“No wind is of service to him that is bound for nowhere.”
French Proverb
Wind. JB and I would sit out the back of the shack, and play our didgeridoos. He had a real Yidaki eucalypt drone pipe, six feet long, hollowed out by termites, painted by a Yolngu from Arnhem Land, with wild black beeswax around the ‘sugarbag’ mouthpiece, and the non-harmonic spaced resonances that he produced with his asymmetric instrument.
I had length of PVC plastic pipe with a rubber stopper, but I kept up the circular breathing and vocalizations of my own aural kaleidoscope of timbres, imitating dingoes and kookaburras and thunder, and wind.
During the Age of Sail, it was another kind of wind, the Roaring Forties that ‘ran the easting down,’ and took the last breath from the last thylacine tiger, and the indigenous people that had lived there for at least 35,000 years. It was the site of the worst atrocities against the black man, the place of bread buttered with arsenic for the unsuspecting, and the terminal Black Line beating, in the hunt for the last survivors.
During the Royal visit of 1868, the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Alfred, at the 28th Derwent River regatta, met ‘the last representative of the Tasmanian Aboriginal race, King Billy and the old woman Trugannini.’ King Billy’s other name was William Lanne, and he was the last captured male to die.
Even his death in 1869 gave him no respect. Dr Lodewyk Crowther removed his head at the Colonial Hospital, in the name of science. Neither it, nor the tobacco pouch that was made out of his scrotum, has ever been found. By 1876, the entire population of Tasmanian aborigines had been annihilated.
In the 50 years from 1803 to 1853, those same winds had brought more than 75,000 convicts to Van Diemen's Land.
‘They call it the end of the world, and for vice it is truly so. For here wickedness flourishes unchecked.’
Tasmania, haunted by extinction, was the first place in the Southern Sea where the headhunters and the cannibals had been the white guys.
Alexander Pearce had eaten all seven of the other convicts that escaped with him from Macquarie Harbor in 1822. He had originally been transported from Ireland for ‘the theft of six pairs of shoes, but he did himself one better, as he and his mates traversed the west coast, on the way back to Hobart.
‘And I said, right there’s another one, don’t you frown,
Chew the meat and hold it down, It’s a tale they won’t believe
When I get down to Hobart town.’
Weddings Parties Anything, A Tale they Won't Believe
His captors eventually found parts of one of the bodies in Pearce's pockets. He was executed at the Hobart Town Gaol at 9am on July 19, 1824, after receiving the last rites from Father Connolly. Just before he was hanged, Pearce said, ‘Man’s flesh is delicious. It tastes far better than fish or pork.’
The wind caused more tragedy, when Robyn and I returned to Tassie, in 1998. The Bluewater Classic Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, over a thousand miles of high winds and difficult seas and ‘southerly buster’ storms, was widely considered to be one of the most difficult yacht races in the world. Of the 115 boats that left Sydney on Boxing Day, only 44 eventually made it to Hobart. Five boats sank and six people died. We hung around the winner’s boat, Sayonara, but no one was in a celebratory mood.
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