We were driving along the Midland Highway on a hot summer’s day and at St Peters Pass the hillsides on either side were covered with flowering prickly box. The small, waxy, creamy yellow flowers of the native bush were a common sight during my mother's childhood in the Fingal Valley, although never flowering so profusely. It was late January 2002 in what had been an unseasonally wet summer, but, even so, this was exceptional.
‘I’m amazed,’ she said. ‘It’s so luxuriant. And so many! I’ve never seen it like this.’
My mother Ann Cameron, had just celebrated her 84th birthday. Seventy years earlier, on November 1, 1931, the then Ann Page began a nature diary. For three years she writes about Frodsley, the property encircled by forested hills through which the Break O'Day River ran. It was in this valley on Tasmania’s east coast that she grew up with her mother, stepfather (her father had died in World War I) and her younger brother and sisters.
She began writing about Frodsley for an English magazine, The Little Folks: The Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine. In it, H Mortimer Batten ran 'The Little Folks Pine Martens', with several pages devoted to nature studies to which children, mostly girls, sent letters from all over the English-speaking world. It was the springboard for her nature diaries, which many years later she fished out of a leather suitcase under her bed in Launceston and diffidently showed me.
‘I wrote a couple of letters to Mr Batten which he published and I just took off,’ she told me. ‘I didn’t want to be restricted in what I wrote and, suddenly, I got the idea of making word pictures. I stopped writing to Mr Batten and began a nature diary. I had been writing differently for him – I hadn't poured my heart out about what I saw, but I felt obliged to in my diary, once I’d embarked on it. I’d go for a ride and come in and write what I’d seen, sitting in the window recess of my bedroom which had yellow silk curtains. My desk was in the window, looking out into the orchard with the river beyond.'
At that desk on March 12, 1933, fifteen-year-old Ann writes: How I love the country! At night, to look out on the moonlit garden, the shining river, the hills, half hidden, half revealed by the silvery radiance. To hear the screech of native hens up the silent reaches of the river, the plover, the frogs, the moving of the leaves in the orchard. It is all too beautiful to explain. I cannot write a cohesive string of descriptions, I can merely put down pictures as they float through my mind in everchanging procession.
Ann had begun writing short stories when very young and was encouraged by Ian Clunies Ross, eminent scientist at Sydney University and later chairman of the CSIRO. Professor Clunies Ross often stayed at Frodsley, where he was involved in research trials. In January 1931, Professor Clunies Ross sent her a card in which he wrote: 'With all good wishes for a very happy birthday and with the hope that this her fourteenth year will see the recognition of her literary ability by a so far unappreciative audience.'
Meanwhile, from November 1931 until December 1934, she created word pictures in her nature diary of what she saw when riding in the bush, rowing on the river, or going for walks. She observed the native trees and wildflowers, the seasons, shearing, harvesting, and the breathtaking sunsets behind Ben Lomond, the imposing mountain to the west of the valley; sunsets she writes about as if she were painting them in her mind. My mother has always lived close to Ben Lomond: at Frodsley, and on the mountain's other side at Cressy, Nile and Launceston, but especially at Frodsley and Upper Winburn at Nile. 'I really love Ben Lomond,' she said. 'I've lived around it all my life, watching the sunsets at Frodsley and sunrise at Winburn.'
In February 1932, when she was fourteen, she was sent to school in Hobart. She wrote little that year, living with her grandmother and going to St Michael’s Collegiate School. During a winter holiday, she writes of an expedition to Bird Corner with her mother, Laura Brodribb. She rowed along the Break O'Day, while her mother walked along the river bank: It was a perfect day for the expedition. The sun was shining brightly which made things look cheerful, the world was still, with not a breath of air, and the river's surface was glass-like, so that I seemed to be floating on clouds. She was terribly homesick in Hobart and was allowed to go home. On October 15, 1932, she writes: I am home again for good, and it is spring and everything is beautiful.
My mother was then educated by a governess, Irene Evershed, who had been the headmistress of a private girls' school in New South Wales. Deafness had forced her to retire early and my grandmother was delighted to be able to provide her children with an excellent teacher. Shed, as she was called, had a tube protruding from her ear with a small trumpet on the end into which they talked. ‘I’m afraid we used to blow into it,’ my mother confessed. ‘Poor Shed!'
Miss Evershed had an MA degree and taught English and Scottish history, geography, English literature and French, teaching my mother to speak French fluently and instilling in her a real and ongoing interest in those subjects. Nevertheless she felt Tasmanian, especially in the bush.
My mother was fortunate in having her love of the bush fostered by the shepherd at Frodsley, Alfred Cook. ‘I loved the bush,’ she told me. ‘I felt part of it and I can still see it now as I saw it then. I was lucky that Cook knew so much. He knew all the trees and plants by name, and he knew about the birds. I wanted to know what the wildflowers were called, what everything was called and he told me. I still want to know what things are called, wherever I am. It’s an obsession.’
Miss Evershed released her charge at 3 pm each day and, miraculously, Cook, as he was called, always seemed to find a reason to be in the yard and my mother would saddle Valiant, her horse, and go off with him. On September 2, 1933 , she describes a bird new to her, a greenfinch, and plunging down a narrow gully entirely roofed by the foliage of dogwood trees: A mountain creek of crystal clear water bubbled alternately over rocks, down miniature cascades, and slid smoothly over flat slabs of rock, covered in gently waving moss. Boulders here and there were covered in thick green moss, and tattered, shaggy logs all had their emerald covering, and the shrubs! Giant manferns, with their enormous, delicate fronds of pale green lace, the smaller, darker catferns, and here and there, quivering gently in some damp crevice, over the gurgling stream, were delicate maidenhair ferns. The biggest fall was very pretty, tumbling from a smooth, shallow pool to a deep one many feet below, over jagged green rocks; a feathery plant swayed over it gently, and a manfern completed one side, while beyond, a luxuriant growth of healthy-leaved wild hops filled the air with their balmy smell. Then we clambered up a bank, and pop! Our heads emerged into the bright sunlight again, looking over the roof of that damp, spicy tunnel, with its subdued green twilight, and its charm and treasures.
My mother is a keen gardener – one who likes to feel the earth in her hands – but she has never planted natives. ‘To me, native gardens always look sterile,' she said. 'It’s not that I don’t like what’s in them, but they look out of place.’ While her love of the bush is undiminished, she is also interested in the great gardens of Europe and in 1983 and 1990 she went on garden tours of Italy and France. As a teenager, she writes of the subtle beauty of bush for those who look for and appreciate it, not for those who only admire trim beds and shaven lawns. Decades later, she recorded her appreciation of La Pietra, an early Renaissance garden near Florence: The garden can best be described as an elegant labyrinth, a green symphony of perfect formal taste.
On the April and May 1990 tour they visited Sissinghurst in England before catching a ferry to France. Sissinghurst was a disappointment; she found it rather prosaic. There was very little out and no pleasing vistas to make up for the lack of flowers. The separate gardens seemed unimaginative, even the famous white garden was unremarkable. However, the drive back to Lewes in the warm late afternoon was intoxicating, the country unfolding in wonderful variety of shape, form and colour in the golden light. England at its best.
On the other hand, she loved Monet's equally famous garden at Giverny, and she wrote that we left with our eyes full of colour … The house has a pink crushed brick facade and in front of it were two big beds of pink tulips set in blue forget-me-nots. The garden slopes away very slightly in a rectangular Clos Normand with archways of climbing plants and massed plants everywhere. Monet liked solid colour and that it is what it was, not particularly unusual flowers, but planted so thickly and the colours chosen so carefully, it was stunning. Beyond this lies the water garden, an absolute dream. The day was slightly overcast, not bleak, but pearly, and it enhanced the beauty of the water, which seemed luminous, fringed and partly seen through trails of weeping willows and flowers spilling down and reflecting in the water.
In Italy, she writes of returning to the Villa Reale at Marlia: I spent an afternoon at the Villa Reale seven years ago and it was so hauntingly beautiful I sometimes wondered if I had dreamt it. Not so. There it stood, stately and peaceful with a backdrop of blue hills and lovely gardens all around blending into meadows of spring flowers sprinkled with wildflowers. The formal balustraded pool is still defended by white swans. There are terracotta pots of orange trees at intervals around it; fountains, statuary and wandering paths half wild in contrast to the formal gardens we had seen, which is part of its charm and unreality.
It is a world away from the Fingal Valley, but there is the same keen observation that was so evident in the young teenager who was enchanted by the bush and wanted to know everything in it. On May 23, 1933, she listed the many trees and shrubs she could identify, among them musk, wild cherry and prickly box, writing I learn more every day of Tasmanian native trees.
Orchids were rare in the valley but in October of that year she writes: There was a great deal of clematis in sweet scented white festoons on the trees and ferns, violets (purple and white with mauve centres), little flat yellow and pink flowers, and tiny, tiny white stars in clumps. And best of all, we found a bed of orchids in the shelter of some scrub; they were a pinky mauve, with four long slim petals on one side of the centre. I have never seen pink ones before, and they were so extremely delicate. Under a tree was some white stuff, called manna, under another was some white pithy stuff, which cockatoos had pulled off the tree; I think it is called Punk.
Although she hated living in Hobart, my mother enjoyed visiting her grandparents there, travelling by train from Frodsley, a railway siding, to Conara, from where she caught a connecting train between Launceston and Hobart, noting the wildflowers along the tracks in her diary. On a visit in 1933 she went walking on Mount Wellington with her mother, an expedition which did not please her: All the side of Mt Wellington between the Fern Tree and the Springs is a labyrinth of narrow, winding paths, intersecting deep bush, fairy glens, and spacious slopes. It is quite pretty, but to one used to the absolute peace and untouched solitude of real bush, it was incongruous to walk on paths made by man, to meet occasional people, broken bottles and other rubbish, and SIGN POSTS! But although the real beauty was marred, it was quite pleasant.
She would have been shocked to know that nearly seventy years later, in November 2000, my son was employed by Green Corps to spend the summer on Mount Wellington. Alexander was rebuilding part of a walking track, the Ice House Track, used by pack horses in the nineteenth century to bring ice down to the town in summer from ice houses on the mountain, where it was stored in blocks in winter. There is a signpost to the track, not to mention a plaque bearing the name of her grandson and those of the other members of the team which worked on the project. My mother was an innate conservationist. She wanted to preserve the bush and in an impassioned entry dated June 9, 1934, headed VANDALISM, she writes of riding through a mystic veil of fog, prismatic raindrops and into an intangible world. A world about to be cleared for farming.
It was an enchanting world, and to think that that beautiful undergrowth may be swept away! It is terrible to think of, and yet it may come. These lovely wattles, all the delicate, graceful undergrowth, and tender fronds, fragile festoons of green beauty, which was put there to make happiness, and loveliness, to make an island's character, and to keep men's hearts right, will be cut and burnt, till nothing remains but saddened, empty, blackened spaces between the lonely trees. And then, after awhile, clover will appear, clover, which is so delightful in the paddocks, and will be so hateful and out of place in the bush.
I know this sort of thing, and far worse, is done in the United States of America, but I never dreamt that one of our family would stoop to such Vandalism. It is incredible! All the birds, and little animals will creep farther back into the dear bush, with terrified eyes. Instead of the charming shrubs and delicate flowers – just clover and fences. No more orchids or violets or clematis along the beautiful Front Mount; sheep and top dressers, out of place and jarring, where Nature should be reigning to keep men natural.
Anyway, it has not come yet, and I can't believe that it will, and this morning the radiant yet ethereal valley was unharmed and beautiful.
A century earlier, Ann's great-great-grandmother, Irish-born Elizabeth Fenton, had kept a journal of her life in the Derwent Valley in southern Tasmania - journals are in the possession of one of her decendants in Hobart. She would have approved, I think, of her great-great-granddaughter. While one can't compare the diary of a girl with that of a woman, both delighted in the bush.
Ann occasionally visited relatives in the area, but it didn't fire her imagination: There are two sorts of country, viz, the broad, sweeping landscape like ours, and country like the Derwent Valley - square paddocks, picked out with hedges, and hop fields, and orchards, and lots of trees, and old stone buildings, just like England.
The Derwent Valley was not remotely like England when Elizabeth arrived in Van Diemens Land from India less than thirty years after British settlement. Her first husband had died in India and she and her second husband decided to settle in Van Diemen's Land. She stayed in Ile de France (Mauritius) for the birth of their first child, while he went ahead, and she and their baby daughter arrived in Hobart on August 11, 1829.
The Fentons rented a house in Hobart and on September 12, 1829, she writes: We selected a house, one of the last in Macquarie Street, which I liked as affording immediate access to the jungle. On November 6, she writes that Macquarie Street leads into a road which goes to the Female Penitentiary and forested hills beyond, along which she often walks with her baby and nursemaid: I turn myself to these deep dark woods, whose aspect is to me all beauty and novelty. It rarely happens that we ever meet a human creature, few walkers come out here, and there is no cultivation to require labour. But here I come as often as I possibly can find a time. The birds, the trees, the wildflowers, the lovely weather, all are strange ...
Settling in the Derwent Valley, their first house was just within what is now the Mount Field National Park. She writes of her new home on August 26, 1830: The situation of it is admirable, at the junction of the Russell's Falls and the Derwent. Our cottage is on a hill and the ground descends in beautiful natural terraces; the ground between the garden and the house is as left by nature, a very lovely park-like region with some very large trees.
Three months later, she writes about her English cottage garden and her interest in the native plants beyond: ...the banks of the rivers are so endless in rich variety of shrubs. I go for miles along them with undiminished interest and never meet a human face. My love of flowers has not diminished, and I fill my flower bowls with native blossoms and English blossoms alternately.
Like her great-great granddaughter Ann, Elizabeth appreciated the bush and took a stand in saving some of the finest trees. On December 2, 1830, she writes of taking her daughter to where her husband – who had been ill – was supervising clear felling for farming: Sometimes we go and sit where Fenton is directing the sawing up of trees, which when piled in huge heaps are set fire to, and the ground cleared of them without the labour of drawing off. I go from a double motive – to have an eye on Fenton, and to intercede for the preservation of any fine tree, to the wonder of the bystanders to whom all trees are the same.
My great-great-great grandmother remained in the Derwent Valley, where she raised six children. My mother left the Fingal Valley at twenty, when she married her first husband, who was killed in World War Two. On their engagement, Professor Clunies Ross wrote to congratulate her 'with mixed feelings'. He feared she might not go on writing and regretted that 'you who are so young, should have bonds however light, to impede your happy carefree progress'. All the same, he spoke of the happiness of marriage, saying 'never believe a word of what the cynical say about married life. With love from us both, sincerely yours ... '
We were sitting at her dining room table, reading his letter, when my mother startled me by saying she had always intended to be a writer but had had eight children instead (not to mention growing numbers of grandchildren and great-grandchildren). 'Perhaps it's more of an achievement,' she said, 'to be responsible for thirty-two people.'
MARGARETTA POS is a Hobart writer and journalist
This article is re-published with permission from ISLAND MAGAZINE, Island 92, Autumn 2003
Email: island@tassie.net.au