Trove - by Jeanette M Thompson
ISLAND | ISSUE 161In a collaboration between Island and the ‘Ten Days on the Island’ festival called ‘If These Halls Could Talk’, ten selected Tasmanian writers were paired with ten halls or notable buildings around the state, responding to place through creative literary works. This piece is one of the ten, which are all published in full on this site.
The villages of the West Tamar municipality dot the shore, like a string of pearls, from Launceston to the sea. We thought this valley was Australia’s best-kept secret when we discovered it. My husband, Tony, found a unique house for sale on the internet. Como, the former summer residence of newspaper proprietor Sir Gordon Rolph, stood alone on the point of a peninsula. There was a salmon hole to one side and a safe cove the other. The Federation house was originally a fishing cabin. Rumour was that Vladimir Petrov had been secreted there in an operation codenamed Cabin 12. I checked the most reliable source of surveillance – the social pages of the Launceston Examiner:
March 17th 1954 – The Prime Minister (Mr. Menzies) yesterday arrived in Launceston for a short holiday visit. He is staying with Sir Gordon and Lady Rolph at Como ... where he will be joined by Dame Pattie Menzies at the weekend.
Two weeks later, Vladimir Petrov defected and went into hiding for ten days. Menzies announced the defection on 13 April 1954. Had Petrov spent ten days on the island?
We flew to Tasmania, inspected the mysterious, windswept ‘Como’, and bought a house further up the hill. When I heard the drone of the mail plane overhead at five in the morning, I would say to Tony, ‘Here come the Petrovs’.
*
For the first two years, we kept to ourselves. Tony tamed the garden, put in a vineyard, took a wine course. I researched the history of the area and began to dream of putting on a play. I sat up in bed one morning with my bedspread covered in maps and log books. I imagined the local hall filled with the chatter of neighbours, the stage bedecked in flowers, the claret velvet curtains drawn open to reveal – Governor Lachlan Macquarie sitting at an enormous dining table laden with oysters, roasted swan and red snapper. At his feet, a thin line of mud designates the shoreline of the Devil’s Elbow. Macquarie reads from his diary:
December 17th 1811: Here we arrived at half past 2 pm and joined the Port Dalrymple Party, who accompanied us two miles further down the River to a little Cove on the opposite, or Left Bank, of it, where we all landed and dined together.
Bass and Flinders had been the first to chart this neighbourhood in 1798. The two boys from Lincolnshire sailed the Norfolk around the square head of land now known as Rowella, West Bay, Camms Road and Kayena. On 12 November they went as far south as Freshwater Point, then ‘... returned down river to a narrow whirlpool reach ... searching the cove opposite to this reach where the sloop had then come to anchor in the afternoon, continued to search for water along the west shore down to Point Rapid.’ Or ‘Point Rapide’ as Louis Freycinet would rename it in 1802. Naming was tantamount to claiming. The French published their map of ‘Terre Napoleon’ while Flinders languished as a prisoner of war in Mauritius.
At that time Kayena was an unnamed epiglottis of land dangling into the kanamaluka river between two coves. It was named in 1968, using a word for ‘tongue’ that Joseph Milligan had taken from the displaced peoples of Oyster Bay and Pittwater. A word, if spoken aloud in the time of Macquarie, would have been as unintelligible to the Governor as to the Panninher people making their annual migration to the sea. The maps we treat as gospel are merely a bizarre patchwork of honouring, erasing and appropriating. They rested like a quilt over the country where my husband and I had settled.
*
Had I been out of bed early that morning, I would have seen a removalist truck that swept around the bend, crawled uphill past the clatter of wooden outbuildings, scattered the roosters into the ditch by Revill’s Corner, and beetled up the vine-clustered hill toward the Rowella Community Hall.
Before their ascent, the removalists had stopped at the Sidmouth jetty to ask two locals for directions to the hall. Like Neighbourhood Watch, the locals rang Bev Bantick, who had lived on that triangle of land at Kayena for almost 90 years. Bev rang Charmaine Campbell, Secretary of the Hall Committee, who went straight there. Council had sent a removalist truck to strip the history from its walls. That is what it felt like, a ransacking.
“Council had sent a removalist truck to strip the history from its walls. That is what it felt like, a ransacking.”
A letter in the Launceston Examiner alerted me to the sale of the hall. Stephanie Taylor, the Rowella Hall bookings manager, claimed there had been no public consultation. After breakfast, I drove along the avenue of macrocarpas that is Kayena Road, around the corner and up to the white-boarded hall. Tony and I had been there once for a play, but no one had spoken to us in the supper room. We just ate our sandwiches and talked to each other. I intended to join the drama club after Tony had recovered from a recent surgery.
I found the hall open but empty. Council had removed all the historical artefacts and posted a notice of sale on the door. I stood in the middle of the bare wooden hall, a towering upside-down hull of a building. Whispers of hymns and theatrical voices still wafted about the rafters. The piano had gouged the floorboards as it was unwillingly dragged from the foot of the stage. In this modest hall, the treasure lay in the names on the war honour boards, the faces on the cricket photographs, the etchings on the drama club cup. These things were missing.
The life members of the Rowella Drama Club had regretfully closed the curtains on 43 years of live performances. Boxes of faded programs and unspoken scripts curled in the green room. A wooden door frame stood agape in the middle of a blank stage. The club had gifted their equipment and lights to a far-off theatre, as they were entitled to do by the letter of their constitution. I found Charmaine secreting the foundation plaque in the boot of her car.
‘I wanted to put on a play,’ I said.
‘Too late,’ said Charmaine.
*
The councillors, some of whom had been members of the club, could see no future in it. On the other hand, there had been a 23 per cent increase in real estate sales in Rowella that year and 200 more views per property than the state average. They voted unanimously to sell the hall. I could not put on a play unless the hall was, by some miracle, saved from the sale.
Thirty-five miracles walked into the Rowella Hall the following week. Stephanie had set up a Rowella Community Hall Facebook page. This drew together a truly diverse collection of people of all ages, professions, creative talents and life experiences. One-third of them had arrived within the past four years and had never attended a hall event. Most, like Tony and myself, were in the over-55 age bracket. They had money and time on their hands but nowhere to go. What seemed idyllic isolation also meant they had no work, family or school connections, no social support in time of crisis. If there was a bushfire we would not know the neighbours’ phone numbers or where to go for help. If there was something to celebrate, we had no one to share the good news with.
The older residents talked of their memories of the hall and the role it had played in their lives. In 1926, the Richmond Hill School parents group, bulging out of the little schoolhouse on Rowella Road, decided to raise funds for a community hall. Generous donations of land allowed them to buy a disused Presbyterian church from the abandoned goldfield of Beaconsfield. It was disassembled into three pieces, borne by wagon across farmland and forest and re-erected on the border of Rowella and Kayena.
For 90 years, the Rowella Community Hall held families together in their dance with the land. The speculative apple and pear orchards that flourished in the ’20s suffered the Great Tree Pull of the ’60s when Britain entered the European Common Market. The fruit trees gave way to vineyards. Narrow roads yielded to the passage of salmon farming tankers, tourist buses and trucks laden with plantation trees for the chipping mill. Gunns’ vineyard, once the host of ‘Run the Ridge’, lost face during the pulp mill fiasco. The vineyard was bought by a mainland wine company avoiding the searing temperatures of Victoria. The cellar door closed and the community roots withered. The men and women went to work; the farms became chores for busy commuter families. The sound of children’s voices from the schoolyard opposite the hall drifted onto buses that whisked them away to distant primary and secondary schools, colleges and university.
When the Rowella Community Hall was put up for sale, everyone was at work, or somewhere else. The entire hall committee had dwindled to three. There seemed to be no one left in the community to do the work of a community hall. The longstanding residents had to reach out to the newcomers. The first task agreed upon was to retrieve the historical memorabilia from council for a ‘Back to Rowella’ celebration.
*
The Beaconsfield Mining and Heritage Museum is only 8 km from Rowella. Council wanted to protect the hall artefacts from falling through the fingers of private investors. The curator, Julieanne Richards, showed me the new Rowella Drama Club display. The precious ephemera was being celebrated with a much wider audience. The museum manager released the Rowella Hall honour boards and memorabilia to the Hall Committee for our history night.
The ‘Back to Rowella’ evening drew a big crowd. Mr John Dent OAM, President of the West Tamar Historical Society, spoke on the origin of the settlement. He brought with him Mrs Alma McKay whose grandparents, Mr and Mrs White of White Hills, had been christened in the hall. The Kelb, Bender and Bantick families found their relatives in the photographs that had been restored to the walls. The late Mr John Clark, former council representative on the progress association, sent his written recollections of brouhahas, bushwalks and bonfires.
There was so much publicity and chatter on social media that the Annual General Meeting brought in a bumper crop. The mayor and councillors attended. A new committee was formed. We successfully applied to council to host the ‘Festival of Small Halls’, a touring concert organised by Woodfordia in Queensland. They provided the musicians and equipment; we managed the event.
The night before the performance, I was still painting banners, sending emails, printing programs, double checking the local performers.
‘Why do you have to do all of this?’ said Tony, waiting to go to bed.
‘If I put my name to it, I have to make it succeed.’
‘Wrong,’ said Tony. ‘It is not all about you. There is no ‘I’ in community.’
‘Well, there is, actually,’ I replied, ‘and there’s a you too.’ We both laughed. ‘Oh, alright,’ Tony said, ‘I’ll organise the parking.’
He was right to remind me. You could convince yourself you were indispensable, but the cooperative had to have a life of its own. It could not depend upon any one person or it would become an exclusive club. A community hall had to be polyvocal, both fractious and unifying.
“A community hall had to be polyvocal, both fractious and unifying.”
The event was sold out and created new audiences, members and supporters. The ‘Rowella Showcase’ of local arts and crafts the following day drew hundreds of people from town and district. The boutique wineries and the salmon farm all contributed to our raffle, and their families attended our events.
Eight months after the hall was listed for sale, Charmaine and I attended an important council meeting. We sat on the outer rim of the Beaconsfield Council Chamber with a full deck of councillors around the circular table. Councillor Peter Kearney put forward a motion to rescind the sale of the hall. After a number of speeches complimenting the hall committee and volunteers, the motion was passed unanimously.
*
The following year, the Rowella Hall invited John Dent to lead a walking tour of some local historic properties. Dale Newman showed us the convict well on his property (1804) at Point Rapid, Jannie Gill tramped us through the swamp to find the ruins of harbourmaster James Matson’s house (1830), and we crawled through brambles to find the sandstone arch of a convict lime kiln (1816) at Middle Arm. At Wilmores Bluff, we stood enthralled as John Dent leaped onto a tree stump and narrated the shoot-out between Matthew Brady and the redcoats:
Basham ran out of his hut crying ‘don’t shoot me, my name is Basham!’ and although he was unarmed, one of the soldiers ran him through the body, just below his heart. McCabe and Brady then left the hut, and after exchanging several shots with the soldiers, took up all their luggage, except a pistol, and very quietly walked off.
The new Hall President, Carl Cooper, and his wife, Mandy, were Tasmanians who had returned after successful careers in business and pharmacy to grow sheep at Rowella. They invited John Dent and two archaeologists, Darren Watton and Ian Edmondson, to conduct a dig on the probable site of Basham’s Hut. A group of 30 volunteers assembled at the hall. Working on six rectangular plots across Wilmores Bluff, we uncovered old china, iron nails, a button and convict bricks. Then the earth was carefully replaced.
‘It is best to leave artefacts in place, not to remove them from their context,’ the archaeologist said.
I felt the sun on my shoulders, saw the broad river sweeping around Middle Island, breathed the salty breeze. I imagined generations of Panninher people would have enjoyed these same pleasures. Every object we had retrieved was meaningless without the space, light and sound that surrounded it. We should be just as mindful of the artefacts and sacred places of the First Nations people.
“Every object we had retrieved was meaningless without the space, light and sound that surrounded it. We should be just as mindful of the artefacts and sacred places of the First Nations people.”
I was thankful that the hall’s artefacts had been returned to their context, too.
*
When I attended subsequent hall meetings, there was no need for a play. The committee was busy with monthly Friday social nights, hosting another folk festival, another craft market, a garage sale. Neighbours Colleen and Bev put on their annual fashion parade with local models. Mr Tim Evans of Exeter RSL wore a bubble-wrap dress. Bev recycled a roadkill kookaburra to fashion a stunning hat.
‘Aren’t they protected?’ I asked someone.
‘Not in Tasmania. They’ve only been here a hundred years.’
*
When the folk festival was held last January, Tony and I were on our final journey together. The cancer he had overcome shortly after we made the sea change to Tasmania, returned to claim him. I was with him in the ambulance as it turned at the junction of Kayena and Rowella roads. I saw the rainbow festival sign flapping on the new tourist signpost for Rowella Community Hall. I knew the band would be tuning up, the barbeque sizzling, wine flowing. Our friends and neighbours would be picnicking on the lawns before the doors opened. It would be a wonderful show. Tony’s parking team would manage without him – as he said, ‘they’re a collective’. I squeezed his hand. We both knew we had a community now and it was because we had been part of the efforts to save the hall.
Tasmania is a trove of small rich valleys and convolutions of landscape in which there is always a community hall. Like a seed pearl, it grows from the lapping of gritty conversations, losses, gains, and large waves of joy. It is a lustre shell of shared work and lives, of waterproof love and affection for one another. Artefacts are not the essence of a building. They are the evidence of a succession of people, held briefly in a loose association called community. The enduring treasures of a community hall are its people. ▼
This article appeared in Island 161 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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