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PETE HAY, Vandiemonian Essays | ||
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Introductory Note
In 1996 a remarkable essay was published in Island. In this essay the early European settlement of Tasmania is potently re-visioned. It is a blazing piece, ardent and ideologically confronting, profoundly dissident – and it is written from a deep well of love for the place that has come to be known as Tasmania.
The author is James Boyce, and his essay should have generated years of debate. His thesis - and I will let him explain it in his own words - is that:
The process that Boyce posits - we might, provocatively, describe it as an ‘indigenising’ process - took its initial impetus from David Collins’s desperate decision in 1806-07 to arm his convict force and despatch it to the bush to secure fresh game for his depleted Commissariat. Establishing apprentice-master relationships with Aboriginal peoples, many ‘wood-rangers’ ‘opted never to return, but to survive and be free all year round on Aboriginal land’. No big deal? Boyce insists that, given the mal-adapted nature of the invaders’ tools and cultural baggage, this constituted a ‘near-miracle’, and, thus: ‘the story of their adaptation to the bush, and the subsequent survival of the first invasion fleet, is the story of the negotiation and interaction between Aboriginal and European peoples’.
Well, okay. This was a long time ago, and Boyce’s thesis can, when all’s said and done, be dismissed as a somewhat esoteric contention of arcane Tasmanian historiography, of little import to a small island community struggling for an economic, cultural and strategic identity within the brave new millennium.
But it would be wrong to dismiss it so. The most radical, the most contentious, the most ideologically in-yr-face aspect of Boyce’s theory is his insistence that the key social division set in place in the 1820s - when the policy decision was made to put an end to the ‘indigenising’ social and economic self-reliance of the ‘lower orders’ - has remained a potent divide through subsequent phases of Tasmanian history. On the one hand there is a powerful, monopolistic elite. It is my extrapolation rather than Boyce’s own that this elite is sustained by a hidebound, mediocre official culture, one characterised by a mentality of cringe, seeing the source of all cultural value and human ingenuity to lie elsewhere, and defining its role as ‘agent’ to distant economic and social ‘betters’. It is an elite (perhaps an interlocked series of elites) that remains profoundly out of whack in time and space, still alienated, never truly home.
On the other hand ‘an enduring Vandemonian spirit’ (here Boyce takes up and extends earlier speculative work of Alex Castles and Michael Roe) perseveres. For Boyce this connotes the persistence of a vernacular social and economic resilience; a combative communal and individual independence. To his instancings I would add such tenacities as the rum’un’s ongoing contempt for authority and its trappings, and, more ‘responsibly’, the quiet persistence of the view that Tasmanians are capable of providing home-grown solutions to their own social and economic dilemmas. It is a tradition that is not always easy to trace and that sometimes engenders contradictions - Boyce argues, for instance, that it includes, prominently but ambiguously, the Greens.
There is much in this thesis that is contestable. It provides, nevertheless, the motivational frame for my own essays. I define myself ‘dissident’; as moving within a subterranean oppositional flow. I begin from the conviction, a conviction based in experience rather than theory, that there is almost always (not necessarily, but almost always) a superior perspective on contentious matters Tasmanian to the approved and sanctioned view. I would even, were my dissident views ever to move to the mainstream, seek symbolic institutionalisation of such unlooked-for triumph through the restoration of the ‘tainted’ nomenclature, ‘Van Diemen’s Land’, at the expense of the prettifying, shame-derived, ‘Tasmania’. But I am reconciled to being ever on the outer.
You now know the why of the ‘Vandiemonian’ part of Vandiemonian Essays. But I also want to explain ‘Essays’. An oft-quoted dictionary-sourced definition of ‘essay’ has it as ‘a minor branch of the literary arts’. Insofar as I bear a character-simplifying dogtag around my neck it is ‘academic’ (to most people) or ‘poet’ (to some few others). In choosing to write increasingly within the essay mode I am, in a sense, doing so in refuge from both the academic article and the poem - though particularly from the former.
In South of My Days, Veronica Brady’s biography of Judith Wright, Brady notes the frustration Wright experienced over the incapacity of poetry to effect change in the areas of her passion (treatment of Aboriginal people and the natural environment). It moved her away from the highest of the literary arts, poetry, to that ‘minor branch’, the essay, ‘the natural vehicle of argument’. Interesting. I moved to the essay for precisely the opposite reason - to escape from the prove-it dictates of ‘argument’. I wanted to be loose and suggestive, to allude, to explore pre-analytical dispositions, to raise possibilities - but emphatically not to ‘prove’.
When I first started writing essays of place it quickly became apparent that this literary undertaking is taxonomically remote from the learnéd 'paper' - that the art of case-making from allusion, from metaphor, from intuited or poetically-derived insight, from spontaneously propagated ideas, and occasionally from epiphanies, free of the necessity to 'conclusively prove', is both liberating and more authentically communicative. It is 'more authentically communicative' because the articulation of ideas which are not then 'nailed down' but allowed to remain invitingly open sets up a much more democratic and egalitarian communicative field than does more 'rigorous', vertically integrated writing which seeks rather to eliminate all but a single preferred meaning. The place essay, then, is an essentially creative mind/place dialogue that is closer to literature - even poetry - than it is to the learnéd paper.
But I also find myself writing essays at the expense of poems. This is because I have never been much committed to poetry for poetry’s sake. I have no interest in those bizarre turf-wars over poetical theory that raise dedicated poeticists to such prickly heights of passion. Poetry has always been for me less an end in itself than a mere instrumental vehicle for the saying of things. If other forms of writing seem better suited to that end, then they are what I will use.
I pondered long an appropriate organising principle for the collection and then decided on the obvious – the chronology in which the prototypes of these essays were first published. Having portentously taken upon myself the label of ‘dissident’ I hope the reader won’t find it disconcerting that I am occasionally light and fluffy. I owe a great many thanks to the redoubtable Ralph Wessman for his commitment to this project, and to Arts Tasmania for the grant that has made it possible for Ralph to proceed to publication. I owe much to Anna, Tom and Maddy; they have never begrudged me the time to be ‘off writing’ and thus, metaphorically speaking, ‘not there’. I owe much to the editors, conferencers and artists who originally commissioned some of these pieces, or who found them interesting enough as unsolicited material to warrant publication. And I owe an incalculable debt to all those robust, rigorous, feisty, articulate Vandiemonian spirits whose conversation and company first inspired the essays that appear in this book.
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