A love for the island
A young girl crests a sandstone ridge above a homestead in Tasmania’s bush and finds her goats nibbling scrub. She has now arrived, pack on her back, at the area that will become their home for several months. Cherry is one of four English wartime evacuees – including her brothers Nigel, Brick, and Nippy. Along with their local friend Tas, they plan to live here in a cave along the ridge.
‘I feel a bit like that myself,’ thought Cherry, as she gazed round happily at the now familiar line of open caves, the rugged rocks, and the hollow which held the reedy tarn, and away to the outline of far ranges. ‘We seem to – to sort of belong.’ No contradiction came to her diffident whisper, only the warm welcome of the sun at noon.
That is the first declaration of belonging in Nan Chauncy’s body of work – They Found a Cave, 1948, her first novel, written when she was in her mid-forties. It is a small declaration: a thought more than a speech, and qualified three times (seem to, sort of, diffident whisper), delivered briefly alone on a ridge with goats. An editor unfriendly to Chauncy’s prose would have crossed out most, if not all, of the softeners.
Cherry is not announcing anything. She is admitting, with some embarrassment, that she feels attached to the bush in a way she never did to the homestead.
It is also the first instance of a literary act that Chauncy will perform several times, with rising stakes in three of her best novels. By 1964, the same act will be performed under maximum pressure in her ninth novel, High and Haunted Island. Two women, school friends, are lost to the world on a black rock in the Tasman Sea, missing – I calculate – for almost twenty-five years. The younger brother of one sails across the strait eager to uncover the rock’s mysteries and stumbles across the habitation. He offers rescue, but they refuse it. One of the women – Vicky – notes simply, I am not now in need of rescue, Mr Roxtell.
The ascent from Cherry’s diffident whisper to Vicky’s forthright refusal of rescue is one of the most consequential arcs in Chauncy’s work. And it offers a concrete reason for studying her work more deeply. Another essay in my set of four, Stories from the Edge, takes up the literary act that Chauncy was performing – the practice register that no other Tasmanian writer of her century could enter. This essay asks the prior, basic questions.
What kind of writer puts these scenes on the page, and expects them to be read seriously? What had to be true about an author, by the time she wrote the third novel, for the refusal to come out plain and credible?
The answer is layered, and the books themselves give it back if one reads each in turn for the moment when the writing becomes most heartfelt. They Found a Cave (1948) ends with a stuttered Christmas toast. World’s End Was Home (1952) ends with an inward three-beat cry that no character in the scene hears spoken. High and Haunted Island (1964) ends with two refusals and a silent gesture.
The three moments share a common heritage – three separate ‘core samples’ extracted at three different depths from a single reservoir. They were written across sixteen years by a woman who, while writing them, was reaching back into successively deeper strata of her own formation. Read in sequence – with one eye on Chauncy Vale where the writer lived – they become a psychological study. The books form a roman à clef held in place not by argument but by recognition.
I’ll take them in order.
They Found a Cave (1948) – Why Did Cherry Make Her Toast?
The children are back at the homestead preparing for Christmas dinner. Aunt Jandie has returned from hospital. The Pinners are gone. The war, itself, is ending. The table has been laid. The constable arrives from the township with a cable – but refuses to stay for dinner. Nigel makes the loyal toast. The King is drunk. Then, almost as a postscript, the only girl at the table gets to her feet:
‘I – I’d like us to – to drink to the New Country,’ she gasped, and sat down with a bump.
In Chauncy’s body of work it is one of the author’s most camouflaged declarations, and for Cherry herself the statement reflects a new perspective. Why did she make the toast? The question has two halves, depending on how one reads the ‘she’. Why does Cherry, a young English girl, propose a toast to a country she has only just encountered? Why does Nan, in the late 1940s, write the line for her?
The first half is answered by everything that has come before. They Found a Cave is, in its structure, a Robinsonade – wartime evacuees flee a cruel hired pair to live in the bush for several months – but its moral shape is different. In a Famous Five novel, the five children would return home unchanged, life a little more splendid for the adventure. In Chauncy, the cave is not a lark or a caper. It is the better house, and the children grow as a result.
The diffident whisper this essay opened with – we seem to – to sort of belong – comes well before the toast. Cherry is there alone on the ridge, looking down across the tarn and then around at the sandstone caves, and she finds herself suddenly at home – for the first time. Only a short while earlier she had lamented that the whole vast bush cared nothing for herself and her brothers, for they didn’t really belong to it.
The qualifiers do real work. Cherry is not announcing belonging; she is admitting, slightly embarrassed, that the bush has done to her what the homestead never did. The diffidence is the proof. A confident declaration in a child’s mouth would deflate. Instead, an embarrassed declaration leaves the matter where it belongs – in the world rather than in the language.
The book provides the reversal. Brick arrives at the caves draped with a milk pail. Nippy has taken up a cat called Fluffles. The children rebuild domestic life inside the cave. Cherry sweeps with a broom of gum-leaves and makes damper for tea. Tas knows how to assemble makeshift beds. They eat and sing. As time goes on they experience challenges. They jump when a large black snake appears. They experience chill and cold, lashing rain. Nigel fails to return after he leaves for an expedition on a bike he’s mended. When the police at last arrive, it is partly to say that they have arrested the Pinners. Tas, asked to give evidence against his own Ma, declines. Better leave me out of this.
The book has been in the cave so long, so faithfully, that we have stopped thinking of it as a hideout and started thinking of it as a household by the time the children must leave. Jandie’s home. The aunt is back from hospital in Melbourne. The cave is no longer needed and the children pack up.
Once only, Cherry looked back at the friendly crags towering into the sky behind her. It seemed unbelievable that it was all over; never again to smell each day the aromatic scents of the wild flowers of the rocks, nor hear again the scream of the mating hawks high in the air; never again the sensation of living on top of the world. She knew she would miss the little unregarded things: the merry deep-throated calls of Joe Whitty, the blundering of moths that made for the firelight in the evenings, even the frogs’ clamour from the tarn, and the frightening cries of owls in the night, as well as the cooking and the fun.
The never again, thrice signalled, is the elegiac note Chauncy denies herself almost everywhere else, and the catalogue that follows it ends, precisely, on the most domestic possible items: cooking and fun. The cave was a place where cooking and fun belonged together. The toast at the table on Christmas Day is, then, not for the homestead. It is for the country where visitors can find in a sandstone cave a new home.
The second half of the question – why Chauncy wrote the line – opens onto the layer of her life closest to the surface in 1948. The base for her life had shifted to Tasmania at the age of twelve when her family, the Mastermans, arrived in Hobart late January 1913.
The family had not come on some colonial adventure. They had come, on a single one-way ticket, after Nan’s father Charles lost everything, discovered he could not afford his old lifestyle, sold his home, and resigned his directorships. The eldest son was pulled out of the family school, Charterhouse.
By mid-1914, the Council Engineer’s job Charles had taken to keep the family solvent was over, and he, now around fifty-six, had bought a piece of rough hill country at Bagdad with what was left of the family savings.
What followed is the source of They Found a Cave. The Mastermans were not, in origin, subsistence farmers; they had been Edwardian upper-middle class professionals. Nan was fourteen by the time her family’s demise was complete. The first house at Bagdad was a slab-timber hut the family built by hand – with three rooms and a bark-sheet roof. Lilla Masterman named it Cherry Tree Cottage.
The cave above the homestead in Chauncy’s first novel was what a girl in her mid-teens, who had watched her family rebuild a household by hand on a piece of land that had no power, no water, and no sewerage could imagine more than thirty years later – when she tasked herself to write about five children running away from cruelty into the bush. The cave was a transposition of Cherry Tree Cottage.
The fact Chauncy gives the only girl at the homestead table the name Cherry is the kind of detail one notices only on the second reading and that, once noticed, will not unnotice itself. The toast Cherry proposes is the toast that the girl who became Nan Chauncy might have proposed in her teens, having watched what her father salvaged from England’s wreck of him and what her mother succeeded in managing.
To the New Country. The toast is made because the people have lost everything in the old one and have made a household, by hand and hard work, in this one. The toast is what the author’s first stratum of formation brought to the surface on writing her first novel – a joint articulation of the woman at two points in her life, a testimony then and on the book’s publication.
This reading does not require Cherry to be Nan. The book is a children’s adventure, Cherry is a fictional English evacuee, and the displacement she undergoes – wartime, parental, geographical – is, despite the list’s length, much less severe than the one the Mastermans went through. But the structural movement is identical. Lose the country you came from, find the one you didn’t know existed, build a household and, declare allegiance to what you have created from scratch. That is the shape of They Found a Cave. It is also the shape of the second chapter in Nan’s life.
At the end of the book, Tas, the local boy at the table, returns the gesture by drinking to the Old Country. The two halves form a recognition. The migrant has arrived; the local has at last, after initial hesitation, welcomed her. The Mastermans had experienced something similar in their early years. Chauncy, writing the novel in her mid-forties, acknowledges the country that had accepted her family.
So the toast is made for two reasons. Cherry makes it because the cave has taught her what the homestead could not. Chauncy writes it because she found roots in Cherry Tree Cottage that she had not so obviously developed in England or, I suspect, found in Hobart. Both reasons sit inside the one sentence at a table prepared for Christmas dinner. The first turn in the writer’s life has produced its first declaration, and it has come out as a stutter delivered by a child who sits down with a bump.
That diffidence is the registration of how much is being said. A confident toast would have meant nothing – an assertion more than a confession. A stuttered one, with both halves of the writer’s history sitting below it, is the right size to be credible and registered.
World’s End Was Home (1952) – Why Did Dallie Feel That Way?
Four years later the declaration is internal, the speaker is an orphan, and the book title says it all.
World’s End Was Home ends with Dallie Eventyde riding home in a cart, or more accurately a float with rubber wheels, with Os – the older brother of her best friend, Cobby. They are hurtling down the track from Pirate Ship hill towards the small green valley to which she has come, by a long route, to belong. They have just watched a yacht sail out with her cousin Douglas on board – Aunt Viola’s yacht, taking her son back to Melbourne. The young man had come to abduct Dallie but was converted, by Dallie’s nursing, into someone he could not have envisioned in the big city.
Emperor, the horse, breaks from a trot to a canter on the rough track. Os calls, Whoa, boy! Steady, boy! Dallie urges him to go faster.
‘Go on – go on!’ she yelled; then sang at the top of her lungs, ‘The old gray mare she ain’t what she used to be, ain’t what she used to be …’ – but all the time something was crowing joyfully within her, keeping time with the pounding hoofs:
I belong! – I belong! – I belong!
The declaration is silent. It is internal. It is set against an external song which knows nothing about it. The harness clanks. The horse canters. Os calls whoa, boy. Inside Dallie, in time with the hoofbeats, the three-beat cry repeats. Why did Dallie feel that way? What is the answer the book has prepared for this moment?
The answer is constructed across the entire novel and turns on a single revelation in its last twenty pages, but its first half-step is given at the Hobart wharf on Dallie’s first day in Tasmania. She has flown in with Gran and Cobby – three tickets bought in haste from Melbourne to Hobart. She is to head further south by boat and live with Cobby’s family. It is Aunt Viola who has precipitated this action, having tracked down Dallie to her school and determined to become the orphan’s guardian, using lawyers if necessary.
Dallie is on the sidewalk near Salamanca Place, standing there with Cobby after seeing Gran onto the bus back to the airport. For a moment she feels exposed in a strange city and a negative thought arises, a feeling that will be answered over a hundred pages later:
‘I don’t belong,’ she told herself, ‘not to anyone but Gran.’
Dallie feels the sentiment once more ten pages later. And it is one that Chauncy spends the rest of the book reversing. The negative declaration sets the whole arithmetic of the novel: because where does an orphan belong when the people who most cherished her arrival have died, the guardians who scooped her up now chase her with lawyers, and the people willing to protect her are mostly strangers?
The first answer the book offers is the valley. Dallie travels with Cobby’s family south on a fishing ketch, the Tregonia, and off-loads at Crazy Bay, Emperor leading the way. They sleep a night among the sand dunes before ascending the great hill that divides the bay from World’s End. At the top there is a collection of grey rocks known as ‘the Ribs.’ She can look down from a flat, jutting rock into the isolated valley below.
When they finally arrive on flat grass, having careened down steep slopes and round hairpin bends, Os looks around the green bowl and its creek, and gives the book its motto:
‘It’s like … it’s like a kind of mistake.’
The valley is so unexpected. No one has entered this world except for Uncle Dan, not even the mailman. And here it is – sheltered, watered, with rich black earth. Os recovers fast: But … it’s the sort of mistake I like! he adds. The idea of the uncivilised place where individuals can recoup and grow is pictured here in its softest, most domestic form.
World’s End is not a punishment; it is a discovery – not on the map – somewhere the world has yet to encompass. Something now that is better than a lump of gold.
But the novel’s deepest logic is not in the valley. It is in Uncle Dan. He is introduced as an old bushman who has lived alone in the wilderness of southwest Tasmania since the years after the first world war, perhaps thirty years or more with nothing but, these days, his dog called Apple and a cottage he has built himself in the hidden corner of an unknown valley.
Dan shows the children the bath he has created in a stream, almost like a canal lock, the ‘shower’, the irrigation he has formed using pipes of bark, and raspberry canes – tall as Dan himself. He stammers with strangers or grown-ups but is at ease with children. The careful reader notices, page by page, something is faintly odd – a surprising friendship with Cobby’s dad, a strange look here and there, a Barrier the children must not cross, a family nobody quite understands.
In the penultimate chapter, in the middle of a busy room – Douglas minding a pet wombat, Aunt Viola having revealed Douglas’s expected inheritance of the family title as her trump card to claim Dallie back – Uncle Dan says it:
‘Well, there seemed no sense in coming alive only to return a broken man. I dreaded people most of all. The bush, the good, clean, quiet bush brought me back to health. I decided I would finish my days as far from people as I could get, deep in the untouched bush.’
He is Sir Daniel Eventyde, Dallie’s uncle, presumed killed at the Front in 1917, picked up unrecognisable. Sam Rylliers, a Tasmanian soldier, mistakenly identifies Dan as a mate of his, and so the wounded soldier gets repatriated back to the island. When Uncle Dan recovers his memory, he chooses – partly with Sam’s encouragement – to stay dead.
Chauncy refuses the operatic moment. Dan does not weep. He explains. To stay ‘buried’ is given as a practical option, not a tragic one. And it is the option a man broken to pieces in Europe took when the alternative was only to return a broken man. He built, in the valley, a life with a garden, a dog, raspberry canes, irrigation. The valley is what England could not offer him, and he saw that Tasmania could deliver.
This is the answer the book has been preparing. Why does Dallie feel I belong on the cart ride home? Because she is riding home no longer alone. She is riding home as the new member of a community at the centre of which is her real uncle, who chose this place over the country he came from – and who has just told her that she may go to England with him for a year and that she’ll always have World’s End to return to; it will be hers one day.
Uncle Dan shows Dallie, by his life, that one can be picked up from anywhere by anyone and find the place one wants to be. The orphan’s three-beat cry answers the wharf-line about not belonging by way of the hermit-uncle who chose his own deadness rather than return to a Europe which had broken him. The chosen-deadness is the key to the book – and it is at the centre of the second turn in Chauncy’s life.
In early 1938, on a Dutch merchant ship returning from a long stay in England —years on a houseboat along the Thames, travel in northern Europe, a teaching post at a Girl Guide school in Denmark – Nan, at thirty-seven, met a German Jewish refugee called Helmut Anton Rosenfeld.
He was around twenty-six. His family’s Königsberg business had been confiscated by the Nazis, and he was making his way to Australia ahead of the gathering catastrophe. Nan and Anton were married six months after arriving in Australia – in Lara near Geelong Grammar School where her eldest brother, Kay, worked. Kay gave them, as a wedding present, his stone cottage at Bagdad, called Day Dawn, and adjoining land, which he had purchased at one time to be near Cherry Tree Cottage, where the family had lived during the war years. Nan renamed the newly-wed couple, Chauncy, and renamed their new home, Chauncy Vale.
Anton was a Jew in Germany, a German in Australia. But he found a sanctuary adopting the maiden name of his wife’s grandmother and a home living in the wilderness of Tasmania.
A principal thread in World’s End Was Home – Dallie losing her parents, and the orphan finding a protector who is her dead father’s brother – is a transposition of the actual arc of Nan’s own thirty-eighth year. The voyage on which Nan met Anton was the trip she was taking home to see her dying father. Charles Masterman died in Adelaide on the last day of May 1938. Nan married Anton three-and-a-half months later, on 13 September 1938.
Chauncy lost her father; she found another man – a refugee without anything, but someone with whom she could establish a foundation for the next turn in her story, and together they developed a life in the bush. The book does not work as biography. Anton is not Charles’s brother; the genealogies are different. But it works as imaginative inheritance. The shape of the receiving – by way of an unexpected man, in a hidden Tasmanian valley, shortly after a parental loss – is Chauncy’s experience.
Similarly Anton is not Uncle Dan – he wasn’t wounded in the Great War. The biographical detail does not match. But the imaginative move the character makes – to stay dead, in a Tasmanian valley, rather than return as a broken man to the country he came from – is a transition that Chauncy watched her husband make, slowly, every day.
By the time Nan published World’s End Was Home in 1952, this had been her household for fourteen years. The valley had received them. The garden was going in. The wildlife sanctuary and outdoor education that would become part of their family’s lifework was gaining shape on the land around them.
To portray Tasmania as some place that destroyed the spirit would have required Chauncy to reject what she knew and saw. It would have required Chauncy to dismiss her own experience in childhood and now the experience of her husband, for whom Tasmania was a place that had allowed him to live. So, she wrote what life had taught her.
And this is why a close reading of World’s End Was Home begins at the end and works backwards: from Dallie’s hoofbeat-cry through the family-romance of the orphan to the fact of chosen-deadness, and from there back into the writer’s life. Dallie feels that she belongs as a result of her love both for the land and for the family at the centre of which is a man who, like her, had been broken and wanted sanctuary. Chauncy knew this to be true.
The book ends with all its non-Tasmanians choosing the island – Douglas to come back, Dallie to return, Uncle Dan to leave just briefly. The valley has done its work in every direction. The chosen-deadness has become a chosen-life. The hoofbeat-cry, then, is what an orphan can feel when she experiences the power of habitation. Chauncy is the writer who could put the cry on the page because she understood it.
The second turn of her life – the return from England, the marriage to Anton Rosenfeld, and the name change to Chauncy – is in every cadence of Uncle Dan’s stammer, every hoofbeat of Emperor’s homecoming canter. I belong, threefold in time with hoofs, best summarises Chauncy’s own experience.
High and Haunted Island (1964) – Why Was the Refusal So Powerful?
Twelve years on, the writer is sixty-four, the book is her ambitious limit-test, and the refusal is unfolded under conditions that come close to being unbearable. High and Haunted Island has, in the parts of the novel that are wholly characteristic, some of the strongest writing she ever did.
The book has a frame that fights with itself. Roger ‘Rusty’ Ironn and Otter Roxtell are sailing south along the east coast of Tasmania on Timmari, all the way past Hobart to Port Davey. Rusty’s dad, a millionaire, owns the yacht. The frame is unmistakably the writing of someone trying on a metropolitan-male register that is not really natural to her.
The boys’ adolescent banter, Rusty’s first-love passages with the boat, Billum the skipper’s salty-dog yarning – these are competent elements for a boy’s own-adventure. But they do nothing the genre has not been doing since Robert Louis Stevenson. If you read the first thirty or so pages of High and Haunted Island you might conclude Chauncy was a writer of charming but minor children’s adventures, slightly out of date.
Then the frame opens. Two student friends, Vicky and Tess, are travelling to Strahan on a steamer, the Rosebery, when they were put ashore in perilous circumstances and left stranded.
The middle of the book, in which the two girls struggle to survive near an inlet at Windowpane Bay as their energy dissipates and any hope of rescue vanishes, is Chauncy’s native register at its highest pitch. The sentences shorten. The metaphors retreat. Verbs of working with the hands take over from verbs of seeing.
We get the half-finished khaki sock that Tess turns into a bed-sock when her bare feet are too cold; the Sealing Wax Set from Aunt Mary which Tess loves precisely because it is useless and that turns out to contain the matches that will light their fire; the dead snake Vicky kills with a stick and skins for a belt – her bloomers’ elastic has gone; the knitting-needle ground to a point on a stone for spearing fish; the pocket-knife dropped in the sea by numb fingers and lost forever; the chocolate counted in squares; the moment when Tess, alone, eats a square without permission and weeps; the moment when Vicky tells her later – Silly Tess, did you think I didn’t know? I counted the pieces, didn’t I?
The contrast between the yacht-frame and the inlet is the most useful piece of register-evidence in Nan Chauncy’s work. The frame is the kind of book children’s publishing existed to receive in 1964. The inlet is the kind of narrative Chauncy was interested to write. The frame is competent but ordinary; the inlet is great. The reason for the unevenness is that the inlet is the register Chauncy had been working in, body and soul, for most of fifty years.
High and Haunted Island contains, side by side, the writer she was when adopting standard genres and the writer she could be when discussing individual lives as a form of habitation.
When the ship of a Scandinavian sect arrives, The Circle – a storm having blown it off course – the captain takes the girls aboard, and their story moves into a new phase. It is here that Chauncy reaches the deepest layer of her own life. The sect, the Circlists, are the most developed sanctuary-figures Chauncy would write. Their religion forbids straight lines on the principle that all things curve in unity to the perfect whole. Their leader, Lamouche, speaks in a faintly stilted and archaic English.
Their Island – a thousand-foot black cylinder of rock in the Tasman sea that a treacherous reef protects— has a hidden depression inside, accessible only through a sea-cave on a shingle beach, which leads to an immense shaft, a hand-cranked haulage drum, and a deep canvas-covered basket.
On arrival, the Chief draws fists full of money out of his pocket and hurls notes and coins into the wind. He looks expectantly at the two girls:
‘The great bad in the world, that is money … Here you need nothing bad. All that is to leave outside the Circle.’ He turned his head as if drinking in with delight the sight of the stark cliffs
Under duress Vicky snatches out her purse – eyes flashing, mouth firm – and throws it far to sea – the purse with money that was to help them get home.
The novel is full of refusals, and this is the first. The Circlists are not refusing money in the abstract. They are refusing, by means of a rite at the gate, the moral economy of the world they have escaped from. It is a rite specifically of arrival. You arrive on the Island by giving up the coins in your pocket. The coins go into the sea. You start again on the rock with nothing.
The book then runs the rite once more near the end. Jacob, three pages from the end, hands his pay packet from the Timmari voyage to Billum and tells him to give it to the boys when they reach Australia, and adds: If you don’t give them the money, throw it in the sea.
Throw it in the sea. The Circlist money-rite, performed by a man who is finally returning home, performed not as renunciation but as a promise, the only ritual the speaker has ever fully acknowledged. Jake the sailor is Jacob the boy who unknowingly avoided death by giving away his place to Helmi on the Circle to propose marriage, and in revealing himself too late deserts the island in the one remaining vessel, a whirl of complex emotions. In doing so, he believes in hindsight, he has condemned the community to death without food or means of escape.
Jacob has been sailing for more than fifteen years under his adopted name, dreaming of the rock. He is going home, and the only thing he has to prove his connection, to mark his return, is the rite of money in the sea.
In total the refusal is played out four times across the book – with the Chief, Vicky, Jacob and Tess as protagonists. Vicky’s is the most hard-hitting. I am not now in need of rescue. The rite which defines the Circlist community, the one she protested against, is the one Vicky uses in the final instance to refuse departure. As a founding gesture of the polity that has held Vicky’s life it is all the more powerful. To take the rescue would be to undo the arrival.
And then there is Tess. She too refuses. Johnnie … I remain here on the Island. On hearing these words – to Johnnie’s surprised reaction – Jacob rises before the Chief and asks for her. It is the Circlist rite of asking and Jacob is the second man in Tess’s life. The first time she was a young woman on the Island – maybe just over twenty years old – still unsettled, still unsure about everything, and facing two suitors. She accepted the repeated overture of Orm, the Chief’s son.
The second time, she does not speak at all. She simply rises and places her hand in Jacob’s. There is no authorial gloss. The reader is given the placed hand, and that is the answer to the asking.
The silent gesture is the deepest act in Chauncy. Since being stranded on the beach, Tess has faced a life that she has not found easy. Her unsettled nature has compounded the challenges: struggling to assimilate into the Circlist community, unable to return home, longing for her absent family, seeing her close friend move forward with her life. Tess eventually marries the more extrovert of her suitors, Orm – but he dies rescuing a child who has fallen among the crags. She gives birth to a daughter, Anni, whom at the end she cedes temporarily into her brother’s care – so that Anni might see Australia and have her voice trained.
Why are these refusals so powerful? The money is thrown. The rescue is declined. But the asking is, this time, accepted. Three rites, all connected, all performed on a small Island – foundational acts of a polity that refuses integration into the world’s economy. The answer the book itself prepares is that those who perform it have paid in full for the right to do so. The action is the last and deepest response to experience, and solid enough to support in a sustained fashion an entire new community.
Chauncy could not have written this book without digging into another stratum of her life.
In 1964, when High and Haunted Island was published, Nan Chauncy was sixty-four years old and had been at Chauncy Vale for twenty-six years with Anton as her husband. She had known the area since her teens as a Masterman daughter. She had developed a life for herself on the property for thirty of her most formative years – created a life of habitation before it became a literature of habitation.
Twice over she had dug, planted, fenced, and built her home – the second time she had named it herself. As a young woman she had bushwalked the rugged south-west with her brother Kay. The coast where this novel strands Tess and Vicky was country she had first learned on foot, in the company of her older, most cherished brother. She founded Girl Guide companies, edited the association’s magazine, The Camp Fire, and served as district commissioner. She successfully lobbied with Anton to have her property declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1946.
She had refused, by the small daily decisions of where to live and how, the metropolitan economy that big cities such as Melbourne, Sydney, or London expected an Australian writer of stature to embrace. Tiger in the Bush, Devil’s Hill, and Tangara had taken the CBCA Book of the Year in three out of four years from 1958 to 1961. The Hans Christian Andersen Diploma had arrived in 1962, eighteen months before High and Haunted Island went to press. Rescue and the world were clearly available, if she wanted, by 1964. The ordinary apparatus of literary celebrity was there for her if Nan stretched out her hand.
She did not. She wrote, instead, a novel in which two women, who both assume central roles through hard work and physical effort in an isolated community on a rock in the Tasman Sea, refuse a yacht that offers them return. Vicky announces, I am not now in need of rescue, Mr Roxtell. Tess more surprisingly affirms the same, I remain here on the Island. The lines are the writer’s own declaration.
The roman à clef layers underneath this book are very firm – and different from the layers in the other two books. The Circlists, a polity that throws money into the sea, are Charles Masterman’s story brought to its first principle. Charles had been forced into the position the Circlists chose: he had, metaphorically, thrown money into the sea by developing and pursuing a losing patent, one that cost his family its economic status. In response, he sought a new life in Tasmania, an island it would have seemed disconnected from the world – almost inaccessible. The lesson of life in the Bagdad bush was: one could lose everything to the ruthless sea but still build a life.
The Circlists in High and Haunted Island are a mirror for Chauncy’s life – and their rites are the distillation of her learnings. Charles had no choice; the Circlists did have one. Chauncy is converting the involuntary to the volitional. In doing so, she transforms the economic refugee into the economic refuser.
The Chief is perhaps Nan’s father, while Jacob is Anton, developed in World’s End but amplified here. The Chief is about polity-building – the European refugee who brought his community through the storms and made a life for it upon a rock the world steered clear of. Jacob is about disappearance – a displaced man who spends about sixteen years avoiding the place from which he came and still loved, recognising its haunted reputation, its dangerous reefs.
Never a waking hour I haven’t longed to come here, to return home, he explains, when at last he confesses. This is where I belong, and where I dared not … and he can’t finish the sentence. The figure disappearing-into-Tasmania that Uncle Dan first depicts in 1952 is now split in two halves: the Chief’s polity and Jacob’s absence, the visible and the hidden; both halves reflecting forced choices.
And then round the great table one night above the tall cliffs there is Tess – at last, truly, deciding to stay, placing her hand in Jacob’s. Tess is the writer herself. The third stratum of the roman à clef has the most conviction. The refusal is depicted repeatedly, and Tess’s life can rebuild once again after its setbacks. She recognises the scope for others to make their own choices, but she too understands that, after years of her habitation in a contained community on a small island, to be rescued is to be undone.
The refusals are so powerful because they are held together by the three personages who have determined the fractured story of Chauncy’s life. High and Haunted Island is a synthesis of the three, performed under maximum pressure. The prose can carry it because by 1964 the writer’s whole life provides the knowledge behind the prose.
The book closes on the boys. Timmari is due to sail home. Rusty lingers at the edge of the Island looking down at the crags. He knows he will return. He now has three loves – a ship, a girl and an island. The frame closes around the inner book. The metropolitan-male register signals its return, but a little softer than before. The boys have seen what the writer has just shown them. And Nan makes her final confession, never would the island … ringed by an infinity of blue, cease to haunt.
The Writer Behind the Three Books
What the three close readings recover, when they are read in this order, is a single writer at three depths of return. The same imaginative act – to choose this place over the place one came from – is performed three times at three different temperatures, and each occasion drawing on a different layer of formation.
In They Found a Cave it is performed at the first layer – the layer Chauncy had been carrying since she was twelve, the layer of Cherry Tree Cottage and the family that had lost its prosperity in London and rebuilt a life in a slab-timber hut near Bagdad. Cherry’s stutter is the Masterman child’s hesitation. A cave is what the adult recalls about a teen creating a new household.
In World’s End Was Home it is performed at the next layer: Nan’s marriage to Anton – the layer Chauncy had been carrying since 1938 and that had been the household’s centre for over ten years when she wrote about it. Uncle Dan’s chosen-deadness is what the wife of a renamed German Jewish refugee, watching her husband put life back together in a Tasmanian valley, can write into a children’s book without melodrama. Dallie’s cry to the rhythm of hoofbeats is the orphan’s cry that everything is now fitting into place.
In High and Haunted Island, it is performed at the deepest layer – the layer of Chauncy’s own life as a writer at sixty-four, in the bush that was both her father’s economic refuge and her husband’s political one, refusing the metropolitan rescue, the chance to return, which she had finally within her grasp. Vicky’s refusal is the writer’s refusal. Tess’s placed hand is the writer’s placed hand. The Circlist’s rite of money in the sea is the lesson of a 1912 collapse turned, here, into something constructive, performed by choice. Throw it in the sea is what the Masterman daughter can say in the voice of an older novelist having watched her parents lose everything but rebuild a life that she learned to value even more.
The three books, read separately, look like a children’s writer working through varying possibilities in her craft. Read together, they look like three stations of a single self-portrait.
This pattern is not simply the projection of some aspiring critic. Chauncy openly rendered her family’s migration in her work: Half a World Away (1962), the book Berenice Eastman calls Chauncy’s appealing semi-autobiographical fiction. The Lettengars are the Mastermans, but the names changed. The family house, Highover – with its view over three counties – becomes Overlooking. Westerham Hill, Kent, goes to Westerham; while the four eldest children call themselves Braves, as the historical Mastermans did.
The financial reversal is the family’s actual reversal, but it is softened slightly. In the novel, someone Father trusted takes all the money – the moral arithmetic is cleaner than it was in life. The S.S. Dilleron is the Wandilla. The Coffee Palace in Hobart is the Imperial. The train up-country to the Bagdad valley is named on the page. There is a camp in tents on rough land, the father standing in his pyjamas at dawn, to stare from the hilltop at the valley which was his. The 1962 book performs in the open what They Found a Cave, World’s End Was Home, and High and Haunted Island perform under disguise.
What this means for the roman à clef reading is that Chauncy was consciously working through her own family’s migration to Tasmania across multiple books over several decades. She is not, in this reading, a children’s writer who happened to live in Tasmania and wrote about the location only as a physical setting.
She is a writer for whom crossings – England to Tasmania, lost prosperity to rebuilt home, broken men to new lives, refugee to rebirth – constitute a foundational imaginative event, returned to over and over in different transpositions, until in High and Haunted Island the crossing has become the decision to stay on a rock because its true worth has at last been understood.
The refusal of rescue is at the far end of an arc that begins at the end of 1912 with the Mastermans on board the Wandilla, sailing from Plymouth.
The Freedom Not to Perform
The argument here is simple and focused: this arc – the self-portrait – spread across three of Chauncy’s most powerful novels, represents a signature act in the writer’s oeuvre, drawing on the various turns in her life – and delivered in a straightforward register.
Writers such as Hal Porter, Christopher Koch, Peter Conrad, and Richard Flanagan have all sought to deliver Major Australian Novels for a metropolitan readership. Each was, in his own way, attempting to write a book Sydney or London could recognise as Literature. Quite apart from their own life stories and related feelings, the available registers for the recognition they actively sought pushed them to crystallise Tasmania as somewhere to leave or a place to grieve. The metropolis would not, structurally, recognise as serious any literature suggesting that the periphery could be good or enlightened, let alone fulfilling.
Chauncy was independent enough to write a different narrative – one in which a character could refuse rescue and be right. She did not require validation. She did not pursue status. Holding out Tasmania as worthy did not undermine her feelings or life decisions. Indeed, the island was the source of progress in Nan’s life, not the obstacle to it. The girl in her teens on the timber veranda and the writer at sixty-four sending a final manuscript to Oxford were the same person. Plain witness was what a self-fulfilled writer could produce in her own register.
The three books, then, are not just three steps in an argument. They are three stations of a single life that found achievement and happiness in the margins of the world, where she had lived from her arrival at twelve to her death at almost seventy. She gave back her positive reviews, layer by layer, in a series of books that, fully aware of the broader world and metropolitan sophistication, showed no sign of intimidation or awe.
We seem to – to sort of belong as the goats nibble the bush. I belong! I belong! I belong! in time with hoofbeats. I am not now in need of rescue, Mr Roxtell. These three sentences, as a key element in an extended body of literary work, remain – astonishingly, still today – the most consequential set of positive declarations a Tasmanian writer of any era has made.
They have been waiting for the critics to see and for the canon to recognise. Periphery, Chauncy argued, does not demand rescue.
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