Launceston is potentially a pretty town, with the wide river moving sleepily to its serpentine estuary, kept snug by tight blue hills. The few thousand houses nestle in the river valley like sugar crystals in the cupped palm of a hand. Launceston is but a mill town after all, but a mill town tormented by the dreams of avarice. Boom threw up the huge churches and Romanesque emporiums, and built tall houses with intricate gables and barge boards, sweeping stairs and elaborate verandahs. Bust sold off the gardens of the big houses for sub-division. Launceston has neither the poetry of workmen’s houses marching in egalitarian rows up and down, nor the leafy elegance of a spa town, but an uncomfortable mixture of the two. Clots of suburbia have coagulated in the valley and grabbed the heights, with wasteland and pasture cropping out in between. Cheap brick veneer cuddles up to the great Victorian houses, compromising their dignity, revealing them as simply monstrous. Flowers splurt out of gardens too small to hold them, spilling on to streets absurdly wide, up which cars occasionally wander, adrift on a sea of tarmac.
Poor and draggle-tail though it is, Launceston has charm. When the town woke up the next morning I discovered that, though the telephone boxes might be vandalised, traders are happy to offer the use of the telephone. The optician could not sell me magnifying spectacles, but he lent me a pair of heavy hornrims without asking for a deposit. Nobody stared, nobody badgered, nobody bullied or hurried.
In the Local History Room at the Launceston Public Library a lady in rose consulted the biographical index and handed me a clipping. It was the death notice from the Launceston Examiner dated the 24th of August, 1908, of William Lyons Shaw Greer. (My father would have been nearly four years old.) It carried the imposing addendum ‘Interstate papers please copy’; among the personal notes on another page was a longer account of how William Lyons Shaw Greer had ‘died suddenly early on Saturday morning’ at his residence, ‘The Hollies’, in Youngtown. ‘The event cast a gloom over the district,’ wrote the anonymous correspondent. William Lyons Shaw, or W.L.S., as I quickly came to call him, was the youngest of the three brothers. He had been in Tasmania about twenty-five years, for most of them as resident Secretary of the Victorian Mutual Life Assurance Association. He had abandoned his Methodist religion and was lay-reader at St Leonard’s Church of England, superintendent of the Sunday School and church treasurer. He had eight children, who were listed as Arthur, Harold, Millie, Olive, Clara, Kathleen, Gertrude and William. No Reg. No Eric. No Eric Reginald.
The rose lady (whose name turned out to be Mrs Rosemann) did not doubt, and neither did I, that we had found my family. It was only a question of finding the missing link. My father could have been the child of Arthur or Harold or William. I didn’t take to the picture of the patriarch in the weekly pictorial. He seemed short and bumptious to me, with his round bald forehead surrounded by a black froth of beard and whisker and a smug little smile laying round his mouth. I liked him even less when I discovered that he had died intestate. Over the weeks that followed I got to know W.L.S. better and to dislike him more.
W.L.S. went originally to the Victorian goldfields at Maldon: there he married another member of the Methodist congregation, Christina Symons. She gave him four children, the Millie, Olive, Clara and Harold of the announcement, before she died in 1884. I gazed at the photograph of Harold William Greer for a long time. He was dressed in the uniform of a lance-corporal of the second contingent of Imperial Bushmen which had sailed for the Transvaal on the Chicago in 1901, when he was nineteen. It may have been simply his youth, but the face that gazed out of the photograph was artless, finer than his father’s smug and shining bonce, more like my Daddy I thought.
At the time of his father’s death, Harold William was a schoolteacher on King Island in Bass Strait. I could find no indication that he had ever been married, or fathered a child in South Africa. Upon hearing of his father’s death he resigned and left the windy isolation of King Island for Launceston, confident, I daresay, that he was his father’s heir and the years of drudgery in one-room schools were over.
Harold William was the first-born son, but he had two half-brothers and two half-sisters. W.L.S. re-married very soon after the death of his first wife, when Harold William was still a baby. The second wife, Annie Elizabeth Martin, came with him to Tasmania in November 1883 and bore her first child, Arthur Edmund Greer, in March 1884. Her second, Kate, was born a year later; her third, another boy, William Martin, was born four years after that, and her last, Gertrude, was born in June 1893, eighteen months before her mother’s death from ‘tuberculosis and convulsions’ at the age of forty-one.
After Annie Elizabeth’s death, W.L.S. had resigned from his position with the insurance company, although he was offered promotion to company secretary when it amalgamated with another society. He justified his early retirement for ‘family reasons’, but it seems likely that the hapless Annie Elizabeth had brought money with her and had left it behind. In 1888 he had acquired the finest house in Franklin Village, on the south side of Launceston. It had been built as a speculation in 1838 by a brewer, in the best, if already outmoded, Ulster Georgian style with Australian cedar panelling and marble fireplaces. W.L.S. called the house ‘The Hollies’ and planted a cherry orchard and brewed cherry wine. He and his wife were patrons of the little church of St James which stood like their own private chapel just across the road. He sent Annie’s boys to public school. In 1895 he acquired Clifton Park, 1,200 acres on the Supply River north of Launceston, with a further 262 acres adjoining. In 1899 he bought an allotment of three and a quarter acres at Wivenhoe as a speculation.
The day W.L.S. failed to wake up his empire fell apart. Harold William had to appoint the Permanent Trustees’ Association executors of his father’s estate, which was, unknown to the children, encumbered with a large mortgage. Nobody seemed to want to stay at ‘The Hollies’; Harold William took over immediately and charged the Trustees ten shillings a week for the eleven weeks that he stayed. Then a Miss Greer ‘minor’ took over and did the job for two and six a week until April 1909. ‘The Hollies’ was becoming dilapidated when in 1910 it was sold for £500 to a Mr Hughes to give to his daughter for a wedding present. The allotment at Wivenhoe went in 1913 for £200.
Harold William applied for another teaching job but was refused. All the children, except Clara, Mrs Bryan, who stayed in Bismarck, and Gertrude, who lived all her life in Tasmania, keeping herself by teaching school, and died unmarried in 1963, left for the mainland. I considered the possibility that my father might have been the illegitimate son of one of the Greer girls, two of whom went nursing after their father’s death, but no trace of an illegitimate birth could be found for any of them.
Clifton Park was no colonnaded mansion standing in rolling parkland with woolly sheep safely grazing. The only building on the land was a ‘paling house of four rooms with iron roof besides kitchen, pantry and storeroom’; the pasture, dry in summer, flooded and cold in winter, was considered ‘unsuitable for cattle or sheep’. It needed clearing, fencing, ditching and draining. In December 1908, the surveyor was already recommending a quick sale before the property could deteriorate further. Instead it was leased, but the lessee was unable to make his crops pay. In 1911 he had to sell his engine and his wagon to pay the rent. In 1917 the crops failed altogether and the tenant farmer defaulted on his rent. The property was split up and separately occupied by various farmers of the neighbouring district until in 1933 it was sold to pay costs. The children got nothing.
The first of the Shaw Greers to leave Tasmania seems to have been Arthur Edmund, whom I found after a long search, managing a station in western Queensland. Harold William also tried his luck in Queensland but after seventeen years he gave up and came south again. He stopped in Melbourne where he died, aged fifty, of a brain tumour and was buried in Burwood Cemetery, in June 1932. He had never married.
William’s name is entered on the honour roll in St James’s, Franklin Village, as having been wounded in the Great War. In 1933 W
illiam came to the Trustees’ office to collect the family bible, so it seems that not only his half-brother but his elder brother too was dead. He married and went to New Guinea, probably when cattle were introduced there. Eventually he retired to Launceston where he lived from 1943 until he shot himself in 1968. He like his brothers had no child.
The trail was cold. I hired a car and drove out to Winkleigh, to look at Clifton Park for myself. The road wound northwards along the western bank of the Tamar estuary, which lay shimmering and tranquil in the lee of the hills to the south. At first I drove among suburban gardens choked with rampant blossoming plants. Hot pink and iridescent orange pelargoniums tumbled down concrete escarpments and frothed on to the road. Alyssum crawled out from under fences and rooted in the tarmac.
Gradually the suburban phantasmagoria faded away and rolling green paddocks took over, horses, cows, a few sheep, hobby farming country. I turned west from the estuary in the direction of Beaconsfield, driving through dappled sunlight under tall stringybarks. Cattle dreamed in the shoulder-high grass of the Supply River flats. In rolling fields above them on the other side of the river tractors were mowing or turning the cut grass over in long satiny swathes, filling the air with the scent of new-made hay. A sign creaked on the breeze, suddenly grown gentle, ‘Clifton Park Hereford Stud’ it read. Someone had done the ditching and draining, and poisoned the bulrushes. Someone had built calving sheds and grain stores and hay-ricks. I passed several old weatherboard houses with tin roofs, but the long drive of Clifton Park led to a red brick something I felt too shy to look more closely at. I dreaded being hailed by one of the tractor drivers, so I quickly turned and drove away. I was glad poor Harold William had been spared the sight of what nearly was his.
The only other thing I wanted to see was W.L.S.’s grave in Franklin Village. At first I couldn’t find the village which seemed to have been shouldered aside by the main north-south motorway. I was driving back southwards along a road I had travelled on my way from the airport and several times since, when my eye fell on a green sandwich-board on the pavement. ‘The Hollies’ it read, diagonally. ‘Tea-room’. I pulled up with a bump and ducked into a gravelled parking space, which turned out to be the car park of Franklin House, the first property acquired and restored by the Tasmanian National Trust. I was hungry and thirsty so I made for the tea-room called ‘The Hollies’ and ordered a salad and a cuppa.
‘Is there a house called “The Hollies” hereabouts?’ I asked, with a face red as fire.
‘You’re in it,’ said the manageress. ‘Franklin House used to be called “The Hollies” so they used the name for the tea-room.’
I didn’t want to say that it was my forebear who had called the house by that name, or that it was simply someone with the same surname as mine. And I didn’t want to explain my absurd situation, prying as I was into matters that may have been none of my business. But, like most Launcestonians, the manageress was expressing a kindly interest, so I told her of my miserable state of not-knowing.
‘Take a look around.’ she said. ‘You never know. There might be a clue.’
I walked up the wide cedar staircase, and looked out over what used to be W.L.S.’s six-acre garden with its cherry orchard, and the gravelled sweep round to the stables and the carriage house. Except that all was just as I myself would like a house, there was nothing. None of the books or pictures in the house had been given by a Greer although there were pictures of the Hawkes family who had lived in the house before them, sent by their descendants from New Zealand. On the street side the house looked over a busy highroad; the once-salubrious residential area around it had been taken over by the noxious trades. Tanks of solvents and lakes of grease stood amongst chain-link fences, which crowded the island of sick yellow grass on which stood the tiny pink stone church of St James.
The manageress gave me the key to the little church, and I poked in the cupboards looking for the parish register, but it was not there, being in fact lost. The church is still used for baptisms, marriages and funerals of the descendants of the old parishioners, but none of the Greer children had chosen to be buried there, although W.L.S. lay alongside Annie Elizabeth under an imposing headstone. The old schoolfriend who collected William Martin’s ashes was buried there. The man whose family firm lent the money on W.L.S.’s mortgage was buried there. But the children of William Lyons Shaw had spurned the family plot. I eventually traced every one and replaced it in its order, with its affines and its progeny, but even as I worked I knew my father was not a Shaw Greer.
There was nothing for it but to go to the Registrar-General’s office in Hobart. I pointed my rented car towards the South Pole and set off under lowering skies.
In Hobart everything was different. A bitter wind knifed through the streets, forcing the citizens to scuttle from shop to shop. Everyone I spoke to seemed fractious and hurried, and I found myself becoming fulsomely apologetic. Thoroughly cowed, I crept into the Registrar-General’s department, expecting to see something like St Katherine’s House, where anyone may consult the index to the registers in privacy if not in peace and quiet. Instead I found a counter with booths, like a pawnbroker’s shop.
‘I should like to consult the index to the register,’ I said to a blue crimplene lady.
She gave me a look that asked plainly, ‘Who does she think she is?’ ‘Well, you can’t,’ was what she said.
‘Why not?’
The silly question got the usual answer, ‘It’s not allowed.’
In the interests of people with something to hide, the indexes to the registers are closed to the public, by law. What I could do was, I could pay the staff of the Registrar-General’s department ten dollars to search on my behalf. ‘Give us a name, and we’ll search for the entry for ten years for ten dollars.’ On a system like this I could have been haemorrhaging ten-dollar bills. I demanded to see Mr Christie, the Registrar.
‘That’s been the law since the thirties. We can’t make the records from 1900 onwards public, no, even though virtually all the people concerned are dead. That’s right. Yes, the law probably does need to be up-dated. Well, no, I’m not exactly sure it’s a law. What’s the point of marriage registration if it doesn’t make the marriage public? Yes, I see your point, but no, you can’t see the indexes, and yes, I know it’s a few minutes’ work to check a relatively uncommon name over a ten-year period but that’s what it costs.’
He withdrew behind his safety barrier. He had not said that his office would withhold the information I was seeking if they thought it bad for me, but if they didn’t demand the right of censorship it was hard to see what justification their interference could possibly have had. Unless of course it was merely a way to squeeze money out of the public that was already paying their salaries. The message was plain; I could only have verification of information if I already had the information. In half an hour I could have done the work they were offering to charge me a fortune for; now it would take months and probably hundreds of dollars just to verify the fact that no member of my father’s family was born, married or buried in Tasmania. And even then I couldn’t be sure that the search had been done properly, or that information had not been withheld. If every other keeper of public records in Australia was to play the same game, my search for my grandparents was going to cost thousands of dollars. And so in fact it proved.
The Archives Office of Tasmania is a small and uncomfortable place. Here there was no lady in rose to take an interest or make helpful suggestions; a series of irritable young women and one languid young man vied with each other to avoid dealing with enquiries from the counter. I was not surprised that the librarians were sick and tired of tourist family historians anxious to prove that their convict ancestors came out with the first fleet. Their evident desire to discourage the spread of the craze, which had led to a massive increase in their work-load and no improvement in pay or conditions, had all my sympathy, but their coldness, boredom and rudeness, on what must have been a fairly slack day, for
there were fewer readers than counter staff, diluted my sisterly feeling.
The system of delivery they had devised to protect the microfilm records from the far-fetched possibility of theft was cumbersome and difficult to understand, especially as they explained it so perfunctorily. Each of my mistakes produced noisy sighs and eye-rolling; every time I asked for a new microfilm, a wave of hostility surged over the counter at me. ‘Are you sure you know what you’re looking for?’ one of them asked with a sneer.
‘My grandparents,’ I answered with the usual surge of shame. I wanted to ask what bloody business it was of hers, but I needed the feeble remnant of whatever good nature she had been born with, so I struggled on, determined to leave no record unturned, for I hoped fervently never to have to go that way again.
By the time they threw me out that evening my borrowed hornrims had worn a bruise on my nose and my head ached roaringly from eye-strain, so the next day I gave up the search through the records and drove by a roundabout route back to Launceston. For much of the way I drove through high banks of Shasta Daisies naturalised from some settler’s long overgrown European garden. Their silvery-white stars and yellow buttons were pretty, but all wrong. Every now and then the tiny car was blasted off the road by the yodelling sirens of American-style timber lorries, carrying the forty-foot columnar trunks of Tasmanian hardwoods. I crept in among the daisies and watched sick at heart as the rigid load swung around the bends, carrying all that Tasmania has left that anybody wants.