DARK CLOUDS ON THE
MOUNTAIN
John Tully has lived and worked in Melbourne for 25 years, but still sees himself as a Tasmanian expatriate. He visits his home state as often as possible to go walking in the mountains and to see old friends. He works as an academic at Victoria University in Footscray but 'in another life' he earned his living as a rigger in construction and heavy industry.
Tully is the author of a number of non-fiction and fiction books, including a short history of Cambodia and a forthcoming social history of the world rubber industry. He is an avid reader of historical works and crime fiction and believes that the latter is a much underestimated genre. His other hobbies include cycling and walking his beloved golden retriever. He lives with his wife in Melbourne's inner west and has three grown-up sons.
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
John Tully
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and enquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher,
Hybrid Publishers,
PO Box 52,
Ormond 3204.
First published 2010
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Author: Tully, John A. (John Andrew)
Title: Dark clouds on the mountain / John Tully.
ISBN: 9781921665035 (pbk.)
Dewey Number: A823.4
Digital Distribution: Ebook Alchemy
Epub ISBN: 9781877006197
Cover design by Gittus Graphics
Hybrid Publishers acknowledges Victoria University for a subvention that assisted the publication of this book.
At the round earth's imagined corners
blow your trumpets, angels
and arise from death
you numberless infinities of souls
and to your scattered bodies go!
from John Donne, Holy Sonnet No VII,
'At the round earth's imagined corners'
Prologue
Salamanca Place, Hobart, Tasmania
Near Ma Dwyer's Blue House
Winter 1948
Dusk had come and gone and a single light blazed over the street from Ma Dywer's front step. Wet darkness lay over the city, starless, moonless, windless and cold; so still that he could hear the beat of his heart and the sizzle of blood in his temples and the occasional drunken shout from some client of Ma's 'Blue House' though it was a quiet night by Ma's standards. Even the seagulls were subdued. He was conscious of the weight of the knife in the pocket of his 'Bluey' as he loitered patiently in the shadows, knowing that his quarry must pass by on his way home from the Blue House.
If he poked his head round the corner he could see that dubious waterfront hostelry: part bar, part brothel, part gaming rooms, famous (or infamous) across the seven seas depending on your point of view. Ma presided over it all, the diminutive descendant of brawling Irish convicts, big-busted and brave, formidable in her furs and feathers, with a gimlet eye for money and an embarrassing notebook full of customers' names, high and low.
When his victim came, he would strike without mercy: 'It's him or me,' he thought, running a thumb across the edge of the knife he'd fashioned so lovingly at work from a mechanical hacksaw blade. He flattened himself into a doorway to escape the rain and the attentions of chance passers-by, but he need not have worried. The streets were deserted. Behind the sandstone facades of the Georgian buildings were gaunt warehouses, workshops, offices and factories cramped together, where spare, rangy men in short-backand-sides haircuts made jams, stored wool, or poured molten metal into moulds. Here, too, secretaries in nylons with seams typed letters on heavy steel machines - Imperials and Remingtons - and giggled as they passed Ma's on their way to lunch. When they had gone home, another class of women drifted to the street: whores who plied their ancient trade in rooms by the docks or turned 'knee-tremblers' against the walls. The man had occasionally lain with them, hating himself for his cheap and joyless spasms, for his betrayal of his far-off woman. But there had been no powdered harlot tonight, filled as he was with lust for a larger death.
Sullivan's Cove - the second site of Mother England's Van Diemen's Land penal colony - was clogged with the masts of ships, because sailoring and stevedoring were labour-intensive trades in those days and ships came from all over the world for the apples, the zinc, the paper and the wool of the dark island. Dark because of the forests, dark for the great black rains that would come howling in from Storm Bay, dark for the waters full of peat from the button grass moors and desolate mountains, darker still from the history of this island. Tasmania had begun as a place without pity or hope, as far away from Europe by sailing ship as it is today by rocket to the moon. Along the way, the Aboriginal inhabitants were almost completely exterminated; regarded as pests like the Tasmanian tiger, the thylacine that once roamed the forests. The man knew little about this history and cared less, but he too felt the darkness.
In 1948, the ships were tended by an army of wharfies and Salamanca Place rang with the rattle of the winches, the crash of steel on steel, the harsh cries of the gulls and the sorrowful songs of the ships' sirens as they set sail for Liverpool, San Francisco or Bremen. The smell of coal smoke curling low on the broad estuary mingled with the cold, damp, lonely smell of the bush on the winter wind. Today in the twenty-first century, when denizens of affluent countries catch intercontinental air flights as if they are buses, Tasmania still seems an impossibly remote place. Sixty years ago it was as distant as the moon, and immigrants, like the earlier convict exiles, seldom returned to their native lands. The island itself was separated from mainland Australia by the three hundred storm-racked miles of Bass Strait, graveyard of ships and once a lawless frontier of sealers and pirates. The man had crossed it aboard the coal-fed SS Taroona, shuddering across the crests of the enormous waves of the Roaring Forties under the vast and ragged sky, figuring that Tasmania was just about as far as he could get from the old country. And danger.
The bush pressed in on all sides around Hobart Town and sometimes in summer the hot breath of the wind blew from the forest with the smell of sparks and smoke on it. It was a hard place, forever redolent of the penal colony it had once been. There were pockets of gentility like Lower Sandy Bay where the posh people were more British than the British and whiter than the King, but just a few miles out from the city, farmers lived on beaten earth floors, snakes slithered in the undergrowth, and the ghosts of the massacred Blacks watched the interlopers from the summits of the hills. In inner-suburban Wapping, the working poor teemed in their rookeries, mindful of the epidemics of cholera, dysentery and bubonic plague that had carried off their kin until recent times.
Behind the city reared the Mountain, the mute watcher of all, over 4000 feet high, dark with timber and stippled with the white boles of dead trees. The man had gone there once, only to flee, uneasy at the alien sadness of the place, so unlike the birch woods and marshes of his native land.
Far upstream, where the Derwent boiled through narrow ravines, gangs of men - among them ship-jumpers and 'reffos', Poles, English, Italians, Scotsmen, Germans, Russians, Dutchmen, Ukrainians, Irish and Welsh, 'Balts' and 'DPs'*1 of all nationalities from the post-war camps of Europe - dug tunnels and canals and threw up dams to generate electricity to industrialise a dirt-poor state that still lived on the fruit and wool sent to Mother England. Occasionally there were brawls, but generally they got on well enough, despite the ubiquitous racist argot of the