The road that intersects the Hellyer Gorge is a joy to drive, its course winding through the heavily-forested country west of Black Bluff. When I think back on my trips through there, the impression is that I have slid down a chute through the rainforest, been flung around hairpins lined with man ferns, plunged into dark shadows and emerged into the blackish green of myrtle woods.
I pulled into the campsite by the Hellyer River late one April afternoon, as the all-day twilight of the western forests turned to full darkness. In the camp, a fire was already blazing. A solitary young man sat before it. There is always a tension in these moments: I too was alone, and had intended to be alone for the night. But I am, at times, preternaturally drawn to a lonely figure in the landscape.
There was an etiquette that must be met at the very least. I pulled up my car some distance from him, and began to extract some belongings. Then, I wandered towards the fire, and offered a simple hello.
The young man also greeted me charily; he had no desire for company on this night. There was a billy on the hot coals on the fire’s edges. A goatee of stubble grew on his wan face, as though his face were charred. Making small talk, we relinquished only small morsels of information about ourselves, our attention regularly returning to the fire’s gassy roar in between short sentences. Both of us were guarded and subdued, but when he asked what brought me out this way, I decided to give him a candid answer.
I was on yet another foray to the west, I said as I sat down on a log next to him, with no real agenda other than to chase its lore. I told him that I believed that this half of the island is a mosaic of landscapes which are doused with memory. I explained that although I have seen none of the significant sites that evince the use of human communities for upwards of 35,000 years, I sensed that my passages through the landscape were also passages through time, and that rather than simply journeying on the surface of this island, I was beginning to make some progress into the stories layered in every square metre of soil or rock.
“Doused with memory,” the young man repeated. “Yes, I would say so as well.”
He threw another log onto the blaze. “I guess you would know the name of Henry Hellyer?” I replied that I did.
. . .
The Murchison Highway, even here as it bends through the bush, in and out of this ravine, is an easy passage compared to the one that Henry Hellyer cut into this gorge and beyond. Young, talented and courageous – but prone to dreadful melancholy – Hellyer set sail in 1826 as the chief surveyor and architect for the newly-established Van Diemen’s Land Company. Much of the future of this island hung on this company. His job would be one of the most challenging in the colony. It would kill him.
Sent into the forests and mountainous regions of north-western Van Diemen’s Land with small parties of bushmen and convicts, Hellyer endured the environment’s assaults on his body. Wet myrtle forests, spiky and stringy thickets of bauera and horizontal, rushing rivers, mosquitoes and hunger plagued their every day of exploration. They slept “like mummies, rolled up in blankets” after days of “violent bodily exercises” and such privations that “we were obliged to go on, or starve”.
The physical hardships appeared to be nothing, however, compared to Hellyer’s mental turmoil. Hellyer believed he had found good grazing land further north, around Surrey Hills, but he was wrong. The Van Diemen’s Land Company incurred great cost attempting to raise sheep and cattle there, and they perished in the winter. In 1832, after a particularly cold winter, Surrey Hills was “becoming the graves of all the sheep”. Rumour and gossip began to circulate among the company’s workers and servants. Hellyer tried to defend himself; he became oversensitive to criticism; he retreated into himself; he let melancholy consume him.
On September 2, 1832, Henry Hellyer committed suicide.
. . .
“My name is Benjamin,” the young man said. “I live in Melbourne now but I was born up this way, on the north-west coast.” The fire was dying down, coals tinkling like breaking glass, the shadows beneath Benjamin’s eyes made deeper by the low glow. He continued. “I went to Hellyer College, actually. My father was a sheep farmer who has worked paddocks originally allotted to the Van Diemen’s Land Company.
“As I believe Henry Hellyer did, I suffer from an aversion to people. Insults wound me terribly and although I know that I am a fair human being – even highly capable in some fields – I frequently disappear into doubt and loathing towards myself. I have been on the brink of doing that thing which Henry Hellyer did before me.
“I should say at this point,” he went on, “that I do not believe in metempsychosis, and I am not suggesting that I have, in any sense, possession of Henry Hellyer’s soul. However, it seems natural to me that places should have curses, and that I should be cursed, as, I believe, Henry Hellyer was.”
His billy had only water in it: he would drink hot water endlessly that night, while I drank drams from my own tin cups. He spoke in creek-like spurts and burbles, but what he said was often brilliant, and all of his ideas were tilted towards philosophy and science. He was university-educated, but self-taught.
“Actually,” he said, “an ancestor of mine appears in Henry Hellyer’s biography. He was a convict servant who was apparently rather lazy, at least under Hellyer’s supervision. He didn’t get compensated for a job and subsequently he was responsible for some of the gossip that hastened Hellyer’s decision. It seems that my great-great-great grandfather spread the slander that Henry was gay.”
He paused. “I am gay, which I’m sure you’ll understand was a big deal as a young man in the north-west. While I wouldn’t change the matter of my attraction to other men, I will concede it has been traumatic sometimes. All this is part of the narrative. It is not so neat as metempsychosis or eternal recurrence: it is neither linear nor circular. This curse, if I can really call it this, is a mess. My ancestor’s words (true or not, who cares) have come to be applied to me; the victim’s presence is in the places I go.”
The ideas were as unkempt as the surrounding forests, but Benjamin’s words resonated with me, giving expression to a feeling I have long felt in certain locations: that like an invisible lichen hanging off the trees, long-since superseded events and ideas dwell unseen everywhere in Tasmania.
Why should places hold curses? We know that we project our ideas onto trees and stones; as such their shapes and their colours are a product of our perception and culture, as well as of themselves. We fling so much of ourselves at our environments that perhaps they retain something of us after we are gone.
But maybe the problem is with us historians. Obsessed with the past, we want to know a place right down to its bedrock. Just as in biological study we are able to find patterns, Benjamin and I were bent on encountering repetitions in human histories, and within ourselves. They are inevitable, and that is what we meant by a curse. It may be that the true curse is the constant need to peer and pry into history.
Benjamin had moved to Melbourne to escape all this. Cities hasten amnesia, memory’s visual stimuli are constantly changing, there is nothing much upon which you can hinge your history … but it is my own experience also that childhood places stay with you. They are the paradigm through which you observe the world. Benjamin had returned to north-west Tasmania.
His plan, now, was to head into the forests. Like Henry Hellyer, he would hurl himself into the tangle of roots and thorns and vines, slashing, like the surveyor, at the clusters of bauera and the cables of horizontal. He was not looking to find any route, and nor did he hope to reach a destination. “If nothing else, the exercise and the clean air will do me good,” he said and I saw him smile in the campfire’s yellow light. When I woke up in the morning, he wasn’t there.
. . .
I recently saw Benjamin in a newspaper article online. It did not report, as I might have worried, that he had gone the way of the intrepid explorer of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. Rather, he was the recipient of a research grant. So, he made it. Whatever came of his expedition into the forests I cannot say. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to whether it was any good for him or not. I would also never assume that his sadness, self-doubt or fear of a curse had left him altogether.
I do know that while it doesn’t take much to up-end one’s ability to carry on in life, it is likewise possible that the equilibrium of happiness can appear suddenly and surprise you, and you suddenly are jolted into feeling fine. Henry Hellyer never found this, but in the newspaper photograph, Benjamin had a big grin, like that of a man in love.
Bert Spinks writes poetry, and poetic prose, about wilderness. He has also played football on Queenstown’s gravel oval. In this blog, he fills in some of the space between these essentially Tasmanian extremes.