In Tasmania (23 page)

I FLEW BACK TO TASMANIA TO MEET GREG LEHMAN AT A RIVULET
near Hobart. It was a hot day and he waited for me on the grass, slapping mosquitoes from his face. Ducks bobbed their heads under the water, and across the bridge was the place where all this began.

I recognised Lehman from the debate in the Dechaineaux Theatre. I had wanted to speak to him after listening to his talk, and since no-one was able to visit this site without the community's permission, I asked if he would be prepared to show me around Risdon Cove.

We crossed the bridge, and I told Lehman about my mercurial ancestor and the discoveries I had made since coming to live in Tasmania: how Kemp had condemned the massacre, his travels with Bennelong, and how his long life in Tasmania had tracked the extinction of the native population.

Lehman agreed that the Aborigines would have perceived Kemp at first as one of themselves. ‘The old fellas didn't recognise an Other. They didn't see a Black or a White. They lived in a world where
Homo sapiens
was all created out of the tail of a kangaroo.' A guiding dictum of Lehman's was a remark by a Cherokee Indian:
There is no such thing as a non-indigenous person
. ‘The basis of my belief in identity is that there was never in this land any distinction between black and white.'

With his ghost of a grey beard and his father's complexion Lehman was, he agreed, an improbable-looking Aborigine. His father was descended from Bavarians from the Black Forest; his mother from a convicted Irish axe-murderer called Chugg. But Lehman identified with his paternal grandmother, an Aborigine called Molly Kennedy who had lived in the hamlet of North Motton in Tasmania's north-west. ‘I am so lucky,' he said, ‘to be living in a landscape that my family has inhabited for 2,000 generations.'

We stopped before a rock where a plaque commemorated the first English settlement. Somewhere not far from these trees Kemp's regiment had shot Robert Hobart May's parents dead.

In his autobiography,
Living to Tell the Tale
, Gabriel García Márquez writes of a ‘massacre' that took place in 1928 in the Colombian coastal town of Aracataca when soldiers protecting the American-owned United Fruit Company opened fire on striking workers from the local banana plantation. The episode came to occupy a significant place in the consciousness of his nation and in his fiction. Later, Márquez tried to piece together the events of that day. ‘I spoke with survivors and witnesses and searched through newspaper archives and official documents and I realised that the truth did not lie anywhere. Conformists said, in effect, that there had been no deaths. Those at the other extreme affirmed without a quaver in their voices that there had been more than a hundred …' Márquez inflated this in a novel to 3,000 dead, and in the end, he wrote, real life did him justice when the speaker of the Senate asked for a moment's silence in memory of the 3,000 anonymous martyrs ‘sacrificed by the forces of law and order'. Aracataca seemed to have a lot in common with Risdon Cove.

‘What does this spot mean to the Aboriginal community?' I asked Lehman, who worked as Head of the Centre for Aboriginal Education.

‘For the Aborigines,' he said, ‘it became important because of the invasion history. It was the first place where the British set up camp, the first place where there was a record of British killings.'

Lehman was regarded in Tasmania as a leading Aboriginal voice. After taking a first-class degree in zoology, he had become one of the instigators of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Land Council, and had played a prominent role in restoring this, Tasmania's most contentious site, to his community – although Lehman's claims about what had occurred at Risdon had been challenged by historians, including Windschuttle. In a handout given to Aborigines attending a memorial here in 1993, Lehman had written that ‘close to a hundred were killed that day'. This was at variance with previous estimates that ranged from three to 50. Reading from his laptop in the Dechaineaux Theatre, Lehman had told the audience that he had since dropped the phrase ‘close to a hundred' because it seemed ‘unnecessarily strident', and had replaced it with ‘whole families were killed on that day'. He had concluded: ‘The exact number will never be known, but the exact number was never very important.' What was important was the fact of innocent deaths.

He kicked some bark on the ground. ‘I then saw Risdon as encapsulating injustice and the bloody manner in which the British had invaded. It was the intent rather than the extent.'

‘What was the intent?'

‘The intent of the British to establish themselves here and the action to use firearms to deal with a situation they didn't understand. But it became a metaphor for a broader political campaign.'

Lehman's preference for metaphor over historical truth had fallen on stony ground in the Windschuttle camp.

‘Have you ever met a Pentium primitivist?' Lehman asked. And he told me about a review in the magazine
Quadrant
of an essay that he had written in response to Windschuttle's
Fabrication of Aboriginal History
. Entitled ‘The Pentium primitivism of Greg Lehman', the review accused Lehman of openly rejecting the search for objective truth. It quoted him: ‘For us, the “truth” is made up of countless contradictory, ironic and provocative elements, woven together into an allegorical, sometimes fictive documentation of what it is to live our lives.' The reviewer ended with the assertion that Lehman's essay presented a threat ‘potentially more destructive' than September 11.

He led the way up the hill. There was a fine view from the summit through the cleared bush, and behind us young trees were planted in tidy rows. We sat down on the grass and I asked the same question that I had asked Edna and Jimmy and Angus:

‘Can you tell me how you discovered that you are an Aborigine?'

Lehman's parents had worked in Ulverstone, in a factory that processed peas and potatoes, and his father also bulldozed for the public works department. ‘My family didn't talk about Aboriginality till I started asking. They were typical of a number who'd become isolated. They had done what a lot of families had done – attempted to disappear.'

He had not known he was Aboriginal till he was ten. Again, Bill Mollison was central to the discovery. ‘Mollison was doing research, speaking to families, and people started to talk.' Lehman remembered conversations around the kitchen table, about how his grandmother was related to ‘Dolly' Dalrymple Briggs whose grandfather was a chieftain. ‘This was amazing stuff for a ten-year-old. I got hold of Mollison's chronology – and there was my family. Bang. This world I knew nothing about.' He said: ‘If this conversation had come up in the 1940s it would not have been conducted at the kitchen table, but in the 1970s things started to open up.'

Unfortunately, his grandmother Molly Kennedy was not interested in talking about it. ‘You'd say to her: “What can you tell me about Aboriginal culture in our family?” She would say: “Don't worry about that stuff.” It wasn't part of what she wanted to pass on – and she was fairly strident.' Nor did he feel able to interrogate his father: ‘I was too frightened. It tended to be me going out finding things for
him
to read. He was aware it was a dark secret, something you kept a lid on. He wouldn't have heard of chiefs like Mannalargenna or Tongerlongetter. He was suffering from an interruption to oral tradition. I had to go out and put together the jigsaw for myself. It's taken 30 years.'

‘How did you begin?'

‘When I was at high school trying to make sense of this strange ethnic tension, I would describe myself as
¹
/
₆₄
Aboriginal. That was the best way I could make sense of it. The fact that I looked like someone who had walked out of the Black Forest didn't prevent my peers from calling me Nigger, Coon, Abo. I got grabbed by the master of discipline and marched off to receive a caning. “Lehman, being an Aborigine is nothing to be proud of.”'

But he
was
proud of it and he determined to stand up for the rights of those who had been held down as half-castes and trouble-makers. ‘The totality of my identity occurred for me when I went to Hobart – I became political. I said: “Don't call me white, I'm black. Don't call me part-Aborigine. I'm Aborigine.”'

‘So it was a political decision to say “total”?'

‘Shit, yes,' he said, batting away a mosquito.

But I needed his help. How could someone who was
¹
/
₆₄
Aborigine – like, it appeared, most of the leaders in the Aboriginal community – choose this fraction of his ancestry over and above the rest?

He took my pad and drew a family tree. He sketched a trunk, then a branch that veered left – his Aboriginal branch. He wrote down the names of his grandmother, her ancestor ‘Dolly' Dalrymple Briggs and then her grandfather Mannalargenna (‘a fine man, a great warrior').

‘What about this?' and I pointed to the rest of the tree. ‘What about your German roots? What about your Irish roots?'

‘That's mongrel,' he said.

I looked away, frustrated by my inability to understand.

At the top of the field the community had planted saplings in plastic protective tubes. I pointed to an older, larger, dense-leaved conifer.

‘What do you see?'

‘A tree,' he said.

‘Exactly. You don't see just one branch. Aren't we made up of all the leaves and branches?'

He looked at me, and in his eyes was the expression of someone who doubted that I would ever understand.

I felt out of my depth. I felt that Tasmanian Aboriginality had elements of a faith, and that facts counted less than feeling. It was hard to think it through: I had to imagine it through. But I felt chained by the Western, linear, rationalist tradition of my English culture, and in the end it was impossible to let this go.

We saw that there was an impasse. He handed back my notebook, and we went on talking in an amicable way, one of us a white colonising bastard, the other an Aboriginal warrior from the Trawlulwuy nation, who had lived here for 2,000 generations. As Lehman had said in the debate: ‘Your 200 years of history are like yesterday for us.'

We were walking back across the rivulet when I remembered that there was something I had been meaning to ask.

He had mentioned that his Aboriginal grandmother came from North Motton and I asked if he knew a couple of old ladies there.

‘What's their name?'

I told him.

He stopped and touched the ring in his ear. ‘I think I might be related to them. Why?'

I said: ‘They're cousins of mine.'

WE WERE IN OUR SECOND YEAR ON DOLPHIN SANDS WHEN MY
mother telephoned from England.

‘You may have other relatives in Tasmania.'

‘Are you sure?' I said, warily.

She had just discovered in her father's autobiography a mysterious reference to a favourite uncle who had emigrated to Tasmania in 1900. He came from Devon and his name was Hordern. ‘He sounds extravagant,' she said. It puzzled her that her father had never spoken of him.

I looked up Hordern in the telephone book. There was one entry. I rang the number and found myself talking to Hordern's granddaughter, Ivy. She lived with her sister Maud on the small-holding where they had been born, 80 years ago, in North Motton in the north-west of the island.

Ivy declared herself in ‘a state of shock'. She had lost hope of tracking down any Hordern descendants in Britain after years of fruitless research. She had followed the lives of my mother and grandfather through my grandfather's books, copies of which she owned.

‘Your grandfather was,' she told me, ‘a very famous writer.'

He was also partly to blame for my living in Tasmania.

HIS NAME WAS STUART PETRE BRODIE MAIS, BUT EVERYONE KNEW HIM
by his initials. He was the first writer I ever met, and the reason why I never wanted to become a writer myself. The author of more than 200 books, he died in his ninetieth year, bankrupt and heartbroken, shortly after my grandmother ran off with a man who first proposed to her when she was 17. His sorrowful end has continued to haunt me.

SPB Mais

He was the only child of an impoverished Devonshire clergyman and a snobbish mother – ‘an abominably stupid woman', he called her – who was more than 40 when he was born. Hannah Mais never wanted children, and since she was married to a man too poor to afford holidays she farmed SPB off to her brother, an enchanting but profligate Devon landowner, whose proudest boast was that he had played tennis with the Kaiser, and who rattled between his two estates in a dogcart. So North Devon became my grandfather's preferred place in the world – the location of his ‘earliest and easily my most carefree memories' – and Petre Hordern his ‘boyhood SPB Mais hero'. Hordern paid for SPB's education and enabled him to go to Oxford. He wrote of Hordern: ‘I had a deep affection for him and he for me and I was very sorry when he disappeared from my life.' This was how I felt about SPB.

 

My first recollection of him. I'm nine, recently arrived from Singapore, and in my first term at my prep school in Oxford. I sit on top of a red letter-box in the Bardwell Road, waiting for my grandparents to take me out for Sunday lunch. I am eager to see them. My parents have dropped me off here and immediately boarded a ship to a new home in Rio de Janeiro.

SPB arrives sooner than expected, in a deer-stalker hat with a number of scarves draped around his neck, each a different colour. (‘He was fanatical about time,' my mother said.) All the way up both arms he wears a number of Rolexes, which he later pawns, and a billowing black coat, which anon I inherit, and he seems to be gruff, intolerant and rather terrifying.

My grandmother was a former model who would never leave her bedroom without make-up on. Already immaculate, she spends a lot of the meal vetting her perfection in a tiny mirror. When she tucks her compact into a bag, I cannot help noticing that the bag contains two wrapped gifts. For me, I hope.

Some days later, my grandfather writes me a letter. The handwriting is so minuscule and untidy that I cannot decipher a word.

His handwriting was the only small thing about him. He filled the room, as if he had rambled in not from the bus station – he never drove – but from the pages of the stories I was then reading:
Greenmantle
,
Mistress Masham's Repose
,
The Prisoner of Zenda
. It didn't surprise me to discover that after coming down from Christ Church, he claimed to have received ‘an offer from Sir Eyres Mansell, who wanted me to become King of Albania. I should have liked that, but my mother, in spite of her snobbishness, could not bear the thought of my going so far away.'

Instead of a Balkan king – a role which would have suited him since he was emotional, driven and excitable – he became a schoolmaster, teaching English literature by turns at Rossall, Tonbridge and Sherborne. He was by all accounts a remarkable teacher, already practising in 1913 a student-based philosophy that did not become common till the 1960s. He flung the set texts out of the window and divided his class into teams to debate the merits of Wordsworth, say, over Byron. At Sherborne, he became mentor to Alec Waugh and encouraged him to publish
The Loom of Youth
– a novel that Waugh wrote after his expulsion and in which SPB is caricatured as always rushing about with an armful of books.

In 1917 – ‘to my great surprise and dismay' – SPB himself was sacked from Sherborne after Chapman & Hall, the firm managed by Waugh's father, published his novel
Interlude
, about a married schoolmaster who elopes with a shop-girl. He fell back on his pen. He went to work for the
Daily Express
and then as fiction reviewer for the
Daily Telegraph
, also contributing regular broadcasts to the BBC. He had a rich, irate voice and was renowned as an unrepentant Englishman: in 1940 he received up to 500 fan letters a day. Winston Churchill said of him: ‘That man Mais makes me feel tired.'

As his fame grew so did the procession of visitors to his home in Sussex. My mother remembers George Bernard Shaw, J.M. Barrie, H.G. Wells, John Betjeman (he gave the speech at her wedding) and Henry Williamson (he slept on the floor). I used to wonder if my mother was not guilty of inflating SPB's reputation, but then I read Julie Burchill enthusiastically quoting him in the
Guardian
(‘Anyone who does not live in Brighton must be mad and should be locked up'). Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess told me that they had made the pilgrimage to Hove. A scourge of old fogies, he had been kind to them when they were young writers and they felt genuine gratitude – which Greene subtly acknowledged by using his name for a character in
Brighton Rock
: ‘See that man going to the Gents'? That's Mais. The brewer. He's worth a hundred thousand nicker.'

SPB was, on the contrary, famously worth nothing of the sort. His personal life came to replicate certain passages of his risqué novel
Interlude
. In 1913 he married Maud Snow, a girl with a taste for schnauzers, sweet biscuits and dry gin. He threatened to kill himself when she wanted to cancel the wedding, and on their honeymoon he took her to his uncle's haunts – and ‘on foot almost every day' compelled her to follow the Devon and Somerset stag-hounds. Neither had a clue about sex. After two years he sought enlightenment from a doctor and then Maud ran off to Paris with a gossip columnist.

Meanwhile, on a catwalk at the Savoy, SPB had met a beautiful 17-year-old Irish model, Gillian Doughty. An enthusiastic rambler, he invited her – over a lunchtime grapefruit in the Savoy Grill – to see the total solar eclipse on top of Mount Snowdon. She was my grandmother.

Nowadays, his might seem a desirable way of life, but in the 1930s he was paid a pittance by his newspapers and the BBC, and for the next 51 years he struggled to ward off penury and bailiffs. He supplemented his efforts to support his new family by writing books, sometimes six a year.

I remember the surprise with which I stumbled on one of them, in a second-hand bookshop in Abergavenny. It was entitled
Some Books I Like
. This seemed self-indulgent until a yard along the shelf devoted to his works I discovered its sequel:
More Books I Like
(total sales: 696).

Apart from books on books he liked, my grandfather wrote novels, children's stories, school texts. Not one of his novels sold more than 5,000 copies. His most successful book,
An English Course for Schools
, sold 21,000. The most he earned from any book was £850 – for
I return to Scotland
.

He lectured widely, especially on books about the English countryside. My grandmother liked to tell of the occasion when he was invited to give a talk at Lewes Prison. He became so excited and enthusiastic about the South Downs in Sussex that he found himself telling the inmates that they must get out more, see it for themselves.

By the time I came to know SPB, his rambling days were over and his income derived chiefly from leisurely travel books. Every summer his publisher Alvin Redman dispatched him on a different cruise. The result was a series with titles such as
Mediterranean Cruise Holiday
,
South African Cruise Holiday
,
South American Cruise Holiday
. These cruise books never made him much money (about £100 each), but they made him all he had to live on. This, I suppose, was the reason I was put off by his profession.

 

My last image of SPB. It is the school holiday and I am visiting him in Bliss House, Lindfield, where the Samaritan Housing Association had offered him a tiny first-floor flat for £4 a week. The man who could have been King of Albania sleeps below my grandmother in a bunk bed. There is room in the kitchen for only one of them at a time. Furniture is stacked on top of the fridge, including a trolley and a child's chair for me.

A description that he wrote in the
Guardian
tallies with my recollection: ‘The living room measures 12 foot by 14 foot plus a small alcove, and this room contains three desks (two of them mine), a large inherited chest of drawers which holds my sweaters, socks and underclothes, a glass-fronted bookcase containing my remaining first editions, some glasses and decanters … Add to this our beloved miniature dachshund and painfully thin walls so that the widow below bangs with a stick every time he dares to play with his tennis ball and the fact that I do not sleep very well.' The article concludes: ‘Do you wonder that we get on one another's nerves?'

I could not wait to leave. Nor, it turned out, could my grandmother.

 

When it first happened he went roaring through the village: ‘My wife has left me for another man.'

In 1974, their mutual friend Dudley Carew had knocked on the door. His second wife had died and he was depressed. His doctor had told him to get out, meet friends. He thought: ‘Petre and Gillian, I'll go and see them.' Whereupon he and Gillian fell for each other and Carew, under the impression that he was rescuing my grandmother from a very unhappy relationship, proposed. She was almost 70.

They married and Carew bought a house nearby. A year later SPB died of a shattered heart, still in love.

 

My mother never liked to read her father's books. It was her sister who had alerted her to the reference to Tasmania. I too had avoided them, until, on a subsequent visit to Kempton, I stopped at a second-hand bookshop in a field, and there on a shelf at the back I found a book that SPB had published in 1965, and dedicated to his grandchildren. On discovering with a jolt that
Round the World Cruise Holiday
was written for Nicholas ‘who will one day, we hope, follow in our footsteps round the world', I bought it.

It occurred to me that my grandfather's wish had come true. My father being a diplomat, I had been brought up in France, Cambodia, Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Peru and Morocco. There was a further coincidence: I, too, had married a girl called Gillian. And I began to wonder if perhaps some of the reasons that decided me to settle in Tasmania had to do with not wanting to follow too closely in the footsteps of SPB. Directly facing the South Pole, and 13,000 miles from England, our house was as far away as I could travel from Bliss House, Lindfield.

Except, of course, that it was not.