Damien Shen

Spirit of Place: My Tasmanian Riviera

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Daniel Thomas

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Daniel Thomas AM, Emeritus Director Art Gallery of South Australia, was in 1958 the first-ever curatorial appointment at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, where he eventually became chief curator and head of Australian art. In 1978 he became founding head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and from 1984 to 1990 was director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Retired and living in northern Tasmania, he continues to write occasionally on Australian art.

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In barbershops, intimacies grow. One day in North Adelaide I surprised myself with a response, not quite serious, to a delicate enquiry about religion: “I’m a pagan”. The Italian–Australian didn’t miss a beat: “Oh, they’re the ones who worship rocks and trees”.

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Only an Italian, I thought, would be immediately familiar with what came first. Especially a man from Sicily, a Mediterranean (Centre of Earth) island colonised by Greece long before the ancient Roman empire had conquered the Western world, and spread the Christian religion.

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I am now retired and living with rocks and trees near my birthplace in Tasmania. Colonised by Britain two centuries ago and more than twice the size of Sicily, it’s a very island-minded place, and pre-settler-minded. My particular site gazes out from sheoak groves of Allocasuarina littoralis on rocky dolerite headlands that frame a view of beach and ocean. Here I have become more confidently ‘pagan’.

 

Of course one doesn’t abandon the Christian philosophy of human kindness and forgiving. However, on my secluded shore I can’t help observe that the other parts of nature — plants, animals, earth, water, air and fire — are all behaving differently, and at times dangerously, under unkind management by thoughtless humans. Over the years since childhood, the sandhill coast of the family farm has been eroded to expose pre-colonial Indigenous peoples’ middens. Storms no longer heap seaweed kelp onto the sands and instead I clean away a tideline fringe of waste plastics. Fire, never previously known to race along the dune-grasses, in 2002 threatened to climb a gully and attack my newly built house.

 

Micro-regional management of the earth is best, informed by knowledge of very small places: “Think global, act local”. Geography rules; it determines cultures. And coastlines are our most important geographical feature.

 

At Hamelin Pool, Shark Bay, Western Australia, I once visited ‘living-fossil’ stromatolites that had evolved 3.5 billion years ago. They constitute the world’s largest remaining group of survivors from our first ancestral life-forms. Stromatolites are cyanobacteria that look like water’s-edge rocks.

 

There I remembered that eighty years ago, a small child at my ancestral place, I had embarked with adults on a Field Naturalists Society excursion upstream on Port Sorell to fossil cliffs where we pondered deep time and the total extinction of trilobites. They were crab-like creatures that for a quarter of a million years were among the world’s most successful animals.

 

The encounter with living rocks at Hamelin Pool also reminded me that thirty years earlier in New York’s East Village I had entered a participatory sculpture, or ‘happening’, by Yoko Ono, in which I sensed how it might feel to be a rock. She issued body-sized ‘Eye Bags’ of cloth fine enough to see out from but not into from outside, and then instructed us to spend time inside the big bags. On a raised polished floor, doing whatever we wished, humans thereby became rocks looking out at fellow rock-creatures, mostly meditating, but sometimes standing, dancing or rolling.

 

Art history teaches that Surrealism, notably Salvador Dalí’s, emphasised the creativity of evolution on littoral edges. The particular history of Tasmania includes Australia’s greatest early-colonial artist, John Glover; a century earlier than Dalí he recognised that not only nature’s elemental edges but also cultural pressures create our spirit of place.

 

A native of the English Midlands, Glover emigrated late in life to join farmer sons who had preceded him to Hobart. In a southern-hemisphere summer, his first sight of his new home was from a ship sailing along my northern Tasmanian Riviera and on 17 February 1831, a day before his 64th birthday, he inscribed a sketch as “Eastward of Round Hill point”. Round Hill encloses Emu Bay at present-day Burnie; in the inland background he clearly depicts Mount Roland, which is visible from my sheoak groves near Port Sorell, and in Glover’s foreground, protecting a grassy coastal plain, are my own sandhills.

 

A century later, Tom Roberts, another great Australian artist, in his final years took to Tasmanian coastal sheoaks and also painted a portrait of Mount Roland, a too-picturesque conglomerate rock rising above the small town of Sheffield. Glover in the 1830s had promptly gone for more iconically Tasmanian rocks, the stately dolerite mountains above the cities of Hobart, where he lived first, and Launceston, near where he finally settled. It’s an uncommon rock in most of the world, but for geologists Tasmania is “dolerite heaven”.

 

We will return to Glover, and to a modern artist, Bea Maddock, whose work has further reinforced my sense of place. Now let’s consider the childhood place itself. The North Down Beach that Glover sailed past in 1831 was where my great-great-great-uncle Bartholomew Thomas had started a sheepwalk in 1828, and after three years was killed, along with his overseer, by Aborigines — the last deaths in Tasmania’s so-called Black War.

 

In my 1930s childhood I knew of Uncle Bartholomew’s death but thought of it as a natural part of life in the past. Aged seven, to escape the great ‘infantile paralysis’ epidemic, I and a twin brother spent a winter in Central Australia where we met the famous Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira at Hermannsburg and duly admired his skill. Of Tasmania’s Black War, we knew chiefly that the Aborigines were clever: the Black Line that swept across the settled areas to net Indigenous populations caught only two small boys. We were also aware of the painted boards hung on trees with a picture-story asking black and white Tasmanians to live peaceably together. (Eighty years later, attending Handel’s opera Orlando in a season of Hobart Baroque in the 1830s Theatre Royal, I wondered if the Black War idea of peace-messages hung on trees had come from the stage, where love messages frequently appear on trees. Orlando brought to mind the best-known example: Shakespeare’s As You Like It.) Farmers inevitably gain intimate knowledge of their land, and I remember my father solemnly showing us Aboriginal rock engravings on the Mersey Bluff at Devonport, the far end of the North Down plain.

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However, more than associated stories and people and excursions, it was the childhood place, its micro-characteristics, that created wonder. All visitors arriving at North Down exclaimed about the sudden revelation of a beautiful view. It comprised sea and distant rocky headlands and islets, dunes and wetlands, foreground farmland, black and red soils, mature trees — mostly English elms — and an unusual hill, the Sugarloaf, that sheltered an unusual open crater, the Punchbowl. Later I realised there were many ‘Sugarloaf’ hills and ‘Punchbowl’ craters throughout the world, and realised the words signified human conviviality and light-headedness, but the geology and botany were enough to lift a child’s mind out of self-centredness.

 

The calm warmth inside the northeast-facing Punchbowl was a pleasant mystery when prevailing north-westerlies raged. That explained why sheep had created the strange rib-like horizontal paths for grazing on the steep Sugarloaf slope. It explained Uncle Bartholomew’s choice of a house site, close above a capacious spring, and with a view as beautiful though less sweeping than that from his nephew Sam Thomas’s more elevated site where I was born. Bartholomew’s first North Down House was abandoned after fifty years but its soft-brick ruins, and a bravely surviving mulberry tree, were still there for a child to explore. Years later I learned that the immigrant Thomas family had brought with them Uvedale Price’s 1790s handbooks for landed gentry, his Essays On the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and, On The Use of Studying Pictures, for the purpose of improving Real Landscape. Bartholomew wrote of the beauty of the place as reason enough for living in what was then extreme solitude.

 

Most of my childhood trees, the mature elms, were gathered in hedgerows and clumps. There were huge pre-settler eucalypts looking down into the Punchbowl. Close to the homestead I was taught to recognise sycamore and ash trees, and a pair of Norfolk Island pines planted for our father’s birth. Most wondrous was “The oak tree”, at the edge of the garden, already a hundred years old and with strange long, low, horizontal branches that welcomed the presence of small children.

 

Towards the end of his life in Tasmania, Glover returned to a mid-1790s sketch captioned Swilker Oak, Needwood Forest; it was a particular tree then celebrated as over 600 years old, and in 1840 he produced a large canvas. (The painting now hangs in Tasmania’s most beautiful historic house, Clarendon Homestead, close to Glover’s final home.) Google tells that “swilker” occurs only in the Black Country dialect of Staffordshire near Needwood Forest and Lichfield, where Glover first worked as an artist, and the word means to spill or splash. So the name emphasised the outgoing generosity and ease of oaks.

 

Glover found spiritual sustenance in his micro-regional memories, just as I remember reclining airborne on the low-slung arms of a great oak, which in 2018 still grows in the garden at North Down.