KYLIE TENNANT, THE BATTLERS
'Yes!' said Mr Peggotty, with a hopeful smile. 'No one can't reproach my darling in Australia. We will begin a new life over theer!'
Why Mr Peggotty should have supposed in 1850 that Australia was a paradise of fallen women where he should take not only Little Emily but Martha Endell as well is a mystery. The respectable people who paid their own passages to the other side of the world were as anxious to demonstrate their superiority to the criminal classes as ever respectable people were. If Charles Dickens had travelled to Australia he would have found a more bigoted middle class than he left behind. He might have been shocked to find Mr Peggotty struggling to survive as a labourer, having been too poor to acquire land of his own, and the two women married to violent men who drank their wages and cared not at all that their children had no shoes. Mr Peggotty, prevented by his poverty from acquiring the wherewithal to live, might have succumbed to gold fever and tried vainly to live cleanly in the frenetic battlefields where most succeeded in finding only a show and those who found more were penniless again within months. Or they may all have gone into service in the houses of the great, an outcome which no one associates with Australia, in which case the women would have been more at risk than ever.
On 30 December, 1856, a few years after Mr Peggotty set out with Martha and Little Emily, David King, aged twenty-eight, a farmer from Lincolnshire, and his wife Elizabeth, aged twenty-five, arrived in Tasmania aboard the Alice Walton. They brought with them their four small children, John, seven, Mary Ann, five, David, three, and the baby, Elizabeth. Perhaps they expected to take up a sizeable land grant in Tasmania, in which case they were disappointed. Rather than moving out into the new districts that were being opened up, David King found work as a tenant farmer on a 150-acre subdivision of a large estate at Dairy Plains, near Deloraine.
Dairy Plains might have reminded them of Lincolnshire, for the alluvial soil is deep for Australia, and comparatively rich. Like Lincolnshire, Dairy Plains is drained by man-made canals, emptying into Leith's Brook; even in the drought of 1988, the grass on the flats was still green, or rather not quite ash-blond. On every side stand blue hills, and to the west the land is protected by the massive bulwark of the Western Tiers. King was farming at Kingsdon, one of two large estates that made up Dairy Plains. Kingsdon was subdivided into nine farms, and three smaller allotments were set aside for labourers' cottages and kitchen gardens. The owner of the whole 1,762-acre spread did not himself live in the big house, but in the pleasant township of Deloraine, enjoying the fruits of his farsighted investment in the development of the soggy plain so that it was suitable for intensive dairying. Both landlords tolerated their tenants for long periods, so that the tenancies passed from father to son, but there was never any chance of the farmers' acquiring land of their own in the district, unless they went out to the margins where the land rose steeply to the hills. The old class structure was well in place at Dairy Plains, and none of the farmers ever succeeded in bucking it. After nineteen years, although the landlord was dead and the property being managed by the public trustees, David King was still a tenant farmer on 150 acres at Kingsdon. His grown sons were existing as labourers; John had the right to farm a mere twenty acres on the edge of Dairy Plains, opposite the handsome house of Kingsdon, with its steep gables and pierced bargeboards, where his father lived. There he raised a few bushels of wheat or oats, and a few tons of potatoes, kept a couple of horses, three cows and a pig.
This is the reality behind the rather imposing statement on the wedding certificate of John King, my great-grandfather, who was married in 1873, 'in the house of Mr David King at Kingsdon'. The bride was Harriett Smith, daughter of William Smith and Ellen Donovan. Her parents were both convicts, who had been married, with special government permission because they were still serving their sentences, in Christchurch, Longford, in 1838. Thus in one generation the distinction between bond and free was wiped out: King and Smith were joined in the great fellowship of the poor, where the distinction between deserving and non-deserving has never been clear.
The two-roomed weatherboard cottage where my grandmother was born still stands, and its tin roof still keeps out water well enough for it to be used for the occasional lambing. Against the sprung planking of the walls, sacking has been stretched. In the old days, the walls would have been papered with layer upon layer of newspaper, but even so they would have kept out precious little of the cold. In their two rooms, one for cooking and one for sleeping, the Kings would have been so huddled together that cold was probably the least of their problems.
When I visited the house the poppy seed in the long field behind it was ready for threshing. On such narrow fields as these the only sensible cultivation is a high yield crop. Tasmanians told me that the poppyseed is grown for the hot bread shops of the Australian capitals; in fact the crop is none other than Papaver somniferum. Tasmania is the world's third largest producer of alkaloids for the pharmaceutical industry, after India and Turkey, despite the pleas of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs to reduce the world stockpile of opium and the seriousness of Australia's heroin problem.
The dry seed capsules of the poppies shone pink-silver in the afternoon sun as I climbed over the rotten gate and walked through the sheep shit to the door of the tiny house, where first Selina was born, in 1874, and then Ada, in 1877, and then Albert John, in 1880. In 1880, Selina died, probably of typhus.
John's family seems to have been growing more slowly than is usual for an Australian farm labourer in the 1880s, but not all the children's births were registered. Given the extreme hardships they endured the parents may have felt that there was little point in travelling to Deloraine to register children so likely to die. Though Dairy Plains is beautiful, its beauty must have become sinister for the Kings as they realised that they would never succeed to one of the bigger tenancies. They were ignorant, poor, virtual serfs on the estate. There was no chance of rising in the world unless they left the district, but without capital they had no hope of acquiring an appreciable amount of land anywhere. The bitterest irony is that they had less chance of acquiring land than the early convicts who were given a hundred acres or so upon their release.
The Kings were farm labourers who had come to the other side of the world only to continue being farm labourers. When David King arrived in Tasmania he could read and write; when his son married the daughter of convicts, neither of them, nor their witness, could sign the register. This was the reality behind the myth of the new world. The Kings joined the vast majority of Australians who called themselves 'battlers'. For some reason, David King relinquished his tenancy at Kingsdon and moved to another on the neighbouring estate of Keanefield; within ten years he had lost that too.
Although Harriett was a member of the Church of England, she was married using the forms of the Methodist Church. The ceremony was performed by John Shaw Greer and this is as near as my father ever got to being a genuine Greer. Harriett's religion soon became dominant, however, and most of her children were christened and married in the Church of England. The King family made several attempts to find a more adequate provision for its growing numbers; the Davids senior and junior took up tenancies in more than one of the new areas being opened up in the eighties, but they also clung to the twenty acres in Dairy Plains, living in the tiny cottage by turns, which was as well, because none of their new tenancies lasted.
My grandmother, Rhoda Elizabeth King, was born in the Dairy Plains cottage on 28 January, 1885.
To the north-west, the hills behind Forth were being opened up, and land was being sold for clearing and intensive planting of vegetable crops. John's brother David had tried his hand at tenant farming in near-by Sassafras and New Ground for speculative landlords without conspicuous success, for as soon as the land was cleared it was, predictably, sold out from under him at a profit. The family pooled its meagre resources and acquired ten acres at a place called Sprent. In 1895 they left old David King in the cottage at Dairy Plains and took the children with them to Sprent.
This was very different country from the idyllic river meadows of Dairy Plains. The thickly wooded hills though not high were spectacularly steep, crushed one upon another in a succession of crazy folds; in the deep gullies tree ferns showed the soil to be rich and sweet, but the clearing of the stands of eucalypts from the slopes was back-breaking work. Once the native hardwoods had been ringbarked and left to fall in their own time, for there was little point in blunting good axeheads on them, the farmers planted potatoes and kept pigs, much as they had in the old country, and for much the same return.
The Kings would have knocked up some kind of dwelling on whatever level land they could find; it was probably much like other selectors' houses: 'with four slab-sides and a top, a place to get in at and two small, square holes, one on each side of the door, to look out through. The whole was guarded by a dandy-looking dog-leg fence, that kept everything off except cattle, goannas, kangaroo-rats, snakes and death adders. Inside, tidy and natty. Curtains on the bed, a cloth on the table, the legs of which were screwed into the earth; two gin-cases that served as chairs wore crochet coverings, while the holes in the floor, in and out of which snakes used to chase mice, were covered with bags and a heavy round block was placed on them for additional safety.'
Steele Rudd's selection was a corner of a degraded cattle run in Queensland, but the newly cleared land in Sprent must have been similarly infested with nocturnal wild life. Potatoes are unlikely to be eaten by cockatoos, but wombats and bandicoots would enjoy rootling in them, and kangaroos and wallabies would have grazed them down to the soil, whether the Kings fenced their ten acres or no. There was no way the grown children could be supported on the yield of ten acres, supposing the caterpillars and borers held off and there was a yield. The Kings however had more serious problems than flood, drought or infestation by plant pests. John William, Rhoda's father, was losing or had lost his mind.
William Henry King told the justices at his father's committal that his father had threatened his life and that of his mother, and had offered to cut his son-in-law's 'inside out' because he had stolen a horse from him, which he had not. John William was also claiming falsely that a Mr Louth of Ulverstone had stolen a horse from him. He believed that he was a great horse doctor and told Dr Stuart of Ulverstone that his horse had worms, which he diagnosed by putting his ear to the horse's hoof and listening for them. The justices believed that he might prove dangerous but in the five months that he remained in the New Norfolk asylum he gave no trouble. He employed himself usefully, although he was piteously confused most of the time and imagined that the other patients were people he had worked for outside the hospital.
By this time my grandmother would have been working as a domestic in Ulverstone. In September 1902 her father was in trouble again. Mr Bishop of Sprent found him in a highly excited state intent on setting fire to his barn, saying that it was infested with anthrax, and, as Bishop would not burn it himself, he would have to do it for him. When they were bringing him to Ulverstone he insisted that the willow trees, the cattle, sheep and horses that they passed all had the disease. He gave tobacco to a police constable, advising him to smoke it to fumigate the diseased vegetation around him. 'He knelt before a notice paper printed in Hindustanee and sang aloud, the words being those of the National Anthem, saying he was singing the words.' This time the justices opined not only that he was likely to become dangerous, but that the cause of his distress was 'hereditary tendency'. He was more difficult to control, constantly quarrelling and fighting with his fellows. He was allowed to go home at the end of June 1903. For four and a half years he kept his wits, but by April 1908 he was singing and dancing in the street, declaring that he had anthrax and bot-flies were coming out of his mouth. Six months later he was discharged and remained calm again until 1915 when he started threatening Harriett with an axe, and running about the streets on hands and knees like a dog; again he was discharged after six months. The diagnosis of hereditary disorder was never repeated.
John William was in the asylum on 10 June, 1903, when William Henry got married at Holy Trinity Church in Ulverstone, to Jane Agnes Rodman, sister of the man his sister Ada King married in 1896. Rhoda witnessed the marriage, signing her name in a wobbly fashion which missed out half of one letter altogether. At Christmastime, the same year, she conceived a child. She was not yet twenty.
De occultis non scrutantur. Let us assume merely that what happened so often to poor girls happened to my grandmother. Far from home, struggling to learn how to adopt the manners pleasing to the Australian gentry, to keep herself clean and tidy, low-voiced and inconspicuous, my grandmother probably had also to repel the advances of one of the men of the household. To make a fuss about this harassment would have been to lose her place. She was lonely and defenceless. The gentleman's casual caresses were probably the only human warmth she felt from one month's end to the next. Perhaps she even deluded herself that he loved her.
She can hardly have foreseen the appalling consequences of her lapse. The man's affection, such as it was, would have vanished as soon as her trouble became apparent. The lady of the house would have blamed only her servant, for men will be men. She would have directed the seducer to give the girl money to pay for her lying-in and get rid of her. And so my grandmother, in dread and misery, made her way to the big city, to Launceston.
On 1 September, 1904, in a mean house in Middle Street, Launceston, my grandmother gave birth to a boy. She gave him the name Robert Hamilton, and because she was unmarried he bore her own surname, King. The name Robert Hamilton was probably the name of the child's father, for neither name ran in her own family. Mrs Helena Beston, usually called Lena, the tenant of the house, registered the child for her. Robert Hamilton King was my father.
In saying so, I say more than my poor father knew. He was never a ward of the state and his name did not show in the register of her charges that Emma kept on top of her wardrobe. There was no government department keeping a file on him in his own name. After Mrs Beston had the baby entered as Robert Hamilton King in the register, the name was never heard by mortal ear until the Registrar read it out to me in Hobart. It is entirely owing to his kindness that I have any name for my father at all; he agreed to read the register for me, looking for any male child born in Tasmania on my father's birthday. He had other names in other places, but I did not even ask what they were.
'Do you think that's the one?' he asked, not convinced.
'It has to be,' I answered. 'How many illegitimate boys were born on the first of September in Launceston that year? How many illegitimate boys were born in Launceston that year? There were only 23,000 people in Launceston, for heaven's sake! It could be a coincidence, but I don't think so.'
Some days later Mary Nicholls found the christening entry in the register of St John's, Launceston, Emma's parish church. On 9 November the tiny boy was given the names Robert Henry Eric Ernest. The curate had some difficulty reading what was painfully written on the piece of paper Emma Greeney brought. He entered the child's father's name as 'Robert Hambett', or something like it, when it was in fact Robert Hamilton, and the column where his occupation should have been entered remained vacant. Perhaps the curate actually meant to shield a good middle-class family from a servant-girl's accusations and simply refused to believe what was written.
For there was a Robert, or rather a Richard Robert Ernest Hamilton, who would have been known to the vicar at St John's Church, if not to his curate, for he had been a member of the Rev. Beresford's congregation when he was Vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Ulverstone. The Rev. Beresford had married him, come to that. Robert Hamilton was born at Colenso, near Ladysmith, north-west of Durban in 1865, and educated in England. He emigrated to Tasmania in 1887 and set up as a house, estate and general commission agent in 1888; he married a Tasmanian girl in 1895. A daughter was born in 1897, another in 1902, and another in 1908. In 1905 he extended his operations to include customs, shipping and forwarding, representing Holyman's White Star line of steamers, and Commercial Union Assurance. He was also a district valuer. When Robert Hamilton King was born, R.R.E. was secretary to the Leven Road Trust which eventually became the Ulverstone Council, with R.R.E. still lending his services as secretary until a town clerk could be appointed. He was also secretary of the Leven Harbour Trust.
But R.R.E. was not the kind of man to get a servant girl pregnant and turn her out. For one thing he was married and his wife had had a baby the year before Rhoda became pregnant. Respectable middle-class men do not seduce the help when their wives are pregnant or pre-occupied with new babies. There was no way a bad ignorant girl like Rhoda King was going to compromise Mr Hamilton's reputation by putting his name in the St John's Church register as father of her child for all the world to see. Everything I have told you about the man is irrelevant; it is also irrelevant that he was tall, narrow-chested, had a moustache, a long face, a narrow nose, deep-set eyes, very fair skin and rode a bicycle around Ulverstone. He lived to the great age of ninety-one and died of athero-sclerosis of the brain. All utterly irrelevant.
Rhoda was not there when her five-week-old son was christened; she had already given him up and gone her way sorrowing. None of the people standing round the font knew what to answer when the curate asked what the child's father's occupation was. The curate opted for discretion. If Robert did eventually become a charge upon the state legal proceedings to secure a contribution from the father for the child's support had to be instituted, and the curate was not prepared to furnish material for a scandal.
If my grandmother dreamed of her baby each night, and woke calling his name, she did no more than relinquishing mothers usually do. If when she went to Launceston she stared at little boys his age, looking for her own features, she did no more than relinquishing mothers usually do. A year after her ordeal she married. She had found another position, as a domestic servant in Sassafras, and there she found a husband, the son of a fell-monger from Perth, thirty-two years old, a labourer. They went to live at Deddington, a tiny place on the upper waters of the Nile River, between Gelignite Hill and Lowes Mount. They had ten children, seven girls and three boys, which is why I shall not tell you her married name, for I have not been able to tell all of them or my eighteen half-cousins, about their half-brother. Rhoda died in 1968, fifteen years after her husband.
My father's names, 'Robert Henry Eric Ernest', were probably chosen partly by his mother and partly by Emma. Perhaps Emma was preparing her new little boy as a replacement for Henry Ernest, whom she still seemed likely to lose. So Robert Hamilton King became Eric Greeney, and later, Eric R. Greeney, as the name appears in the register of results from Wellington Square school. From the beginning my father hardly had a name to call his own.
His mother was the first of several women left to grieve for my father and helplessly wonder what had become of him. For his part, he never knew her name. It seems unlikely that he would not have known of the existence of Emma Greeney's register and its place on the top of the wardrobe. He probably knew that his name was not to be found in it. He was too smart not to realise that he did not have the same encounters with officialdom that so harassed his foster-brothers and -sisters. Yet Emma never concealed from him or from any of her children that they were adopted. The state wards all knew what their entitlements were, although they often misunderstood the nature of their trust funds and the limitations on their access to them. Until Emma Greeney legally adopted them the state wards were entitled to their own names if they wished to assume them, and their files were kept in their own names. No legal form of adoption existed when Emma took Robert/Eric away from Middle Street, but this was one child that Emma had to call her own, after the uncertainty and anguish of expecting month by month that Ernie would be returned to his mother. Robert and Emma's only hope of keeping Eric was to hide him from his mother, for they had no legal claim to him. For several years after they got Eric, Robert Greeney's name did not appear in the post office directory.
If Rhoda wandered the streets of Launceston, looking for her little boy, she never found him. He may have thought that he had been abandoned and forgotten but he was almost certainly wrong. Middle-class women might try to pretend that the birth had never happened, but working-class women usually confessed their lapse to their husbands and took their children back from the state when they married. The mothers of state wards wrote letters to the Neglected Children's Department, many years after their children had been given up, mostly without success. Robert Hamilton King's mother, persuaded or duped into countenancing private adoption, had no way of knowing if her son was alive or dead, well or ill, happy or unhappy.
Actually he was happy, although he may not have realised the fact.
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