There are three land masses on Earth that reach for the south: Africa, South America and Australia. At their inverse pinnacles are South Africa, Patagonia and Tasmania. Rarely do we associate these three places geographically, let alone historically, culturally or in terms of shared stories. Yet there is much they share.
I have written before about the uncanny parallels between Tasmania and Tierra del Fuego (Forty South magazine, Issue 72, p34) – how to me it felt more familiar as a Tasmanian than most places in Europe and many places in Australia. It wasn’t just the fagus covering the mountainsides that points to our shared history of once being joined as part of Gondwanaland, but the sheep ranches on the flatter land so reminiscent of Tasmania’s Midlands, the scale and colours of the villages and the Antarctic icebreaker resting in the harbour of Ushuaia.
I believe there should be more conversation about our “southern-ness” as well as our Aboriginal or European past, our European-modelled society and the influence of our Asian-Pacific geography. It too, forms part of our identity.
Recently, I had such a conversation.
Fabián Martínez Siccardi, an Argentine writer, had four days in Tasmania and I was to play host. We had never met but had exchanged emails, and from these I knew he was keen to hike, to meet writers and to visit a sheep farm.
Siccardi has written several novels including Beasts Outside, which won a Clarin Award in 2013 (the Clarins honour Argentine achievements in entertainment, sports, literature and advertising). Siccardi and I had been connected through the world of words. In 2017 he undertook a writer’s residency at a castle in Scotland at the same time as with Hobart-born Caroline Brothers, another successful novelist. I had done a public conversation Brothers in Hobart while she was promoting her latest novel The Memory Stones, which happens to be set in Argentina during the dictatorship of the 1970s and 80s. She also wrote the cover blurb for my second book, The Balfour Correspondent.
In Scotland, Siccardi and Brothers got talking about Australia and South America, and she shared with him an essay I wrote in 2011 about the myriad parallels between Tasmania and Patagonia. It turned out he has Patagonian heritage and wants to create a book of three stories from the Southern Hemisphere: one from Australia, one from South Africa and one from Patagonia. Siccardi decided I might be the Australian writer and wrote to me. He already had South African writer Arthur Rose lined up for the project.
. . .
I expected, from his emails, that Fabián Siccardi would be a warm, interesting and fun person. Meeting him confirmed it. He is 53 years old, he has 20 year-old twins, and he lives in Buenos Aires where, when he is not writing, he runs a translating company. I picked him up from Hobart’s The Pickled Frog hostel first thing on a Monday morning and, after a quick but delicious breakfast at Straight Up café, we drove to Port Arthur.
I took him Port Arthur partly because Patagonia was also used as a penal colony in the 19th century (there is a prison built in Ushuaia based on plans from Port Arthur), and partly because, when you only have a few days, the Tasman Peninsula offers a microcosm of some of Tasmania’s special landscapes.
Through the stories of Port Arthur, a sense of Van Diemen’s Land begins to emerge, in all its horror, wonder, delusions and dreams. It is possible, too, to imagine the environment that convict and settler would have seen on arrival – if you imagine the eucalypts in the dense forest twice as tall and twice as wide. It was an environment strange and wild to the newcomers; it was an environment intimately known by and inseparable from the first Tasmanians.
The rush to exploit this “wilderness” is evident in almost every story or view as well. One can’t help wondering how many arrivals were struck by the beauty of the dark green forest meeting the cobalt blue of the sea, the 300 metre cliffs and the beaches of white sand, whilst the prevailing lens created a view of timber, coal, minerals, land for grazing and seas for plundering. It was the same lens that pushed prospectors, farmers, chancers and criminals southward into Patagonia, and that devastated the Aboriginal people of that southern land.
For the visit of Fabián Martínez Siccardi, we secured the use of a little shack near Premaydena, the perfect place to drink red wine, look out over the sea and listen to the black cockatoos as they spoke of their own Tasmanian stories; ancient lore or prophesy, we couldn’t determine. Then it was out for dinner at the Nubeena pub – beer, fresh seafood and unquenchable conversation.
After about 12 hours together, it was almost confronting how intimate the day had been. We already knew so much about each other and we already knew things that we wouldn’t have told close friends. Talking to someone new, and whom you are not going to see regularly, is liberating: there is no background, no baggage, no assumptions to try to accommodate, and you know that if it gets awkward, you won’t see them again for a while!
Siccardi had said early in the day that he thought engaging writing must be built with the “Four Ps: past, present, place and personal”. I realised the same is true for conversation.
We set off first thing the next morning to Fortescue Bay and walked out to Cape Hauy, sweating out the previous night’s excess. If you only had a few hours in Tasmania, perhaps this is what you would do: start and finish on the white sand and in the crystal water of Fortescue Bay, pass through several types of Tasmanian forest and get dizzy from the tops of the dolerite cliffs that appear to continue vertically far below the surface.
Walking along the track, we talk. There are a million things that two human beings have in common or that connect them, but as a Tasmanian and a Patagonian we also have relatable stories of colonisation, the destruction of indigenous peoples, resource mania, the clearing for the grazing of foreign animals, penal colonies, geology, climate and biology. And perhaps, a bottom-of-the-world mentality.
Siccardi wanted to get a sense of Tasmania, as well explore some things that might be comparable to his own Patagonia. This led him to spend the following day at Curringa Farm near Hamilton in the Central Highlands where the smell of the sheep shearing shed took him straight back to the ranch thousands of kilometres across the Pacific Ocean in Patagonia where he spent his school holidays growing up.
. . .
The concept of “southern thinking” has been promoted by South African J.M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. The University of San Martin in Buenos Aires has a department in honour of Coetzee’s work – specifically to how it relates to “southern thought” – known as The Coetzee Chair: Southern Literatures. Many Latin American scholars felt that the work of Coetzee resonated in their own lands. Coetzee has called Adelaide home for 15 years now, further connecting the three continents that reach for the south.
“The meaning of the Coetzee Chair is linked to the ease with which literature connects worlds, however far or unknown they may be. Thus, its activities promote the composition of a more real image, more open to those who, by experience and trajectory, are perhaps closer to us, and constitute an experience of encounter between the southern worlds,” says the University of San Martin website. This isn’t a bad summation of why Fabián Martinez Siccardi, Arthur Rose and I are attempting to write a book together.
Patagonia is more southern, latitudinally more in the 50s compared to Tasmania’s 40s and South Africa’s 30s, but they are all deeply southern in terms of their own continent and as such in their history and their culture. The stories of the south are under-told, and generally, when they are told, it is through the European lens or heavily subjected to the filter of “official history”.
In some ways, the search to connect with those who may share understandings or be shaped by relatable stories is a response to globalisation: to reach for common identities or common myths, to share beliefs and experiences, a modern attempt to share food and story around the fire with a visiting tribe. Humanity is globally connected today by news, economics, social media and mass culture, but local culture, which remains place-based, will probably always be unique, despite growing global hegemony. It is in exploring this that we uncover and conserve an identity.
There is something within many of us that seeks connections with those from afar; to identify difference and commonality; to share two worlds openly and honestly. Meeting someone from far away frees the mind and the tongue. Why be anything other than completely open and truthful? Why not admit you have more questions than answers, even though you may be speaking of your homeland? In that moment, one can exist as they truly are.
It is really four worlds you share: theirs and yours, that of their place and that of your place, all woven with the threads of past, present, place and the personal. Siccardi and I both come from lands of amnesia and confused identities, places that deny their history both in terms of deliberately genocidal interactions with the original inhabitants and the colonial foundations built by convicts, desperados, misfits and adventurers. In Tasmania and Patagonia, denial is both structural and systemic, but often deeply unconscious.
“People write,” Siccardi said, “because they are uncomfortable about something.” This might be an urge to express rage, a need to share something beautiful, to expose a truth, or a desire to explore a confused identity.
. . .
We spend an evening in Hobart’s Hope and Anchor Tavern to share words and drink with a small rabble of Hobart writers, and I imagine that, if we switched languages, we could just as easily be in a pub in Patagonia. Travel and new people foster open thinking and open dialogue. They free us from some of the myths we carry, like who we think we are and how we behave, what history we have with the person we’re talking to, what their views are and what we think is expected of us. Imagine if an entire culture could have the sort of experience an individual can, of unchained communication and self-reflection. We can only hope such liberation of the guides the writing of our book.
At Hobart Airport, we say goodbye and it feels like we have been friends for years. I look forward to seeing what comes of the book, the journey and the destination. Both our lands are to some degree, still fantastically isolated: Tasmania by sea, Patagonia by “nothingness and distance”, and both by their southern-ness. But seas and endless plains no longer prevent conversations.
A publisher once told James that when he is asked for his bio, he should say: “James writes subversive essays about important things.” James felt a bit awkward about saying this publicly, but secretly he liked it. He has written for many publications. His books are Essays from Near and Far, Walleah Press, 2014 and The Balfour Correspondent, Bob Brown Foundation, 2017.