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Bothwell Bunyip - Tasmanian Highlands Journalist
The Bothwell Bunyip – as it confided to CharlesG of Bothwell Tasmania Australia
Celebration of a sadness.
By Charles Gossage
Celebration of a sadness.
By Charles Gossage
A child. A simple Tasmanian child who could well be considered very ordinary, contented and pleasantly normal. A child who often roamed alone on the lumpy button-grass former glacial plains at the foot of the snow-capped Central Highlands’, Mount King William on the Plateau of 4,000 lakes and tarns. A simple child with a pleasant passive and passionate amused and bemused trusting for life.
Through many childhood days of roaming, he experienced all the extremes that the highland lakes area could produce. The King William Range defines the boundary of the mountainous country to the west, and of the lake region to the CENTRAL east. The drainage from this lofty watershed sends water either to the West Coast system or to the East via the Derwent System. An isolated pathless area that this child loved and felt loved where everything was in a state of resolved acceptance and balance.
Everywhere there were the smells of native eucalypts and alpine wildflowers. Ancient distinct odours, fragrances, aromas and scents that streamed infused in the still, gentle or ravishingly harsh breeze. It made this place his place and distinct from anywhere else in the world.
Various plants and tiny insects could be identified by tasting them. Tastes often served as natural warnings too.
All plants and animals could also be recognised by feeling them. Painful feelings were more often the organisms way of protecting itself in the way of a warning.
Any smells that the human body found offensive, were natural ways of protection against disease.
The oodles of ever-present trustworthy sounds served as communications of pleasure, function, warnings, protections and even instinctive predictions.
All the colours of the known spectrum or common rainbow, were splashed all over the landscape. In intricate delicate finesse or blatant combinations of emotional mood-creating visual arranged structures of tone and texture. Colours had variable roles of dominance during the daylight hours. A perceptive magical world of seeing pleasure. Of erratic un-predictability or moulding and melding, all combining to be something we call Beauty. And in particular, the beauty of the bush at Tasmania’s High West frontier.
The world of the night too was a whole new experience that could be shared or imagined with treasured speculation. The childhood experiences here and the night-time speculations, were to soon save that child from emotional disaster.
Life in the remote highland lakes, rainforest and mountainous area of Tasmania was good. Real good.
That child, who roamed alone upstream and further West from the Derwent the Guelph near Butlers Gorge construction village, was me.
I had what was called squint. One eye dominant to the other.
It was decided that my lazy eye, after six years of childhood, would only get worse and an operation was needed to straighten it and enable me to have a bi-optic three-dimensional sense of distance. An operation in Hobart was deemed necessary. For weeks after the operation at St Lukes Hospital by Dr Turnbull, to minimize any eye movement, both eyes were bandaged closed. For a child now seven years of age, to be suddenly forced into a world of blackness, was terrifying. Like most other dam-construction village workers, my parents and sister at distant Butlers Gorge did not have a motor car, so I was denied visitors. I yearned for my dog and the trust and fun he represented. I don’t remember, but I must have often cried as I experienced the pain of nothingness. I would have willingly died had it not been for my determination to mentally put a shape to every intricate sound that I strained to hear. The intensity of light-less loneliness was almost unbearable and made me more angry by not knowing when it would end.
Being a child who naturally trusted everything and everyone, to be plunged into a world of darkness and without any human comforting reassurance, was cruel torture. The ultimate sadness was not knowing what to fight against.
Eventually the bandages were removed. My good eye was considered satisfactory and my bad eye that had been straightened, still had only half vision. I could see only what people normally see around the edges of where they are looking. Dr Turnbull and his staff decided that the bad eye might come good if the other eye was covered for a year or two.
My mum had travelled down on the bus to tell me. She cried.
I was to be admitted to the Blind Deaf and dumb Institute in Argyle Street overlooking the North Hobart oval. Here I would have accommodation and where keeping my good eye covered could be supervized and policed. For a little kid from the bush, being confined to the Institution was a terrifying enough experience without having an enforced vision affliction. Having to share the extreme challenges and punishments with strange new children was an initial shock. Coping with life in the Institution with children all fighting for some form of survival seemed like being in a weird jail for the innocent. It was impossible to make friends as I had not yet learned how to communicate with them. Often the staff were extremely cruel and presumed we could only be taught by inflictions of pain. Being poked with pencils, getting skin screwed up and receiving the cuts with a cane, were common. I felt strongly for the totally blind and deaf and tried to warn them when they were about to receive punishment for things they had no idea that they had done. I learned many survival tricks that I would never had needed to experience in the bush. I learned a special type of compassion for children inconvenienced by inabilities. At night many of us boarders were locked in the upstairs dormitories. These became somewhat disaster areas. I learned to be sympathetic while trying to explain things with sound or sign words. Many of my easily accepted concepts were completely unknown by some of the other children. Simple concepts of sleep, fun, behaviour, rain, weather and more had to be learned. It was always an unpredictable worry as to what gave the staff cause to inflict punishment.
I learned to fight for their needs and began to have little time for self-pity.
I lived for two years in a semi-blind state coping in the bizarre and sometimes grotesque confines locked away in strange surroundings away from my family and much loved freedoms of the bush. It was not a childhood of choice, but one that I had to have.
Helen Keller came to visit. She was hidden in a huge fur coat. She felt the shape of my face with her hands. I’ll never know why. The only taste of pleasure I remember was playing cricket with the blind men from the broom factory next door. One of them, a man named Nat Sonners, was friendly and talked to me. A rare experience. My sister who was now at Hobart High boarding school, would sometimes come with a flavoured ice-block in a cone. Treasured moments.
Eventually everyone gave up on my sight recovery, and I was pleased.
I was able to finish my Primary schooling at Butlers Gorge before it was made a ghost town and then nothing. The Clark Dam was built and the plains that I loved to roam were all flooded by Lake King William.
I loved my times alone in the highlands and memories please me. I know that the Earth is all alive, everything is interconnected and I am part of it. I now look back and feel a celebration of a sadness.
[ Comment ]
The Code.
Weirdos wanted
Local Government Association of Tasmania conference in Launceston was told “We need more weirdos”.
But what are weirdos? Just ordinary people like you and me. They are often simple folk that have become so frustrated and befuddled by mediocrity, that they can contain themselves no longer.
I say the bubble has burst. The dormant spirit of the Highlands and the Up-Country character that has been developing since the pioneer colonial days and that has been subdued by traditions in time, is back. The free settlers founded their spirit on accepted British tradition. A stagnant colourless mediocrity. The true creators and developers of the Tasmanian Spirit of the High country along with the Code of the Mountain Bush, were the convicts and their descendants. They had no choice but to willingly grab the challenge of creating a new culture based on achievement from the demands of need. Any new change in our island State was based on their capable confronting and conquering of desired discoveries. Creative initiatives were tried and tested. Included if successful and discarded if not. Opportunities were everywhere to try new things. A new country with new people and new ideas. Only the wealthy worried. The majority might well have all been called weirdos. They dared to be different because there became no established procedures. Freedom was a pleasure to be gained and appreciated and shared. Colonial convicts and their familes established in the outer and upper country, away from the wealthy self-centred land-owners. A frontier for new ideas was created for free thinkers. An evolved frontier for practical solutions and objective un-biased musings.
This was and is the basis of the character of the Tasmanian High Country. As this freedom is the Code of the Up-Country bush and by infusion the rest of Tasmania, then flow on Future, we’re ready for you.
Clean Green Naturally {Click On}
“I’m just a bunyip but I’m happy.
I’ve seen it all. We had it made, and well made it was.
Natural progression was called progress. The trick was to hasten slowly. Let change happen as needs be. Any problems would sort themselves out. Change was always for the better because the better bits always overwhelmed the weaker less desirable. There was safety in numbers. Strength in success. Superiority in stability. Defence in denial. This was how it began and how it was. A sort of code of the bush.
Disasters and extreme happenings came and went. We were hampered for a while but we always recovered.
The nature of Nature was natural.
Everything had its place and every place had its things. Plant things and animal things. From the tip of that place now called Ossa to the bottom of the then nameless liquid covered depths.
Depending on what you were, you lived where you were best suited and had been able to establish. Salt “water” had its living things as did stagnant, slimy, smelly swamps. As some struggled against the tide, many struggled against the flow of water with mineral bits of rock on its way to becoming salted.
Land had its life – made by absorbing disintegrated rock to make distinct shapes only to eventually decay back to what they started as, to give another a go at making life. Life is only temporary but the act of living is a never-ending cycle.
I am only a bunyip but I’m happy. We had it all working perfectly. Things lived and died and lived again in a scheme called life. Ridiculous, I know, but reasonable when accepted.
Then came the gradual invasion. The interveners came to change that which had developed in the very best way possible.
They came with animals and plants and ideas that didn’t belong. These were not part of the natural development.
Suddenly the rule was that there were no rules. Change was to no longer be natural, but devised and or manufactured. Reactionary whims that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Males of their kind were preoccupied with superiority. Females were obsessed with dysfunctional floral variety.
Ignorantly imposed plants, sheep, cattle and foreign birds were introduced for food. This was not even enough for the unsettled settler. Food was not functional any more, but had to contend with a thing called being tasty. That which should have been practical to eat for sustenance, had to be tainted for variety. This they called taste. They acquired new tastes for no reasonable reason. They needed a bit of tang in their life because they didn’t know how to be complacent.
There had been natural laws of the bush that belonged to the future. We lived without important concerns. Bunyips are now born for extinction because we cared enough not to care. ”
Clean Green Naturally
Higgeldy Piggeldy Plot. by Charles Gossage
An early VDL Author was Charles Rowcroft. Well known for having lived in the Bothwell (Fat Doe) area and writing a fictional story - ‘Tales of the Colony’. 1843.He also wrote a lesser-known story, simply called ‘The Bushrangers of Van Diemen’s Land’. Nothing to do with bushrangers and a very simple story. More of a plit than a plot. If Rowcroft is accurate in his storytelling, then conversation was rather dreary and colourless. There are very few colloquial expressions which is a bit of a drag for someone like me that is always looking for something to shiver-me-timbers as the elusive Bothwell Bunyip.Things were simple then. People were not concerned with feasability studies and memorandums of understanding. So why do I find this tale so fascinatng – well delving below the drab, there emerges a long list of somewhat higgledy piggledy interesting facts of colonial life found in the mystery of history.Remember, the following are the author’s words. - And so, Rowcroft tells me: ‘Aborigines had a superstitious fear of the dark and were particularly afraid of horses. There was nothing like them in Nature and they were thought to kick and bite’.
[The early colonials could do things even the Boy Scouts have not yet thought of.] ‘They boiled water by putting it in their cap and adding a red-hot stone.’ The worst one character could say was - “The dirty, sneaking, cowardly, shore-going, long-tailed blackguard!” ‘As quick as a bandicoot and as cunning as a platypus’. ‘A woman cries out naturally when she is in fright, because that is all she can do’. ‘He girded up his loins’. ‘Neither was there any animal that could be domesticated’. ‘Cold is always greatest just before sunrise and there are always pre-dawn gusts of wind’.‘Almost all medicines are valuable and curative in the inverse ratio of the pleasingness of their gustation’. (Taste) Rum and salt water is grog. ‘Rescuers would rub drowned bodies with salt beef to revive’. ‘Bayonet wounds were, of all others, the most dangerous and the most difficult to heal, from the triangular form of the weapon which prevented the orifices from closing and healing, as the surgeons term it, “with the first intention”.’ Blue jackets were sailor officers. Red jacket army. UK to VDL was fifteen thousand miles. Emu – meat something like beef. Emu feathers worth a lot in England. ‘Emu is the shyest bird in Nature’.Natives had no fences and indeed relied on the game animals to be free to browse. Settlers were in seach of cleared land for grass and to put fences on. [Early shepherds acted as fences] ‘Natives generally go about in mobs of thirty or fourty’. ‘Spears [tea-tree]) points are fire-charred on the end and about ten feet long’. Tend towards quantity. Not many kills but lots of cripples. “Most fearful of all weapons – a woman’s tongue”. Mentioned everywhere is the Mimosa tree [Wattle].“It was all very well for the long-tails,” such was the observation of theworthy sailor, “to dig up the land; but his profession was to plough up the sea; and he never should be able to bring himself to bear such a sawneying life,” he said, “as to stand with his hands in his pockets looking at sheeps' tails growing behind them.”[Animals] - numerous black and diamond spotted snakes. Native magpies and white cockatoos. Bandicoot, pelican, black swan, black cockatoo, rosina parrots (made excellent pies) pair eagles circled nest, little bird colonists called ‘laughing jackass’. ‘there existed a sort of native dog on the island, of a species between that of a hyena and a jackal’. ‘swans are all black on this side of the Earth’. ‘tempted to eat some of the large caterpillars or grubs which are abundant on the red gum-tree’. Rowcroft muses –‘ that powerful principle of our nature which prompts a woman's heart - in its absorbing love for that one being whom it has selected from all other men in whom to confide her virgin trust — to consider him as all in all to her — and of all things on earth the most precious and the dearest![Venison – word described all game food – particularly cooked roo]‘Kidneys, flesh and fat which he had cut, after the manner of more ancient heroes — taking a layer of flesh and a layer of fat alternately.Then driving in his short stakes, one on each side of the live coals, with their forked ends uppermost, he laid his ramrod, which performed the part of a spit, on the upright supports, the two ends resting on the two forks, with the fire inthe middle. delicious prog, the hind quarter of the game, one of the legs, which he arranged to cook gradually near the fire on three small stones, which he set under the meat.’ Natives ‘made fire by “drill” method taking it in turns. Picaninny gathered small pieces of possum, sticking the whole of her fragments together as she proceeded, so as to make a round mass as big as a cricket-ball which she placed in a little net about as large as a small landing-net, made from the flexible fibres of the stringy-bark tree, and which she carried suspended round her neck. Shebrought together the parts of a singed opossum and a small ball of hot gum’.[Natives loved sugar when proffered also indulged in the fermented sap from the native Cider Gum]We are told ‘ boats could not anchor securely in the Derwent because the bottom was all rounded pebbles. Sailors in small boats detected wind changes by watching the tails of horses on shore. [The natives gathered for an annual games carnival near Lake Fergus just North of Skullbones Plains and Murderers Hill.]And so, as the winds continue to blow over the land of the Convicts in Paradise, Mr Rowcroft – thank you for the snippets.
Free Book downloads – Google: SETIS. Sydney University collection of literary and historical texts from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
David Wylie Coach Bothwell at Crown Hotel
Bothwell Post Office does the block.
By CharlesG(The Bothwell Bunyip)
The Post Office has moved. In typical Bothwell rural rustic rate of change of progress, it has gone backwards in time. Back into the delightful two-storey hand-hewn local sandstone former general store. Back to be almost next door to the original first Bothwell Post Office.Standing on the steps, is a place to muse on the mystic mists of the memories that remain in upright structures and the unfinished influence of past and present residents that lingers on. I would love to be able to paint it with words.You can look down towards the river and the only bend in Bothwell. There, is the site of the former Blake’s - Bothwell Brewery, by the River Clyde. It had to be there because that’s where the water was – believe it or not, beer is mostly water. Opposite is the original Coach house next to the cutest cottage and the Fat Doe Bakery which was formerly a Bus and Truck Depot. Next up is the small Bookmakers Hall and Meeting Place which was also used for reading and smoking rooms and for playing cards, draughts, bobs and bagatelle. Then the Castle Hotel (what would a Bothwell be without a Castle), the Garage also a former Drapery and Millinery, Haberdashery Store, and across the Hollow Tree road to the Supa-store built on the site of Mr White and Mr Hart’s White Hart Inn.
Sign in Castle Hotel:
Compostologist
Cart Horse Poo 2/- a bag.
Racehorse Manure 5/- a bag.
Delivery by preferred Date.
Beside the “new” Post Office was a Gunsmith in his gunshop selling ammo, shot and powder. Bullets and rifles were a later invention. Remember cowboys and Indians, winchesters and richochets.Further up was the original Post Office. On the corner of Queen street was the Ironmongery, Hardware, Bakery and General Store that sold everything. From wiggleing whatsits, to gyrating gismos, from eatable edibles to clinging clobber. From thingos to thingamijigs. Bread for my Grandma and boiled gumballs for me.The store had compressed air money tubes that whizzed along wires to an overhead cash desk. The change would be loaded into the pneumatic tube and shot down a wire to stop with a clunk at the counter in front of you.Where the Post Office is now located, was the centre of comings and goings. The first mails were delivered from Green Ponds by convicts with horses and donkeys. In fact in 1837, 80% of Postal Employees were convicts. Many were illiterate which probably caused an ill-letter-rate. These convicts were dressed in blue trousers, blue waistcoats and blue jackets with the letter ‘M’ in white on the collar. They were also issued with shoes, shirts, one blue forage cap and one black silk handkerchief.In many ways nothing much has changed. Prim and propper ladies paraded in a dawdled dalliance while shepherds, hawkers, hunters and herdsmen ambled the streets. All sorts and sizes. Some with the strength of draught horses, some with the speed of race horses and some with the brains of rocking horses. People still treat the town with a feeling of ownership. Traditional erratic wrangle-parking and the Bush Telegraph is as important as the must have Mail. People still amble, stroll, wander and indeed take a contemplative saunter.The delusion of delight is occasionally shattered by log-trucks in a hurry to take trees to slaughter.With disregard for the pains of progress, the Bothwell Bunyip and I can still enjoy the profound, prolific presentation of the bigger picture.
An Up-Country Shindig Click on. Dance night in the Hall.
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Bothwell Bunyip 
