Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Third Letter from Far South: Inhabiting Intercultural History
John Cameron
This essay is the third in a series of “occasional letters” that retired environmental educator John Cameron will be writing from his home on Bruny Island, just off the southeastern coast of Tasmania, the island state to the south of mainland Australia. To read his two earlier letters, see the winter & fall 2008 issues of EAP. Jcameronvking@optusnet.com.au. © 2009 John Cameron.
I noted in my first letter that living on Bruny Island has given my life partner Vicki and me the opportunity to put into practice the ideas of place responsiveness we taught at university, and that continues to be the case in surprising and unintended ways.
One of the perennial questions that emerged in classes concerned the origins of a sense of place. Does it arise from our awareness of the lives of others who live and have lived in the place, the accretion of stories and the marks of their presence left behind, or from the features of the land, its non-human inhabitants, and its inherent qualities as we perceive them?
European progressive thinkers about place, such as Doreen Massey, have argued that sense of place is best thought of as deriving from a network of social relations; non-human influences are rarely mentioned [1]. Many of our students reacted against this human-centeredness, feeling that their experience of Australian places was integrally connected with the land itself.
I suggested to students that it was surely not one or the other. The more interesting question was how the two sets of influences interact to produce that elusive but profound felt response to certain places. Recent events on Bruny Island have brought these issues to the fore in a very personal way.
*******
Living at the end of a long private gravel road, we rarely have unanticipated visitors, so it was quite a surprise to find a real-estate agent standing at our door one Sunday morning last year. It was a courtesy call, he explained, to let us know that the 20 acres of degraded paddocks with a coastal woodland strip on the southern side of our land would be auctioned in four weeks.
This was most unwelcome news. Our nearest neighbors live a kilometer away, out of sight behind a ridge, whereas a potential buyer would likely build close to the water, perhaps within 100 meters of our house. The sense of spaciousness, isolation, and immersion in the natural world we treasure was suddenly jeopardized. A building and road in the middle of the narrow strip of coastal woodland would destroy wildlife habitat and disrupt passage of wallabies and other native creatures along the only tree-lined corridor in an expanse of bare fields.
After recovering from dismay at the potential sale of the land and the prohibitively expensive asking price, we decided we had to act for personal, ecological, and heritage reasons. When we first arrived on Bruny Island, we had heard that the remains of an old historical site lay somewhere in the woodland now for sale, but we had been unable to locate the site, nor could our 80-year-old neighbor who had been shown it 20 years ago.
When we inquired, the president of the Bruny Island Historical Society confirmed the existence of ruins of an old hut constructed of earthen and clay sods in the vicinity. As far as she knew, however, it hadn’t been visited for 20 years, so its exact whereabouts, or even if there were still visible remains, was uncertain.
Soon afterward, she sent us a 1988 photograph of the hut, and we ventured across the barbed-wire fence to search again. After considerable roaming about, attempting to match fence lines and trees, we found ourselves in front of a roughly rectangular-shaped earthen mound about two feet high topped by a long-established sheep trail. The mound was perched above the shore close to a creek bed and was the size of two small rooms. Delighted to have rediscovered it, we gazed in wonder. This was the “sod hut” reputed to be the place where the “Protector of Aboriginals,” George Augustus Robinson, commenced his so-called “Friendly Mission” in 1829 at the behest of the colony’s Governor to gather the remaining Tasmanian Aboriginal people and take them to Flinders Island to the north of Tasmania.
Thus began our rapid immersion in intercultural history. We found a photograph taken a 100 years ago that showed elliptical earthen sods stacked high to form massive walls and a doorway corresponding to the gap at the front of the current ruins. Documents from the Historical Society indicated that the very first ration station was established here as part of Robinson’s Mission, that he left four sacks of bread at the hut, and when he returned the next day he found 13 of the local Nuenone Aboriginal people there.
These were virtually all that remained of Bruny Island’s indigenous population after two decades of disease and murder at the hands of European sealers, whalers, and settlers. The records implied that Truganini, a renowned Nuenone woman, had stood here at age 17 and encountered Robinson on her people’s tribal land. She’d had a harsh introduction to the ways of the white man—she witnessed her mother stabbed to death by a European, her uncle shot by a soldier, and her sister carried off by sealers. Worse was to come:
Timber getters killed the man Truganini was to marry. During a boat crossing of the Channel, she watched in horror as her husband-to-be was thrown into the sea. As he tried desperately to climb back onboard, the timber-getters cut off his hands and left him to drown. Truganini was then repeatedly raped [2].
Nevertheless, she accompanied Robinson as guide and translator, stating later that she considered that “he was not like the timber getters and the other white men, he was a good man and could speak our language” [3]. They traveled around the coast of Tasmania in harsh conditions, persuading most of the Aboriginal bands they encountered to accompany them to Flinders Island. Many of her people died there from disease and deprivation before Robinson, his Friendly Mission a failure, moved with her and several others to the colony of Victoria. Truganini grew increasingly critical of Robinson and finally returned to Oyster Cove, visible across the Channel from here, to die in 1876 as disputedly the last remaining full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal person. [4]
*******
A large, full-color advertisement for the auction soon appeared in Hobart’s Mercury newspaper proclaiming “true waterfront to a sparkling turquoise bay, a private pebble beach and a sheltered anchorage… sweeping views with frontage to high-water mark on Blackstone Bay… awaiting an enterprising person to take this property to a new level.”
We watched with sinking hearts as potential buyers came from the water on luxurious yachts and on the road in expensive vehicles, even chartering small planes to inspect the land. The least we could do was alert interested parties to the existence of the sod hut and its historical significance.
We contacted the Tasmanian Heritage Council and found that we could nominate the hut for listing on the state’s heritage register. This required marshalling all the available literature on the sod hut, its features, history, significance, and evidence of its value to the local community. Our living room quickly became the repository of old documents, maps, books, photographs, and newspaper clippings.
We gathered the best of our material and, at the next community market at the neighboring village, we set up a table. Underneath the placard “Save the Sod Hut,” we informed our neighbors of the impending sale and collected the signatures of 40 local residents (out of a total north Bruny Island population of 100) on a petition to the Heritage Council.
Actively campaigning on a heritage and environmental issue in the local community was the last thing I expected to be doing barely a year after moving here. Our original intention had been to keep a low profile and set up a quiet place of retreat for ourselves. Bruny Island, like much of Tasmania, is a community strongly divided along environmental lines, with cars bearing bumper stickers demanding an end to old-growth forest logging lined up on the ferry alongside those declaring “Greens Tell Lies.” In my previous work as a green economist and campaigner, I had witnessed the damaging effects on communities of such strong polarization, and wanted to be more of a mediator than an activist, if I were to take any visible role at all.
We submitted our nomination and petition to the Heritage Council, asking them to inform the real estate agent and thus potential buyers of the existence of the sod hut. We hoped this might discourage developers and might even bring forth someone who valued its cultural and natural heritage. Unfortunately, as the day of the auction approached, although the real estate agents received a letter from the Heritage Council, they did not feel it incumbent upon themselves to inform potential buyers. I prepared to attend the auction with our research material and inform the bidders about the sod hut and its heritage nomination.
*******
Three days before the auction, I wandered restlessly over to the ruins again. All our efforts hadn’t amounted to much, and an unfortunate outcome seemed inevitable. Wasn’t there more we could do? I leaned up against the bark of a native box tree and gazed at the small clearing of native grasses below the ruins. I visualized the fateful meeting between Robinson and the Nuenone people in this very spot two centuries ago. I imagined where the access road and building site would most likely be, and the effect on the remaining strip of woodland and wildlife. The history of the place had come to life for me, and an unfortunate future was looming. In that moment, I felt a surge of determination to act.
“I really want to go for it, love,” I announced to Vicki when I returned to the house.
“Go for what?”
“Actually bid at the auction, seriously.”
She looked at me, surprised at the uncharacteristic force in my voice. We discussed whether we could afford enough out of our retirement money to make a realistic offer, but we both knew that the sort of person who could afford to charter a plane to inspect the property would outbid us quickly.
We arrived early and sat in the realtor’s parking lot assessing the affluence of the likely bidders by the size and model of their cars. With our hearts in our mouths, we presented ourselves 15 minutes early and explained our intention to bring the existence of the sod hut to the attention of the bidders. We were ushered into a small empty office, waited to be shown into the main auction room, and were flabbergasted when the auctioneer came into the office and commenced his spiel.
“What about the other bidders?” Vicki exclaimed.
“You are the only bidders, but it is still an auction and I am required to proceed.”
*******
It was a surreal event. The real estate agent engaged in a long and strange shuttle negotiation between us and the sellers, who were in a van in the parking lot. Their minimum price turned out to be just affordable for us, and a sale was finalized.
We walked out into the noonday sun feeling stunned. I had visualized a room packed with wealthy investors attracted by the glossy advertisements and the beautiful waterfront lot. Fortune had smiled on us. The real estate agent explained that different auction times had been advertised on different signs by mistake, and it had deterred a number of interested parties.
To celebrate, we went to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart to see Benjamin Duterrau’s famous 1840 painting, “The Conciliation.” It depicts Robinson meeting with Truganini and other Tasmanian Aboriginal people. How much more meaning the painting had for us now that we had suddenly become the custodians of the place where one of the earliest conciliatory meetings had happened! Vicki bought several books on Tasmanian Aboriginal history and the story of the painting itself so that we could deepen our knowledge.
We returned to Bruny and climbed over the fence onto our new land, still in a state of disbelief. I felt as if forces stronger than my own will were at work. Having prepared myself for a battle at the auction and thereafter with the new owner, we ourselves were suddenly the new custodians, or shortly would be. What a gift, what a responsibility!
I hadn’t taken more than 20 steps onto the new land when I stopped. There in the middle of the path in front of us was a large mottled tan and white feather from a sea eagle. Every time we see the White-bellied sea eagle gliding along the shore or soaring over us in the fields, we stop in awe and appreciative silence, but we had never before come across one of its feathers. To encounter one for the first time in our path to the sod hut on the day we had become the future owners was a remarkable event. Surely this eagle’s gift was auspicious.
*******
Having received our nomination, the Heritage Council sent a researcher and surveyor to examine the site. They inspected it carefully, photographing and identifying the base of a possible bridge by the stream. In addition to some copies of correspondence from Governor Arthur establishing the ration station in 1828, they brought with them old maps of the area, including George Calder’s original 1843 survey of the local coastline and accompanying notes. To see the coastline sketched in the original hand of the surveyor was intriguing, and we eagerly sought copies.
Several months afterward, we had the opportunity to contribute some artwork to a local exhibition on the island. Vicki came up with the idea of an installation based on the sod hut and our response to it. The exhibition would be held in the same community hall in which we had set up our petition, so it would be a way of reporting back to those who had supported us.
I took pastels, crayons, and watercolors out to the site and set myself up among some tussocks of dry native grasses. I hadn’t used a watercolor brush on paper for decades and could still hear the echoes of my primary school art teacher and my artist mother discreetly suggesting that my talents must surely lie elsewhere. And indeed I didn’t produce any masterpieces this time either, but the process of looking in depth at what was in front of me was revealing. What presented itself to the eye wasn’t dramatic—a low rectangular hummock, the top of which was regrettably an eroding sheep trail, the interior of which formed a hollow covered in broad-leaved sagg grass. A few spindly black peppermint trees leaned over the ruins.
Yet I was undeniably drawn to this place. Part of the appeal was its history. Significant events occurred here, and the traces that remained invited imaginative reflection. The photograph from the previous century helped me to visualize the scene—much larger trees and more of them. What was now a dry streambed would have flowed year round until all the trees on the slopes had been removed. There would have been a clearing in front of the hut where the Nuenone gathered; in fact, some of their stone tools are still here.
The placement of the ration station made sense. It had enough of a vantage spot over the Channel, looking toward Oyster Cove and Hobart from where boats came yet was sheltered from the southwesterly gales by the headland. Boats could easily be brought to shore on the stony beach. Even if there had been no ruins, it felt like a good place to sit. Vicki experienced different feelings here, sensing great melancholy, but she agreed that it would be a worthy site to put a rustic bench one day.
After seeing my first creative responses to the sod hut, she suggested I use local materials to evoke the place. If the sod hut was constructed out of earth, why not try to paint with it? After some trial and error, I found some clay near the hut that I vigorously mixed with water to make a thick slurry. I set up the old photographs amid the pots of clay “paint.” Vicki drew on her years of teaching painting in English universities to guide me. For hours and days I built up the pages with rhythmic daubs of clay mimicking the layers of lozenge-shaped sods laid one on top of the other. I only realized later how this process echoed the third stage of Goethean scientific inquiry—the repeated drawing of a form to allow the “gesture” of its essential nature to be revealed.
*******
Meanwhile, Vicki had become fascinated by Truganini and George Augustus Robinson, the two leading characters in the history of the sod hut. Duterrau depicted Robinson as pasty-faced and chubby with curly blond hair, narrow-set blue eyes, wearing a dapper striped shirt and an odd puffy cap reminiscent of a baker’s hat. Truganini appeared as a beautiful young woman with close-cropped black hair, dark olive complexion and dark sorrowful eyes set far apart, wearing a shell necklace.
After making many drawings, Vicki painted detailed watercolor portraits of Truganini and Robinson and then portraits using the clay slurries on two pieces of driftwood. She mounted the latter on a standing driftwood log with two sawn-off branches like arms and two saw marks incised across a tree trunk she had found on the shore below the sod hut.
This wooden figure, which was the size and girth of a human being, immediately set up a resonance between what had happened on the land, stripped of trees and scarred with erosion, and what had happened to its first peoples, taken from the island and left to perish in exile. She placed four burlap sacks at the base to represent the four sacks of bread that were left for the Nuenone as rations on the first night of the “Friendly Mission.”
*******
To convey the multi-layered nature of the site, its history and our response to it, we put together a large album of our research with collaged copies of old documents, maps, surveys, Vicki’s photographs of the stones, trees and birds of Blackstone Bay, and fragments of our paintings and sketches. Vicki exhibited watercolors of the endangered bird species of Bruny Island and some driftwood bird sculptures. She also constructed two evocative sculptural pieces, “Vessel for Joy,” woven from eucalyptus bark and black cormorant feathers, and “Vessel for Grief,” made from rusted barbed wire and 13 black and white tern feathers, 13 being the number of the remaining Nuenone people who met with Robinson. I included my sod hut clay paintings.
Just before the exhibition, in a stroke of good timing, the Heritage Council informed us that our nomination had been accepted and that the sod hut and surrounding remnant coastal woodland would be permanently protected from development and listed on the Tasmanian Heritage Register. A copy of their letter completed our exhibit.
Once the installation was finished, I sat quietly in its midst, feeling strangely moved. Vicki had set it up so there was ample central space to walk between the various parts of the exhibit, which was animated by the physical presence of wood, earth, wire and feathers from the land, and by the historical presence of the Nuenone people and early settlers. Being surrounded by these tangible representations of the pat and present in a different setting somehow amplified the experience of being at the sod hut site, imagining the first contact and the original building. Truganini’s clay portrait looked across to the “Vessel for Grief,” and I sighed in recognition of the sorrow that had eluded me at the site itself.
*******
There seems to have been a strange alchemy at work within me as a result of our immersion into the human history of the sod hut site and my appreciation of its natural qualities. The knowledge that George Augustus Robinson and Truganini were here on what has become our land galvanized our imaginations, gave us impetus to protect the site, and drew out our creative response.
My motivation to act with uncharacteristic determination came from the days I spent before the auction walking the land, sitting in the woodland, visualizing the early historical events, and sensing its differences and continuities with our existing place. The aspect and outlook were more sheltered, the eucalypts were taller with less undergrowth, but the two blocks of land definitely belonged together. My artwork came from a combination of early images of the hut and the physical sensations of sitting for hours sketching the hut as it is now.
In turn, sitting quietly within the completed installation of our creative work deepened my feelings about the sod hut site itself and its history. The alchemy of these accumulated impressions, histories, and images has led to an ever-deepening response to “Blackstone,” changed our role in the community, and transformed my sense of what it means to be custodians of this land. There has been a numinous quality to our story as well, with uncanny timings and the strange appearance of the eagle’s feather immediately after the auction.
*******
The stories and discoveries continue. Blackstone Bay is so named because of its shingle of jet-black pebbles. These rounded stones fit wonderfully into the palm of the hand, become lustrous and warm when rubbed, and one accompanies me everywhere in my pocket as a talisman. Recently I have been exploring the geology of the Bay, and have called upon my early geological training to construct a plausible hypothesis for the origin of the black stones. Approximately 165 million years ago, molten dolerite intruded into the cold sandstone beds. Where the two came into contact, the magma solidified rapidly into fine-grained black rock.
One day, to my amazement, I realized that the geological contact zone, where hot dark dolerite met cold pale sandstone, outcropped on the beach directly below the sod hut—the human contact zone where the white emissary first met the black Aboriginal inhabitants. I felt a shiver down my spine at the resonance between these human and geological events separated over vast periods of time. My previous letter described the interplay between daily experience and the expanses of geological time. Now we are inhabiting a third time scale—intercultural history—that seems a distant, lost time, yet one that is full of presences we still feel.
At the top of the hill above the bay is a pile of sandstone blocks the previous owner had stacked in preparation for the foundations of a house that was never built. Everywhere I look, there are poignant reminders of how futile many human projects are, and how transitory is our stewardship of the land.
What will be the stories and marks of our presence that we leave behind when we go? I take some solace from two facts. Even if we were to vanish tomorrow, at least the sod hut site is now part of the permanent heritage of Tasmania, and thousands of new trees are growing in once denuded paddocks. It may not fully return the gifts that are lavished on us by this place each day, but it is something.
Endnotes
1. Massey, D., Space, Place and Gender (London: Polity Press,
1996). Massey sought to rescue the notion of a sense of place from
those critics who regarded it as irredeemably reactionary, being
fixed in the past. Hence she came up with a more progressive, global
sense of place formed through fluid social relationships. She was
also writing from the context of inner London in which the impact of
the more-than-human world is severely muted compared with most
Australian places. In her most recent work, For Space
(London: Sage, 2005), she expands her perspective, especially in
chapter 12 when she writes of the geology of the Lake District and
the elusiveness of place.
2. Reynolds, A. J., ed., Keeping Culture: Aboriginal Tasmania (Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press, 2006), p. 27.
3. An excellent account of the early intercultural history of Tasmania is provided by Henry Reynolds in Fate of a Free People (London: Penguin, 1995). The quotations from Truganini are on p. 142.
4. As Reynolds documents (see note 2), many descendants of the original Tasmanian Aboriginal people live in Tasmania today and keep their culture alive through their strong relationship with the land, craft, art, literature, and political activism.