Part 1 – The Refusal

In the second war, an enemy raider lying in Port Davey hears the banshee blast of a coastal steamer, forcing two ‘young ladies’ – its only passengers: the schoolgirls, Vicky and Tess – to be rowed ashore and onto a deserted beach. The women survive long enough for another ship to arrive: one belonging to the Circlists, a Scandinavian sect, who rescue the castaways off the beach and carry them to a sheer-sided rock sailors call Reef Island – otherwise Haunted Island or Wreck Island.

The sect has built a green and self-sufficient settlement under its rim. Years later, on Tess’s wedding day, the community’s ship – The Circle – sails for New Zealand. It is never seen again, and soon after the island’s only other boat, a fishing vessel, is lost. The young women – several years older and married into the sect – are now, willingly or not, marooned.

More than fifteen years pass before Tess’s younger brother Johnnie arrives with an old school friend – PG Ironn, a millionaire. They offer rescue on their sailing boat back to the mainland – a rescue for which the book has been preparing its readers from the first chapters. Vicky speaks frankly. ‘I am not now in need of rescue, Mr. Roxtell,’ she says gently. ‘One day, perhaps […].’ Tess speaks too: ‘I remain here on the Island.’ That scene is the resolution of Nan Chauncy’s High and Haunted Island, published in 1964.

It is also the most extraordinary passage any 20th Century Tasmanian writer ever put on the page. Two women on a rock far out in the Tasman Sea, offered the rescue which a whole book has developed, refuse it. There is no irony around it, no authorial commentary, no operatic farewell – only a few, quiet sentences that encapsulate a reorganising of perspectives and plans, given without italic or gloss, in the straightforward register of people managing life.

Read against the major current of Tasmanian literature, the scene is unaccountable. The Tasmanian novel is not, as a rule, the place where characters refuse the boat off the rock. The dominant register of such writing – from Marcus Clarke onward – has been one in which the island is something to escape, to elegise, to mythologise from the metropolis, or to die into.

Hal Porter’s Tasmania is what cannot be lived in. Peter Conrad’s island is a Lilliput whose true character is legible only from Oxford. Richard Flanagan’s is a place where belonging arrives, when it does, at the moment of drowning. None of these registers can carry I am not now in need of rescue. Put the sentence in Porter’s mouth, or Conrad’s, or Flanagan’s, and it fails.

Yet there is the sentence, on the page, in 1964, written into a children’s book by a woman who had spent over thirty-five years in the Tasmanian bush above Hobart. It comes without apparatus, in the plainest possible English, in the mouth of the Chief’s wife with work still to do. It is the line a hundred and fifty years of Tasmanian literature could not have written, but one author did.

Indeed, Chauncy’s statements, as a refusal of rescue, appear unique in Tasmanian literature still today. A previous article investigated why she made them. The question this essay pursues is another: why do they even stand out? How does a literary tradition arrive where it is today – with, in essence, just a single verdict? The canon welcomes a sole, if rich, perspective; and it is this inheritance Chauncy sought to reverse.

Part 2 – The Verdict

There has to be a judgement before a reversal, and Marcus Clarke delivered the verdict on Tasmania across various iterations of what became his novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, published at different lengths under two similar titles from 1870 to 1875 with endings that became, over time, more tragic.

His story took the penal apparatus – Macquarie Harbour, Sarah Island, Port Arthur, the triangle and the lash – and made it the island’s literary signature. In his vision, the landscape was not just indifferent to human suffering but an accomplice – complicit. Providence, or its absence, had designed a geography to hold men in place while the institution shattered them.

All around breathes desolation; on the face of nature is stamped a perpetual frown.

The sentence closes the great topographic overture to the Macquarie Harbour chapters – a paragraph that moves down the west coast naming its stations of bleakness: Cape Grim, Sandy Cape, the Hell’s Gates themselves – the entrance to Macquarie Harbour, Rocky Point, the straggling harbour of Port Davey. The sea will not let men flee. The sea-line is marked with wrecks – the sunken rocks dismally named for the vessels they destroy.

Mountains, sentinels over the water, close off the horizon. The forest cannot be eaten, while the soil is prolific only in prickly undergrowth and noxious weeds The entire country is the prison.

It is precisely the coastline Clarke’s litany condemns that Chauncy keeps embracing. Port Davey – named in the verdict’s founding section on the penal settlement as part of that iron-bound shore where all is bleak and cheerless – is where, a century later more or less, Nan casts Tess and Vicky ashore from a steamer’s lifeboat in High and Haunted Island.

It is where, the year before, she sets the last volume in her Lorenny trilogy, The Roaring 40; and where twelve years earlier, she sets the seminal adventure of World’s End Was Home. Dad and his mate, Bert Longe, go prospecting for gold near Port Davey after the first world war when, trying to find a track to Crazy Bay, they stumble on Uncle Dan.

Three times she began a story that ends in belonging on the exact stretch of coast the verdict had established its beachhead. The reversal could not be more literal: Chauncy returned again and again to the specific beach Clarke had sentenced, and started her constructive books there.

Clarke’s judgement has proved extraordinarily durable. Other island literatures shadowed by intrusion or oppression – Ireland, Sicily – have produced sustained counter-narratives: fierce cultural pride, resilience, the affirmative chaos of a place finding itself and establishing its own status.

Tasmania has little equivalent. Its literary identity has stayed mostly one-dimensional: a site of suffering; a place to be endured, escaped, or mythologised from elsewhere. Many of the major writers tackling Tasmania in the 20th Century – such as Hal Porter, Peter Conrad, Richard Flanagan – have refined Clarke’s verdict without reversing it. Each offers a Tasmania confirming, in his own register, the island’s fundamental incapacity to sustain ordinary human flourishing.

The point is not that they are bad writers. Porter’s prose is extraordinary. Conrad is one of the finest critics of his generation. Flanagan deservedly won the Booker. Each, in the register he chose, is a serious writer doing serious work. The point is narrower. The reckoning of Tasmania has, for a century and a half, had basically one pole – a series of debits.

§1 – Porter: Belonging Refused

As two of his books show, like witnesses kept apart, Hal Porter sentenced the island twice – once in his own person, once in his art. The person arrived first. In 1946 he came to Hobart as Senior English Master at Hutchins, the island’s version of Eton, a century old that year, with a pub across the road and a library built over disused swimming baths into which, through a trapdoor, the school dropped its unwanted books. He describes it all – twenty years later – in the second volume of his autobiographical trilogy: The Paper Chase (1966).

On his first night after arriving in Hobart, in the midst of a gale and downpour, he lies in the shuddering rooftop penthouse of a boarding-house with pretensions. Instinct tells him that the island holds a taint no rain can wash away. Porter argues with himself – about the murderous atmosphere, the grisly tales, the inherited legends. He, like Conrad and many authors working outside the explicitly fictional novel, cannot help drawing reference to incest and all its associations.

By morning he has argued himself out of the dark thoughts – sailor lies, he tells himself, which are not to be credited. In Hobart he spends much of his free time dancing, dining, going to parties. And he observes.

The verdict he forms, then, is his own, and all the worse for being personally earned. He talks of ancestor pages deliberately cut or torn from early convict records, inbreeding and distorted gentility, dotty aunts and alcoholic cousins, crumbling mansions packed into a small, cold island. In a passage that the Tasmanian writer, Heather Rose, would unconsciously echo in 2025, it is not a place to whisper in. It is, he seems to imply, more like his initial fear: a hell here to which Hell is a crèche.

He had already revealed much of this verdict five years earlier: in his flamboyant novel, The Tilted Cross (1961). The story is set in Hobart of the 1840s – overlapping with Clarke’s own territory. The protagonist, Judas Griffin Vaneleigh, is a transported artist, a fragile dandy – based on the historical figure of Thomas Wainewright. The book’s inaugural sentence is Porter’s verdict compressed to fourteen words, as if taken from his never-forgotten first night in Hobart’s relentless downpour: Van Diemen’s Land, an ugly trinket suspended at the world’s discredited rump, was freezing. What follows reworks the Gothic inheritance – weather as assault, the town as cruelty’s theatre, a self not built there but unmade.

I creep away from this age of vulgarity, from the festering whispers, the smiling deliberate cruelty. I creep away from those with their veins filled with mud, those with the microscopic vision of the fly for filth, those crowding and squeezing and riding upon each other’s backs, those cutting each other to pieces with squeamish bigotry. […] I creep away. I am nothing.

The two registers feed off a common underlying vision. You can hear an echo of The Paper Chase in this passage. However, the style itself was perfected elsewhere. Porter grew up in Victoria; he wrote The Tilted Cross in Hedley. Porter, as an outsider, would try the island of Tasmania in person – seek to dismiss the inherited verdict. And yet he ended up reasserting it through both fiction and memoir. He tested the verdict and found it to be true.

§2 – Conrad: Belonging Recognised

Peter Conrad’s Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania (1988) performs the verdict differently. Conrad, born in Hobart in 1948, left for Oxford after graduating from the University of Tasmania in 1968 and subsequently built a career there. He went back almost two decades later as a visiting sophisticate – to catalogue, the dust jacket says, a Lilliput of wonders. The conceit is everywhere in the book. It’s a Lilliput, he writes, inhabited by Robinson Crusoes. The resulting work is a record of all he found: a place he could not live in, rendered into brilliant essay prose.

Down Home contains some of the finest sentences ever written about Tasmania. The Glenorchy passage, in which Conrad catalogues his childhood suburb’s mythic poverty, is characteristic. Glenorchy, he notes, is allegedly the facsimile of somewhere in Scotland – a British analogy that could not account for what was actually there. Considering the country more broadly, he notes the Aboriginal meanings have been erased, while the colonial names are misplaced metaphors, a cartography of elsewhere, a relativity of myths and attributions – sometimes misspelt, spread across a land which the settlers could not read on its own terms.

Walking the main road into town, Conrad finds a wonderland of ingenious mythology: the bear-skinned sentry painted into his box at the London Deli; the white-suited Kentucky colonel revolving on a plastic sign over tubs of frying chicken; the mural at Superwheels of affluent vehicles – Porsches, Trans-Ams, and Thunderbirds – above the hosed-down actualities, bonnets agape like slaves in the market-place showing their teeth; the Goliath cement works raising its bulbous grey pipe against the sky.

This is a devastating diagnosis of spiritual poverty, even as he cannot see that their equivalents are found as much in other countries, including Britain or America. He is searching for confirmation that his choice was right, and this critique helps supply it.

The book, read a second time, is an aesthetic performance that relies on the poverty it diagnoses. Conrad is not some unknown, living in Glenorchy. He is a celebrity, based in Oxford. The writer is standing at a distance. To the audience in his adopted town, the picture of Colonel Sanders is amusing. A resident of Glenorchy reading Conrad does not get to laugh; a reader in London does. The prose is written for a metropolitan audience to whom Tasmania is most probably a curiosity cabinet and the writer acts as their qualified guide.

Conrad is supremely aware of this. Late in the book he writes about the return itself – about feeling himself disappearing into the people and places I’d been made by, about the failure of the myth of self-invention he had imbibed. It is a genuine passage. He had even visited New York, he signals; and stayed long enough to pick up its local ideology.

But the recognition arrives late, and is delivered in the sophisticated register Oxford offered him. It sits in tension with other throw-away confessions: Tasmania was a convenient nowhere, he wrote. There must be a way out of it into the world. Tasmania was not the world. Indeed, he was famously unsparing of the island – his choice of words relentlessly lashing its narrowness or smallness in both physical and metaphorical ways. Insularity is a Tasmanian creed. He talks archly of people being arrested in the temporal frame. He feels again the suffocating moments. His whole intellectual persona was cast in opposition to the provinciality he felt he had to flee.

The recognition that he was made in this land does not undo the position he wrote it from. He reflects, Tasmania reminded me that we are all still pioneers, required to colonise the piece of ground which chance assigns us, make it our own by shaping it. And yet this is precisely what he has not done; instead fleeing for establishment and tradition.

Where Clarke’s convicts could not leave, Conrad could and did. The landscape remains something to be diagnosed from a distance, and the diagnosis is delivered for the amusement of the metropolis which had received and comforted the diagnostician. In the process, he picks up Nan Chauncy and portrays her life and her achievements without a flicker of understanding. ‘Slightly loony,’ his parents believe, and he does not contradict them. He has already laid the evidence a sentence before: ‘a tweedy lady.’

He condemns her work by association and her efforts through misrepresentation. In reading his description of Chauncy’s novel, They Found a Cave, I find it hard to believe we are reading the same text. He imposes a characterisation for which the evidence simply does not exist. Conrad talks about a sale, buying and selling the new world, colonial profiteering. John Marsden is lured into the same trap. The words are not there for this interpretation. As if working himself into a frenzy, Conrad links the stranded, evacuee English children struggling for their own happiness to a process, nowhere in the book, that turns the slaughter of Aborigines into imperial profit.

The chimera builds. He declares the book’s ending a call back to civilisation, and by implication England – a surprisingly leaden surface reading – from a supreme critic of the English language. Instead, the ending is a boy threatening his brother with a carving knife for speaking without respect about the Aboriginal dead. Nan’s words are there, consistent with the book overall, consistent with her behaviour throughout life – in line with her upbringing – and consistent with two of her greatest works: Tangara and Mathinna’s People – novels Conrad must know exist but refuses to acknowledge.

Indeed, what he suppresses is the trajectory of an argument in development: a career moving ever deeper – an individual Aboriginal skeleton in 1948, a young Aboriginal girl and her community in 1960, a whole civilisation narrated from within by 1967. I wonder if this lack of recognition is partly because Conrad’s own seminal moment came early on and never evolved further. In any case, he appears to cash in his fame, achieved from an armchair in the cloistral hush of Oxford, like a trump card to avoid the more pedestrian effort of substantiated argument.

It is a fantasy of wishful thinking – a mirage if we are being generous. Conrad cannot allow Chauncy to be insightful or her books to have worth because, then, the real escape – to Oxford and its towers – would have lost a key part of its unique value. As Conrad noted elsewhere in the book about writing in Tasmania, they are inscriptions on an unfriendly nowhere and metaphors of a cherished elsewhere. This is his own view. He uses nowhere fifteen times, as though a refrain.

And so, the direction of Clarke’s verdict stayed unchanged; Conrad just refined it into a dazzling essay of sophist virtuosity.

§3 – Flanagan: Belonging Reached

Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1994) is one of the deepest of the three engagements and the one that most fully transmutes Clarke’s verdict into something else. Flanagan’s Tasmania is not provincial, not narrow, not suffocating. It is the site of a cosmological reckoning.

Aljaz Cosini, the eponymous river guide, glimpses the problem early, like a child with something precious that it mistakes for a toy, he had broken what had held them together. And the shattered pieces could not be remade into a single item. His life until the end has been one of invisibility, drift, and accumulating bad choices. Maybe I was always drowning.

It is in the Franklin River and, in the long moment of his drowning, that he notes the Celtic knot – me the river or the river me – the entire island, the entire colonial heritage, the entire weight of what was done on and to the place before he was born. The closing passage contains some of the finest paragraphs in modern Australian writing.

The river remakes Aljaz as something else – gives him his belonging. But look at the cost: he achieves true connection in dying. Only in the annihilating moment are the pieces remade into a whole.

Flanagan’s magnificent prose is built around a radical premise: in Tasmania, belonging is not a condition of the living; it is, instead, a revelation at the point of death. The land will receive you, finally, when you can no longer walk on it.

Across his fiction this pattern holds. The fundamental relationship between person and place in Flanagan’s fiction is one of mutual destruction. His characters are broken. Tasmania is a site of repeated wounds: institutional corruption, Indigenous dispossession, postcolonial haunting, ecological loss. Flanagan’s vision is essentially tragic – and simultaneously magnificent in its devastating clarity.

This is Clarke elaborated into metaphysics. Clarke’s convicts were broken through institution; Flanagan’s characters are broken by history and ecology. Aljaz is not flogged. He is drowned by the accumulated weight of everything Tasmania has suffered. His arrival at a right relationship with his world – the river me – is, Flanagan sets out, indistinguishable from his extinction, indistinguishable almost from Dawes’s own end in Clarke’s grim tale. The verdict has become grander and more wide-ranging. But it has not been reversed.

§4 – The Common Register

Three writers, three decades, diverse literary products: wounded memoir, historical gothic, essayistic return – almost an apologia, mythopoeic novel. What they share is more important than what distinguishes them.

All three write Tasmania from a position of distance: temporal (as memoir or revisit), stylistic (Porter’s baroque adult voice), geographical (Conrad in Oxford), and metaphysical (Flanagan’s narrator already dead). Distance is not incidental to their achievements; it is constitutive. The performance of Porter’s life, the Gothic stylism of his novel; the metropolitan register of Conrad; the drowning-visionary of Flanagan – each demands the writer be, in some sense, no longer there. The books could not be written from inside the ongoing practice of living on the island.

And all three deliver books that a metropolitan reader would find congenial. Porter’s theatricality, Conrad’s Oxford eye, Flanagan’s tragic sublime – these travel broadly and well. They match the registers in which sophisticated readers in Melbourne, Sydney, Bloomsbury, and New York like to be told about provincial places.

Nothing in the various novels asks the reader to consider whether ordinary life on the island may be good, whether children may grow up well there, whether a family may be happy in a valley above Hobart. That question is not inside the register. It cannot be asked in Porter’s prose – or Conrad’s, or Flanagan’s. The prose itself forbids it.

Christopher Koch is the near-exception that defines the rule. He twice won the Miles Franklin and treated Tasmania with a constructive earnestness none of the other three matched. Many readers around me recall his books as positive and warm in a way numerous of his peers were not. However, his deepest engagement with the island shows exactly where the limits of that seriousness lay.

Out of Ireland (1999) gives Van Diemen’s Land its most sustained treatment in modern Australian fiction: the journal of Robert Devereux, a Young Ireland gentleman transported after the failed rising in 1848. Devereux’s journal names the island’s system in the oldest verdict-language available. He records that the probation system is Purgatorio. It is, he says, a system composed of three main circles through which a convict ascends toward his ticket-of-leave. Dante’s architecture, laid directly over the penal apparatus, by a narrator with a classical education and no reason to doubt the analogy.

The island changes Devereux: he comes to love an Irish convict woman there, Kathleen; he has a son. However, none of it can hold him – his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go. Even Koch’s most generous Tasmania is a place of passage: a purgatory one is refined in and released from – not a home. The island receives; it cannot keep. Koch’s impulse remained within Clarke’s gravitational field: the verdict softened, elaborated, made Dantean, but never reversed.

Part 3 – The Practice

There is, in fact, at least one author who wrote something different last century. And again, the writing proves the rule. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Wild Oats of Han (written 1908, published 1928) is the single earlier children’s book of a happy Tasmanian childhood – Launceston’s hills rendered as a golden world. But this, too, is a departure book: the family runs into trouble, the furniture auctioned, and Han must leave the island for Melbourne, her childhood falling from her as the chrysalis falls from a butterfly.

Childhood, in Prichard’s title and structure alike, is the wild oats sown before real life begins elsewhere; even for the island’s happiest child, Tasmania is not a place you can stay. Prichard’s narrative is positive, and yet not revolutionary. Only in Chauncy is the bush childhood not an antechamber to the world but the making of it, and staying is what the books are for.

The Vicky-on-the-Island scene this essay opened with is the culmination of a single sustained literary act, repeated multiple times across Chauncy’s twelve novels with rising stakes. Each instance ends with a child or young woman declaring her belonging to the land in the plainest possible terms, against an alternative the metropolitan culture would have valued much more highly. Each declaration is delivered without rhetorical apparatus and works because the prose is plain. The register makes the affirmation possible; but it is a register the metropolitan canon struggles to read.

Two reversals are at work in Chauncy, and they should be distinguished. They operate on different axes, and they do different kinds of cultural work.

The first is the reversal of Clarke’s verdict. The island is no longer the place that breaks you; it is the place that makes you. The same geography that Clarke turned into a natural penitentiary, Chauncy turns into a site of formation. The mountains that closed off the convict’s horizon and separate them, like Conrad, from the world become the ridgelines that make all the world for the Lorenny family. The forest that could not be eaten becomes the bush in which Cherry learns to belong. The sea that would not let men flee becomes the channel by which Dallie is delivered to World’s End.

If we were to extend Nan’s reversal further into children’s literature, the tree as fate – which kills Judy in Seven Little Australians; as an event, shocking to the book’s readers, but in line with Clarke’s vision of Australia – becomes in Chauncy something explained, not menacing. It is a tree that allows Tess to write, with a charred stick the initials of their names and of Tess’s brother (T.O.R.), letters which one of their rescuers – Sven – then recarves with a sharp knife. The act becomes a means for the women’s discovery. And it is a tree that blocks forever Cleft Rock, allowing the present to live again.

Chauncy reuses each of Clarke’s elements, but for the opposite purpose. This is a symbolic transformation, one which I have already signalled through the character of Dr Henderson and his thesis in my novel, Tasmania Bella: the same qualities that made Tasmania a living hell – its isolation, its wildness, its distance from the metropolitan centre – now make it a site of liberation.

The second reversal is more difficult to name and is, finally, the more consequential of the two. It is the move from vision to practice.

Porter, Conrad, and Flanagan all produce visionary literature. Each, in his own register, offers a picture of Tasmania – Porter the picture of a place where past and present fuse in almost Gothic fashion; Conrad the picture of an oddity legible only from the metropolis; Flanagan the picture of a land that receives the dying. The pictures are powerful – in Flanagan’s case breathtaking. They sit comfortably inside serious literature, one which a metropolitan readership has long recognised and valued. They depict; they diagnose; and they mythologise. The reader looks again at the island through a writer’s sharp eye and intellectual acuity. The audience savours the finesse – the ballet of words.

Chauncy produces something different – and it is partly the difficulty of naming it that has kept her invisible within literary scholarship. Call it a literature of habitation: fiction in which the question of how to live in a place is taken up and answered, over and over, by the protagonists inhabiting it. Cherry sweeps the cave with a broom of gum-leaves. Dallie stacks shingles for Uncle Dan as he splits sawed logs on an old stump as a workbench. Tess threads raw fish onto a knitting-needle for cooking. Vicky knots her bloomers’ elastic and skins a snake for a belt. The bush in Chauncy is not what the eye sees; it is what the individual encounters. The land is not a vision, but a practice.

Three things follow from the distinction.

First, the visionary register is what canon-formation has been built to recognise. Vision is portable. It travels from the periphery to the metropolis and arrives intact – a Tasmanian river still drowns Aljaz Cosini in Bloomsbury, a Tasmanian suburb is still a Lilliput in the London Review of Books. Practice does not travel in the same way. The half-finished sock around Tess’s bad knee, Cherry’s stuttered toast, Dallie’s silent three-beat cry – these depend on the reader having enough sympathy with the doing-of-life on the island to register when the doing becomes a declaration. A metropolitan reader trained to parse vision will look through these moments and miss them.

The register is as inaccessible to an au courant cosmopolitan adult today working their way through Roald Dahl and seeing no more than a structure of discourse. How to explain the child impact? How to explain the genius?

Second, the practice register is incompatible with the positions from which the visionary authors write. You cannot write I belong! I belong! I belong! with serious meaning in Oxford. You cannot write it grandly, with a baroque adult voice – so wonderful but one recalling only the cold and the rain, the whispers and the cuts. You cannot write it from within a drowning vision. The statement would become something quite different.

A visionary register demands the writer to be, in some sense, no longer there – and the moment the writer is no longer there, the practice register becomes unutterable. The constructive declaration cannot be made from a distance. It can only be made from inside the doing.

Third, the practice register has its own moral weight, and it is in some respects heavier than the visionary one. To write ‘Tasmania is a tragic place’ is to make a statement that the world is ready to accept as true. To write instead ‘Tasmania is a place where ordinary life, conducted with care, is good’ is to stake a claim – it is to tie one’s prose to an assertion the metropolitan culture trained on irony or tragedy is structurally disposed to regard as just naïve. Chauncy made that claim repeatedly in her novels, and pulled it off each time without sentimentality and without mockery. It is a singular achievement.

This is not a criticism of Porter, Conrad, or Flanagan. Each is a serious writer doing serious work within a register the culture rewards. The visionary register will always be more critically prestigious. It is what metropolitan culture wants above all. The point is, instead, an acknowledgement that the culture’s reward system has a big hole in it. The practice register is what a metropolitan society has trouble recognising. However, it is where Tasmania’s only constructive literary tradition resides. It is a register the canon is least equipped to see.

To recover Chauncy is to recognise that hole, and to begin to fill it. Three-quarters of a century have passed, and practice is often missed as an achievement worth understanding and praise. It is time we reconsidered.

Part 4 – A Tasmania with Two Poles

If the tragic vision is the only canonical Tasmanian literature – if the island’s literary identity remains damage, guilt, claustrophobia, and grief – then the picture is not just incomplete but actively limiting. It becomes difficult to imagine Tasmania as a place one inhabits by choice. The island risks collapsing, in literary and popular imagination alike, into a single dimension: a place defined by what was done to it, a wounded place, a dark place.

The canons we build shape not only what we remember but what we believe is possible. A single-pole literature makes our interpretive framework brittle. It constrains what readers expect and what writers attempt. The attachment to a single story produces, over time, a culture not knowing its fullest potential.

Compare this with how other literary traditions have handled tough places. Hardy gave Wessex both its darkness and its nourishment – Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Under the Greenwood Tree exist in the same landscape. Joyce gave Ireland Dubliners and the affirmative chaos of Ulysses. Sicily has Lampedusa’s aristocratic elegy and Andrea Camilleri’s creative vitality. In each case, the canonical literature has held both poles – the tragic and the constructive, the damage and the recovery – and the result is an identity rich enough to reflect the complexity of the place itself.

Adding Chauncy to the Tasmanian canon does not soften Flanagan’s vision or diminish it. It expands the picture. Chauncy offers the other pole: a Tasmania where human beings can flourish in right relationship with the land. Tasmania’s identity without her is a portrait painted with half a palette. The picture with her becomes chiaroscuro, and is all the more dramatic for the addition.

Indeed, the second pole is, at last, beginning to rise in adult fiction. Heather Rose is a Stella Prize winner and resident in Tasmania. She authored a memoir whose title, Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here, plays against the island’s dark literary identity. Rose published in 2025 A Great Act of Love: her first historical novel, in which a young woman flees London around 1837 for Van Diemen’s Land to build a life there, amid a small, indiscreet colony of exiles and opportunists. She doesn’t simply endure one – but actively builds it. Caroline Douglas buys an unoccupied cottage, while posing to others as no more than a tenant, and beside it an abandoned vineyard. She sets about her successful reinvention upon an island where the seasons are upside down and wild occupants outnumber humans.

In the terms of this essay, it is a constructive Tasmanian novel – the register Chauncy built on the children’s shelf arriving in adult fiction over seventy-five years later. The novel’s colonial Tasmania is a place where the making of a life is possible, written by an author who chose to stay. The pole Chauncy established alone seems, at last, to be acquiring new writers. This is precisely why the recovery matters now: something vital might be emerging, but the seminal work has been forgotten.

There is a broader principle at stake. There is a moment in my novel Tasmania Bella when a retired judge, Ms Rebus, takes three younger women to Port Arthur – her idea, a pilgrimage, with a copy of Clarke’s novel, For the Term of His Natural Life, she had found in the cottage’s living room. At the site she declines assistance with the dry authority of her profession: I’ve got Clarke. We’ll manage.

Inside the ruins she speaks of Rufus Dawes, wrongly convicted and shipped to Van Diemen’s Land, and of what the sanitised exhibits leave out: the blood, the stench, the moment the lash touches a healing wound. Flogging, she tells them, was not just cruelty: It was policy – bureaucratized pain. And at the closing of the classic, Ms Rebus notes, there is no rescue. Dawes is not saved. Sylvia does recall him – speaks his name, Richard, just once – but only as they drift over the sea and die together on the raft. ‘That’s Clarke’s mercy,’ Ms Rebus says, ‘right at the end: simply recognition, not redemption. I read that at thirty and wept.’

I wrote the scene because I wanted to test a question the novel could not ask directly: what does it take to stop reading Tasmania through Clarke’s eyes? The judge reads Clarke with the care he deserves. She does not flinch from the verdict his novel delivers. But she also knows – and the trip to Port Arthur is in part designed to show the younger women – that endurance is not the only story an island can tell about itself.

The other story has been on the children’s shelf for almost eighty years. It was written by a woman who lived for the most formative years of her life in a valley above Hobart, choosing not to leave when fame arrived. She wrote twelve novels in which children grow up well in Tasmania; Chauncy’s characters, like her, choose their world over other possibilities. To recover Chauncy – to connect her to such modern writers as Heather Rose – is to expand the literary identity of Tasmania and reveal its greater potential.

Part 5 – What Recovery Requires

What does it take to bring a writer back? In past cases the act of recovery was not a scholarly program or a committee decision but an individual with authority saying: ‘Look at this. It has been here all along.’ The machinery followed. Publishers reissued. Reviewers reconsidered. University courses adjusted their reading lists. The writer re-entered the conversation.

However, recovered authors have at least enjoyed a platform to be recovered onto: still in print, or available in libraries and second-hand shops. Chauncy’s return faces a harder problem: her books have almost disappeared. Text Classics and John Marsden fired the starting gun. However, the barriers are still there.

Republication is a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient one. Critical work is essential – the kind of close reading that can show what the books do. And even then, criticism alone will not complete the recovery. Chauncy needs to be read – not studied, not assigned, not added to a list, but read. The novels need to return to the hands of children and adults who might then see what her original readers had experienced: the physical immediacy of the Tasmanian bush, the moral seriousness she granted her young protagonists, the quiet insistence that attentiveness to place – a mix of care and cooperation – is not something small, an auxiliary to real life, but instead a virtue which constitutes part of the foundation for a moral existence.

This is what distinguishes true literary recovery from merely academic rehabilitation. A writer who is studied but not read has been archived, not returned. Recovery means bringing the work back to the condition in which it was created: to be encountered by readers who come to it not because a syllabus demanded it, but because the writing itself drew them and compelled them to stay.

Recovering Chauncy is not an act of nostalgia. It is not a sentimental return to a simpler literary era, nor a patriotic reclamation of an Australian voice, nor even charity toward some minor writer who deserves a footnote. It is an act of cultural repair – a recognition that the most important work is not always the most visible, that the periphery can reshape the centre, and that children’s literature can carry the weight of a culture’s deepest concerns. It is also a recognition that the mechanisms we rely on to identify and preserve literary achievement have, in this case, failed.

What recovery requires, in the end, is the reader looking closely. And the clearest demonstration of what such close looking yields is in Chauncy’s opening pages to Tiger in the Bush (1957).

Coda – Tiger in the Bush

The seminal introduction in this book makes the reversal explicit. Badge’s father has been bushed in the mist, prospecting for gold:

Dad found himself not a step away from a drop of about eight hundred feet […] The mists cleared, the sun shone briefly, but Dad was still there – still staring down. For Dad was learning every feature of the valley, he was telling himself this was ‘it’, the place he had always hoped to find.

Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur saw cliff-edges as a natural barrier. Clarke illustrated the risk to men, that they might go over. In Chauncy, Dad stops at the cliff; looks down. The eight-hundred-foot fall is nearly the altitude of the drop at Cape Pillar. What differs is the direction of the gaze. Arthur and Clarke looked down and saw a lifetime sentence. Dad looks down and sees the valley he has been longing to find his entire life. He sees a home.

The proof of the reversal is the working sentence that follows: He may even have been worrying then about how to cross the Gordon with supplies. The cliff edge has been converted, in a single clause of practical concern, from a precipice into a domestic-oriented logistics problem. Here is Chauncy’s reversal of Clarke, working on the very same topographical feature. The natural prison has been reworked into a home and garden.

‘The world as ‘Badge’ Lorenny knew it was just home – home tucked between the rough-wrought mountains of Tasmania like a drop of dew between cabbage leaves.’

Chauncy concedes the geography. The mountains remain rough-wrought. But the simile converts the same geography from a holding-pen into a nursery: a drop of dew, sheltered by cabbage leaves, in a kitchen garden. Marcus Clarke’s mountains closed off the convict’s horizon. Chauncy’s mountains do not crush the home they encircle; they cup it. The boy whose world is bounded by them is not buried by them. He is nurtured.