PART 1: The night the stars fell to the ground
Devonport
In the early 1920s, my grandfather took over his parents’ farm at Thirlstane and they retired to a smaller farm on the highest hill above Devonport. Today their retirement farm is the site of St Brendan’s College. Back then the houses of Devonport’s 5,000 souls clung close to the muddy banks of the Mersey Estuary.
One day my grandfather’s cousin visited from beyond the Western Tiers. My grandfather showed his cousin the town on one side of the hill and the beach on the other. It was the first time she gazed on the sea.
That evening after tea the cousin went outside. Suddenly there was scream of terror, she pelted down the hall and dived under the kitchen table. My grandfather, his parents and other family members asked her what had happened and tried to soothe her but she just sobbed. When the power of speech returned she said, “The stars have fallen to the ground”.
There was silence until my grandfather caught on. “She means the street lights.” He took her outside and explained that Devonport was one of the first towns hereabouts to be lit by electricity.
I loved this story as a teenager. My parents’ house was only a few hundred metres from where it was set. My bedroom had a view down to the streets by the river. I imagined the children of Old Devonport dancing at night around incandescent fireballs still crackling and hissing where they fell on the muddy streets. Their parents watched on, warmed themselves and agreed this was even more remarkable than the seven-foot-long Tasmanian tiger recently spotted in Spreyton.
That was my self-administered curative for a place where it seemed everything of value was shipped out, including fearful queer kids like me. The story made Devonport its own, wondrous place. That’s not what my grandfather had in mind when he retold the story. For him it was a story about how ignorant some people once were and how education dispelled that ignorance like electric light dispels dark.
It was only later I realised there was a religious dimension to the story. The words my grandfather said his cousin spoke to explain her terror are from Revelations 6:13: “And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth.” Her distress was not only because she thought she saw a frightening disturbance of nature, but because that disturbance was a sign of the coming Apocalypse. Throughout Christian history, meteor storms have been interpreted the same way. The Leonid meteor shower over Alabama in 1833 put slave owners in such fear of the Second Coming they told their slaves which other plantations their children had been sold to. There was no fear of God in my grandfather’s voice. He was a moderate Anglican and although he didn’t say it directly he must have known his story mocked religious superstition and fervour.
There are many similar stories of ignorance, backwardness and poverty told across Tasmania from about the same time and I believe with much the same purpose. Take the sugar sack families.
Cethana
My other grandfather did not care to farm. In the early 1920s he started his working life at Sheffield buying skins from snarers and trappers in the Central Highlights. With a horse, rifle and cash, and dressed always in a suit and tie, he would travel up to Cradle, enjoying the hospitality of Gustav Weindorfer at the gates of alpine Tasmania.
On his way to the mountains he rode through Cethana, where the Forth River once roared its approval of the spectacular, 1,000-foot cliffs reaching high above, but where there is now a rockfill dam that engineers say is also, in its way, a marvel. At Cethana my grandfather encountered a family so poor all the children were dressed in old sugar bags tied around the middle with baling twine. Older Tasmanian men, my uncles included, would joke they were so poor or neglected as children they thought their initials were the letters CSR printed on the sacks they had no choice but to wear. But my grandfather’s story was told in great detail as if to say this is the truth behind the joke. He said the children darted like brown-backed wallabies into the undergrowth when he approached, so rarely did they see other people. He said they had no education and lived “wild”. But he also said the mother would wash and dry the sacks with great care, which I took to mean he wasn’t blaming the parents of neglect. My 10-year-old imagination constructed from this single detail the Edenic image of parents so devoted to their children they did not let work, money or appearances disturb or obscure the pure bonds of love. It was a fantasy reaction to the tight, hard-working, buttoned-up rural community I lived in, and an ungrateful one given how deeply my hard-working parents loved me.
A number of Tasmanian districts had a sugar sack family, often over the mountains, in the upper reaches of river valleys, isolated from others. For example, in Wanderings in Tasmania, George Porter wrote he was told of a family almost identical to that described by my grandfather, down to uneducated children dressed in sacks who “bolted like wild rabbits” because they “had never seen people before”. Porter’s family was at Loongana near the Leven Canyon, south of Ulverstone. The book was published in the mid-1930s but it describes events a number of years earlier. Evelyn Emmett wrote about a similar family in the hills north of the Fingal Valley. The sugar sacks were a trope.
I don’t take the similarities between these stories to mean they were copies. But it is not a coincidence that they arose at the same time, were recalled for a long time after and, in the recollection, share key features.
“Tasmania: what is wrong with her?”
Tasmania was in turmoil in the early to mid-1920s. Prices for our exports had plummeted. Unemployment was twice the national average. Emigration was higher than any other state and manufacturing lower. The population began to decline. The Legislative Council blocked social legislation while workers went on strike. The Tasmanian Rights League said federation had short-changed Tasmania and demanded a better financial deal from Canberra while the other states accused Tasmania of mendicancy. More and more farmers, including veterans from the failed soldier-settlement schemes, were unable to obtain a living from small holdings in the back-country and slid into subsistence. Their meagre income came from labouring on the farms of others in summer and autumn, and trapping in winter. Some of their children went unschooled. In 1924 the Hobart Mercury asked, “Tasmania: what is wrong with her?”
This will sound familiar to anyone who lived through Tasmania’s 2013 crisis of confidence. The high Australian dollar made our products uncompetitive, so exports slumped as they had in the early 1920s. This gave rise to the same fears of economic decline, population drain and collapsing services, and the same claims for fairer funding and accusations of mendicancy. The same images of people without jobs, skills, literacy or prospects, made headlines first locally then nationally. In the Griffith Review, some commentators responded to the question “does Tasmania need an intervention?” by portraying Tasmanians as no-hopers, especially in regard to education and business, who could only be saved by importing experts from the continent.
An illiterate young fellow from Burnie who had never had a proper job became the Australian newspaper’s Tasmanian poster boy. Some of this was generated by the political right to discredit the Labor/Green government and its focus on environmental protection and marriage equality. But it nonetheless tapped into deep fears Tasmanians have – many originating from the earliest years of colonisation – about being a failed and flawed people, of being mocked, conned or ignored by the world, and of regressing from the civilised to the wild. The same deep fears had played out in the 1920s. Sugar sack families were the feckless Burnie boys of their day.
Unnoticed and unreproved
An expansion of the hydro-electricity system helped rescue Tasmania from the malaise of the 1920s, or so it was said at the time. Factories were built: Cadbury’s in Hobart, Coats Patons textiles in Launceston and Goliath cement at Railton. Towns were lit: Devonport was added to the grid in 1924, albeit with a supply so unreliable most homes lost power if both cinemas showed films at the same time. The stories my grandfathers told of ignorant girls and destitute families isolated from modernity spoke not only of Tasmania’s anxiety about its perceived backwardness and the many problems it must solve to catch up, but of how to solve those problems. To be properly housed, educated and employed, and to become the disciplined labour force the electrified factories required, families at the end of lonely valleys or beyond the dolerite ramparts must be uprooted from their places of impoverishment and gathered in to the new suburbs, suburbs like those that would creep up and engulf the little farm looking down on Devonport. Why subsist on selling skins when you could weave wool for the world?
Was there resistance to this? I imagine some people were loath to leave land they loved and forsake what freedom or contentment they had. Inevitably, there was loss of skills, mores, language, attitudes and ways of life preserved by Tasmania’s unique landscape and uniquely adapted to it. The tradition of escape to isolated places to live one’s life unhampered by society’s expectations has a long history in Tasmania. The island’s first Anglican Bishop, Francis Nixon, noted of Tasmanian convicts, “When they were released they loved to live solitary lives, wandering away from towns and settlements, forming little groups in the bush where they could remain unnoticed and unreproved.”
But by the early 20th century the pull of town life, at least for poor subsistence farmers, was strong enough to overcome that convict legacy. The attraction of town began to depopulate Tasmania’s rural fringe so that today it is hard to imagine it was ever anything but silent forest, steppe and mountainside. Critical to this depopulation were stories like those of my grandfathers’. They simultaneously carried the shame Tasmanians felt at their state’s perceived backwardness and shamed those yet to yield to the new, electrified Tasmania. A century after emancipists fled to the many places in Tasmania where they could live unnoticed and unreproved, the disapproving gaze of society found their descendants and returned them.
Extraordinary Tasmania
Stories of fallen stars and sugar sack families give insight into their times and also into the cycles of Tasmanian history, particularly those traps of intense self-doubt and false hope Tasmanians periodically fall in to because we still too-often judge our value solely by what the world buys from us, instead of what we share here that allows us to live contentedly.
But there is another, unintended legacy of these stories. To achieve their goal of banishing our perceived backwardness, they had to contain compelling images and ideas. The fact they are so embedded in the landscape adds to their power. But this power means they are hard to forget and continued to be told long after their immediate relevance faded. The pursuit of a standard, 20th century Tasmania, where electricity-powered towns and factories and cotton clothing was taken for granted, has left us with a legacy of an extraordinary Tasmania. The people in this extraordinary Tasmania live in towns illuminated by fallen stars and have children who are part human, part marsupial. What better antidote to the shame, self-doubt and precarious sense of self-worth these stories once conveyed than the fantastical images set within them. From within tales about a benighted Tasmania, these images shine forth brighter than any bulb.
When I was told these stories as a child all I heard was a vague disapproval of the ignorance and poverty of the past, so I invested them with my own meanings. My hope is that more Tasmanians will do the same with the stories we have inherited, putting aside the ideas they once spoke to and finding new meaning in them. Reimagining and retelling these old stories is one of the quickest routes to understanding and loving Tasmania more deeply. At least, that’s my experience.
In part two of this essay I will look at stories also told to shame Tasmania for its backwardness, but which carry within them even more wondrous and illuminating elements.
Rodney Croome grew up on a dairy farm in Tasmania's north-west and studied European history at the University of Tasmania. He worked on the campaign to decriminalise homosexuality in Tasmania, was a founder of Australian Marriage Equality, and currently serves as the spokesperson for the gay right and equality advocacy groups Just Equal and The Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Group.
