which we would find the answers to the world’s problems, as well as our own, or so we thought. We’d shared a good many drunken nights too – like the time Anna wheeled me around Sandy Bay in a shopping trolley, laughing and offering a hand when she upturned me into the gutter.

She, like most of the people I went to uni with, had left in search of more opportunities and a better climate while I stayed here and tried to come to terms with the noisy bag of mixed feelings I had for this island. It had me on a string – I’d tried to leave but I’d always ended up coming back, sitting somewhere staring out at the horizon while the wind froze my cheeks and the grey days crawled in around me. And there, never too far away, would be Mount Wellington, looming above, describing me to myself. My island. I loved it, I hated it.

We decided that it had been too long and that we needed time to catch up properly. ‘Let’s go away,’ she suggested. ‘Up the coast.’ So we did and I drove us the wrong way. Daydreaming as usual, I drove north to Bagdad before I realised that was the wrong way to Bicheno on the east coast. I thought, how long have I lived here?

I’d done that before, once driving nearly all the way to Strathgordon before a sleeping passenger woke and said that this wasn’t the way to Lake St Clair. (A few years later I was on a bus and I heard a girl say, ‘Did you hear about the people from the uni rafting club who were going bushwalking at Lake St Clair but accidentally drove to Strathgordon?’)

So, on the way to Bicheno via Campbell Town, Anna and I talked.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve been researching dad’s family history – nearly all of his ancestors were Irish convicts. A few were English and a couple of them free settlers, but mostly they were Irish and convicts. My great-grandfather and his family lived down at Recherche Bay; his father had been a whaler there and he worked in the sawmills.’ I drove along, chatting, not seeing the shock on her face.

‘Rachel!’ ‘What?’ ‘You do know, don’t you?’ ‘Know what?’ ‘The MacDougalls.’ ‘Sure, they owned the mill that dad’s family all worked in.’ ‘I’m a MacDougall!’ And so it was somewhere on the road to Campbell Town that we worked out that Anna’s great-grandfather had owned the mill that my great-grandfather and all of his brothers had worked in. I’d seen pictures. Pictures of them up huge trees, two men with one big saw.

‘My grandmother always used to tell me stories about life at Recherche Bay,’ Anna told me. ‘She grew up there for a while. It was a small community. There was this story she always used to tell about a bunch of the workmen who went to town one day, went into a cafe, and when they were asked if they wanted a serviette, they said yes because they thought it was something to eat! And that they saw a coconut in a shop window and thought it was a hairy potato.’

My turn to be stunned. ‘No way. Dooey told me that story.’ ‘Who’s he?’ ‘My grandfather’s cousin. He told me about his father and his uncle, who went to town for the day, and ...’

What a way to stumble upon a piece of Recherche Bay folklore! Here we were in my leaking-oil Holden on the way to Bicheno, discovering how incredibly linked we were. And divided. By class.

I met her grandmother some time after that, at Anna’s brother’s wedding. Anna told me later that her grandmother had said I seemed like a nice girl and that I must have ‘escaped’. The Learys had a particularly bad reputation – though I knew that already. Every time I went to interview someone who wasn’t part of the family but had known them, they’d tell me they were nervous before I arrived, through not knowing what to expect. Anna’s grandmother told her stories of the workers, particularly the Leary men, fighting all the time on the sawdust pile. Any time there was a big event, a wedding, a funeral, Christmas, anything, they’d be out there fighting.

Anna’s family owned the mill. My family worked in it. Anna said her grandmother wouldn’t have been seen dead socialising with one of the workers. I was the first person in my family ever to go to university. I’d struggled when I arrived, with the words, the mannerisms – it was a new world to me. I had lived all my life in the burbs – with the workers. Apparently I have Gough Whitlam to thank for the fact that I went to uni. Someone told me that once.

Those French blokes; they ended up at Recherche Bay because they were looking. They were looking for some guy who’d been eaten somewhere else. I went there looking too. Looking for ghosts. And while I was looking for them, I found a community of people – people who loved, fought, swore, laughed and cried there. And I found a whole lot of vegetables. Recherche Bay, it seems, was full of them: potatoes (nonhairy), cabbages (big), onions (French) and who can say what else? And now it’s a place thick and rich with stories and I’m hoping those stories don’t get buried under piles of burning timber – or fall down into the big fissure that’ll be created when the island rips in two.

Oh, and by the way, what is a serviette?

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RACHEL LEARY is a Tasmanian performer and cultural geographer. She has previously published work on the Hobart Rivulet in Australian Cultural Geographies and in Island Magazine.