Daughter Of The Plateau

By Karen Harrland

What does it mean to have no place to call home, and no family to turn to? 

 

Manna, named for the regal white gums and yellow-tailed black cockatoos of the Central Highlands of Tasmania, was a

• Language: English
• Publisher: Forty South Publishing Pty Ltd
• Release date: Aug 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780648532996

Karen Harrland

Karen's first book, a memoir called Spinifex Baby, won the National 2014 Finch Memoir Prize. She now lives on the side of kunanyi (Mt Wellington) in Tasmania, not too far from the Central Plateau where this story begins. The North-West Bay River runs past her property and where the river meets the sea she works as a storytelling teacher at the local Primary School.For a number of years, Karen and her family were Reserve Managers on isolated conservation reserves both in the Simpson Desert and outside of Broken Hill. They worked hard to repair and support the country and lived deeply entwined and connected to the landscape.Whenever possible, Karen will be found writing, bushwalking or swimming in the beautiful Tasmanian wilderness.

Book preview

Karen Harrland’s story unfolds with blood and tears and yet has the warmth of a remote hut’s fireside in a snowstorm.

Like a great stag’s antlers, Karen Harrland’s Tasmanian story enfolds the reader in both the beauty and terror of life far beyond the city lights.

A stirring and beautiful story which, like the waves of the Southern Ocean, never falters.

A strong and fierce girl, iced-up thugs and worldly-wise women in remote Tasmania: the perfect book for a snowy night, a fireside whisky and desperate hope that things might get better.

—Bob Brown

environmentalist

A born storyteller, Karen Harrland delivers a suspenseful and confronting Tasmanian drama – that once you start reading you won’t be able to put down.

Karen strikes gold with a tale about a girl named Manna, growing up with troubled parents in an isolated cabin in the Tasmanian wilderness. The story tells of Manna’s travels to the far corners of Tasmania, searching for purpose and reason. Manna wants to know why her mother left her as a little girl in the mountains and why her father abandoned her too, at age fourteen, to fend for herself alone in Hobart.

Karen takes you on Manna’s terrifying journey of discovery and reconciliation with ease and elegance.

—Don Defenderfer

author

Karen Harrland’s Daughter of the Plateau is a love letter to Tasmania’s immense landscapes and powerful coasts. From the raw splendour of the plateau to the unbridled energy of the west coast, Harrland captures Tasmania’s nature in visceral detail, with compelling effect. Her beautifully drawn characters are a celebration of human relationships in all their richness and complexity.

— Stephenie Cahalan

Doctoral Researcher and author of

Colour and Movement: The life of Claudio Alcorso

A provocative, affecting and uniquely Tasmanian novel. This book has the guts to tackle darker aspects of the human condition and the sensitivity to honour its treasures.

— Mandy Renard

Tasmanian landscape artist and printmaker

Heartfelt, emotional but straight to the point. A wonderful journey of a young woman discovering herself and the world around her.

— Asha Dermer

16-year-old adventurer

Daughter of the Plateau

© Karen Harrland 2022

ISBN 978-0-6485329-9-6

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover art and fern motif by Deborah Wace

Published by Forty South Publishing Pty Ltd, Hobart, Tasmania

fortysouth.com.au

Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group, Victoria

mcphersonsprinting.com.au

For my husband Alistair Dermer

for believing in me.

To my children Asha, Clay and Zavier.

Stay true to your own paths in life.

To the young people who are finding their way in world. I see your courage. You bring joy and hope for the future.

Contents

Stan

Manna

The North West

The hut

Ocean tears

Reunion

Everyone makes mistakes

The hangover

Surf and tea

The paintings

Sorting it out

Womanhood

The walk

Headlights

Healing

Back in the surf

Dan

The whale rescue take 2

Love

The clean up

Fire and ice

A new belonging

The explanation

Police

Forgiving the unforgivable

Back to the high country

Lake Sorell

Queen of the fungi

The deer hunter

A slow waltz with the wind

1

Stan

Stan rested the barrel of his rifle on a moss-covered fence post, his ears alert for deer. He peered through the shroud of mist which threaded through the stringybark forest like a worn fishing net. He heard nothing. No tell-tale grunts, no bushes rustling. He relaxed his shoulders but stayed in his pose. The stag he was looking for was a cunning bastard. He’d been trying to get him for years, but the old fella seemed to get wilier with age. Stan knew he’d lost all sense of reason as to why he wanted him. It wasn’t the meat: he had more than enough of that with his handful of sheep, the rabbits he trapped, and the plentiful deer.

Stan hated that big stag with a passion. Sure, it trashed his forest, ate everything that should be tucker for the little native fellas and produced offspring to continue the damage. But really, if he thought hard about it, he reckoned his obsession must have something to do with his lost wife and his lost daughter.

He and Sarah had moved out to the hut twenty-odd years ago. They’d met when she was at one of those anti-logging meetings of all things. It was down in the Liffey Valley, where the old growth rainforest met the sheer cliffs of Dry’s Bluff. He’d been doing his best to sell the hippies some fresh roo meat. Not that they bought any, vegetarians they reckoned, as if he could ever have such a choice!

He’d sat at their fire for a while, making the most of their flagon of port. She’d said she liked how he was so ‘grass roots’. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He’d brought her back to the hut for a visit, thinking he’d make it nice and romantic, but to also let this hippy chick know what being out bush was really like: cold and hard. He’d been surprised when she’d said that she loved it.

Of course, it was too good to be true. The chance of him hooking up with such a beautiful, smart woman was bloody slim and he figured he’d better keep their life pretty quiet so that she’d forget about the rest of the world and not feel tempted to leave him. They made their living from the hut, shooting deer, rabbits, roos and whatever else they could eat. They got pretty good at growing food too; with the lake nearby, they had all the water they needed, not to mention fish.

Thinking back on it, he might have gone a bit overboard on the isolation thing; it might have been better if she’d had someone to talk to. A wasp sting of remorse burned in his gut, but he shook it off. Bugger it, she’d made her choices too: it wasn’t his fault she was weak and couldn’t handle it. He’d always put food on the table and a roof over their heads. His thoughts hardened, pushing away the self-loathing that might tip him into madness.

He’d grown up mostly in town, Bothwell. It was a funny little half-arsed place on the edge of the Central Plateau and his Dad liked to say it looked over the rest of Tasmania. They had one of those crumbling stone houses on the outskirts of town, not one of the flash ones done up with roses out the front, but the sort with car wrecks in the paddock.

Once Dad got sick and stopped his wood-hooking business, Stan had to haul the wood as well as take on all the shooting to bring in meat for the littl’uns, while Mum worked herself to death sewing for the town. He’d be out hunting and hauling wood all day, then fall asleep at night hearing the ‘thump, thump’ of her foot, pumping the treadle up and down on the old Singer.

Mum and Dad had died within a year of each other: Dad of cancer of the lung, too many smokes, then Mum from a broken heart. A heart that broke from too much hard work, that is.

He was fourteen when the social services came in their fancy car. He remembered the resignation in their eyes as they looked at what remained of his family. They told him he couldn’t look after his three siblings, though he’d made it pretty clear that he could. He’d even yelled at all the kids to take off and go bush. The bastards were too quick. They pulled out a bag of lollies and had the boys bundled in the car with the doors locked before you could blink.

They’d cried too, especially little Maisie, his favourite. She’d known better than to go for the lollies. She’d clung to him screaming, her nails digging into his arm as they dragged her away. He rubbed his forearm as he stood in the forest and remembered her dark eyes as she pressed her face against the window.

After he’d lost the littl’uns he’d felt like he’d been set adrift, like those icebergs he’d heard about near the North Pole. He’d refused to get in the car with them and they said they’d come back, but if they did, he’d been long gone. He knew how to take care of himself.

‘Living from the land.’ He’d smirked when Sarah had explained that all her friends thought it was so ‘cool’. Sarah was all sunshine and roses then, talking hippy crap about getting away from civilisation.

He picked up his gun and walked across the paddock. The late afternoon hour had subdued the almost constant wind but the air, as he breathed it into his lungs, was sharp, as though there was snow coming. His boots were soaked – the mossy grass was wet ten months of the year, the other two the ground was frozen solid. The green blades caught a beam of sun just as it edged below the mountain behind him.

He’d ‘lived from the land’, ’cos no-one else was going to feed him. But still, it had made his wife feel good, to get rid of all the ‘capitalist stuff’ as she called it. She’d arrived with her long hair and beads. Oh, he remembered that hair: it was the colour of the world when there was nothing else left, the night sky on a cloudy night, so dark it sucked the light like black velvet. He had been convinced he wouldn’t need anything else once he had her, and beside the odd whisky, it had been pretty much true.

In those days, he’d figured that he was strong enough; he survived with muscle and attitude. Dismissive of those soft pansy boys she was with when he’d met her, with their ‘Save the Forest’ stickers and peace signs. He guessed that’s what she had been looking for – not that she’d ever admit it – someone who could take care of her and who knew how to be a man.

Stan walked up the two steps of the cottage, leant his rifle against the wall and knocked the wallaby shit off his boots. He levered them off, then, after picking up two large chunks of stringy bark, pushed open the timber door and went inside. His eyes adjusted to the gloom and he knelt by the fire, neatly moving the charred log aside to fit the new pieces, stoking the flames so they licked around the wood, seducing it into its warmth.

He sat at the melamine table, on the timber chairs they’d found on the side of the road all those years ago and brought in on the back of his Dad’s old Holden ute, the one that was still parked in the shed. He carefully lit the kerosene lantern then, in the flickering light, poked the kettle on the stove to a warmer spot.

Sarah liked it at first, doted on the house and made it a home, crocheted new beanies for them both, then a tea cosy. She’d scrubbed every corner of the old house, till the dark floorboards gleamed and the fireplaces were spotless. They’d re-planted the veggie patch, laughing together as they slipped in the mud and slop, then made love out there, on a pile of soft moss. His fingers rubbed together, remembering the feel of her soft skin.

They’d worked side by side to build a fence to protect the young seedlings that braved the mountain air. He’d shown her how to tend the dope plants and hide them among the tomatoes. ‘That’s paying for our kerosene,’ he explained, ‘and it’s our entertainment in the winter’. She laughed at him, but soon took to it herself. They both did, probably a bit too much.

A smile twitched his lips as he stared into the flames, remembering how she would scream at the hungry roos that invariably broke in. She’d clanged saucepans together and chased them across the paddock while he laughed. They’d been happy, happier than he could have imagined. He’d bring home a fresh deer to eat and she’d turn it into a stew that would last them days. They had no fridge or electric power. They’d put the pot outside to keep it fresh during the day: it was certainly cold enough.

Then the baby came. To be expected of course. It was what she’d always wanted, or at least said she did. She wouldn’t go into hospital. ‘It has to be born at home,’ she said. ‘It’s the natural way, a woman’s right.’ Then, of course, he’d had to help her. As much as he’d lay down his life for her, he felt that was women’s business, that was. She should’ve had other women there, not him.

He was useless. The blood was horrifying. It seeped out of his wife in dark pools. Then there was the screaming, the gore. Seeing her beautiful cunt being ripped to shreds like a piece of meat. Still, it wasn’t that different from lambing when it came to it and the baby was strong when she was finally born. Thank God for that.

The child reminded him of his little lost Maisie. Dark hair grew into curls that he teased, twirling them round his finger and letting them bounce back into place. Her curls, just like Maisie’s, attracted feathers and dirt as naturally as mist clung the mountains. She was a sweet thing, little Manna. Wild too, he remembered with a grin. It had taken a lot to teach her to stay still and silent as he lined up a deer in the scope.

Stan got up and reached for a white china cup from the top shelf. It had a slight chip in it and a trace of blue flowers around the top. It had been his wife’s favourite and sometimes he found himself using it. More than sometimes, if he was honest with himself. As he poured boiling water over the tea-leaves tears, rolled down his cheeks. They fell onto his worn, lined hand. He wiped his eyes with the frayed sleeve of his jumper.

She’d pushed the baby away at first, saying it wasn’t hers, she didn’t want it. Said she was scared she would hurt it. He remembered pushing it back onto her, like he’d done with abandoned lambs that needed feeding. She’d screamed at him, lost in her well of tears, but eventually she gave in and fed her baby. Fed her, but not much else. She’d sat for weeks – or was it months? – in her dark room in the hut while he’d washed out the bits of rag they used as diapers and rocked the baby at night by the fire. The little’un was good too, didn’t cry too much. He had to go out hunting in the end and get them more food. Sarah got a bit better and took the baby round with her as she did some chores, didn’t leave her screaming as much. He watched her though – she was pale as a ghost and had a distant look.

He let that little girl creep right into his heart. She was his shadow, always tugging on his coat or following him a few trees behind, even when she’d been told to stay put. He taught her to hunt and fish. In turn, she taught him when her Mum needed a hug or a cup of tea. He thought they did all right as they stumbled along.

Sarah gave Manna all the schooling he’d never had while he showed her the ways of the animals: how to work out where the deer had been, or how winter was finally broken with the first sight of the slow circles of the swamp harrier, back from its overwinter on the mainland. She was a good kid. Stan’s heart seemed to fold in on itself when he thought of her, years ago, back when she was a young girl running along behind him, and he was still loving her as a father should.

He stared into the flames for a long while, then tipped his cup back and finished the last drops. He gazed unseeing into the cup nestled in his hands.

Even after all that, Sarah had run away like a rat in the night. She’d dragged her suitcase the whole way down the pitted and corrugated road. It was part of the reason he didn’t follow her. He figured that she’d never get far.

It had taken an hour or two of pacing the veranda before he realised she’d meant it and he should probably go after her, but by that time she was hidden in the bush. It was dark as sin and he had to turn back. The road was still covered with fallen trees after the last storm and the kid was home by herself.

The following day, the only sign of his wife was drag marks, and they led all the way to the bitumen. He’d stewed over it for a few days, then got his ute started and drove into town. One of the locals, an old bastard, was in the pub holding up the bar, his beer gut spilling from under his woollen jumper. He let Stan know that his missus had been seen on the road. A log hauler had taken pity on her and given her a lift down off the plateau in his Mack truck. Taking a deep swig at his pint, his lips still wet, the old man had said, with a glance at Stan, ‘She was dragging that suitcase behind her like a crazy woman.’

Stan put another log on the fire and carried the lantern to his bedroom. He took off his jumper and trousers and climbed into his iron bed – its springs long since gone, the mattress propped up with some adzed timber. He lay awake a long time, opening and closing his hands, trying to clutch a memory of long dark hair in his fist.

2

Manna

She could smell him. A pungent moonshine whisky that Stan traded furs and firewood for. ‘Smells like oak and barley,’ he used to say, slurring the words together. She thought it smelt like fear. The stench came more often that winter than it ever had before. Manna sat in the high-backed timber chair and watched as flames curled up the stone fireplace. The amber shapeshifting would normally soothe her, the flames forming faces that turned into the two people she knew and those she only imagined, but today the flames only danced with each other. Manna sat on her hands, as if this could still her. She knew he expected her to wait for him.

The stag’s head was nailed, crudely, onto the wall. It sat staring outwards. The separation between her and the deer blurred as she looked into its eyes. Her legs seemed pinned against their will, instead of carrying her running into the paddocks, where the tufts of poa and wallaby grass had been eaten into a lawn, studded with twisted gums which stood as sentinels to towering scree slopes, where she would flee, if she could, away from him and that sorrow-filled hut.

She felt a stirring deep within her as she gazed at the smooth pelt of the deer. This past winter she had felt like she was budding, as wattles did before they burst with yellow blossom. Her slight, gangly figure was beginning to force itself into a woman’s form. Small mounds pushed out the front of her woollen jumper. New curves appeared. She found herself running her hands over her shape.

Her eyes traced the slender neck and angular face of the deer until they reached the glassy death in his eyes. She kept her hands buried under her thighs, but they twitched, aching to reach above the fireplace to stroke the velvet fur.

She remembered her father mounting the stag’s head that last winter, hammering the long nails in with loud, even strokes. Ice squalls threw themselves at the window and wind threatened to bend the hut in two like it would a young eucalypt. That winter was so long and so cold, she thought they would either be submerged or frozen solid in the unrelenting storms of snow, ice and rain. That terrible winter was a long time after her mother had disappeared, gone like the frost on the wooden fence posts after the sun touches it.

…

A hand shook her shoulder. ‘You with me Manna?’

‘Oh, Dan! What…?’ Manna looked through blurry eyes at the crowded bar, swiping her mouth with her sleeve for traces of sleep drool. The room hummed with the Friday night crowd.

Shaking the mountains from behind her eyes, she stretched and hugged the big man looming over her. His stubbled face scratched hers and, still half asleep, she shrank back. Her eyes came to focus on area sight over Dan’s shoulder.

The deer’s head was mounted over the bookcase that was filled with stories and poems by writers such as Hemingway and Plath. She stared with disgust at the head, much smaller than the ones she had known in the forest in which she’d grown up, but nailed in much the same undignified manner to the wall.

Manna leant towards the polished table, reaching for her beer. She rubbed her eyes and yawned as Dan sank into the chesterfield opposite. The leather creaked as the big man slumped and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘I’m buggered,’ he said. ‘Good to be here though.’ He nodded at his beer before he lifted the pint to his mouth and swallowed a large mouthful. She pushed her dream into a corner of her mind and dragged herself back to the present. She’d missed Dan while he’d been away, even though a smell like a dead seal hovered around him.

She leaned away from him, fanning the air. ‘Jeez Dan, you stink!’

‘Yeah, probably do. Sorry. I didn’t have time to shower. Want to sit outside?’

Manna shook her head, ‘Nope, it’s freezing out, forecast to snow down to two hundred metres tonight. We’ll be right, I’ll try not to breathe in.’ She grinned. ‘So, how did it go? Looks like I need to get you another beer already!’ Her words tripped over each other as she tried to regain her bearings. She filled her gaze with his large frame and smiling eyes and felt her shoulders relax. She stretched her arms above her head, pushed dark tendrils from her face, then tied her hair into a loose bun.

Dan paused, his eyes fixed on her.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

He glanced down his half empty glass. ‘Oh, nothing, sorry. Still adjusting to being back in society.’ He took another swallow. ‘The trip was bloody great. I’m stuffed though. We just finished unloading the ute, I’ll have to go back in the morning to sort it properly. The meat’s in the fridge, that’s the important thing.’ He leaned back.

Manna raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Meat? As in…?’ You could never tell with Dan what it would be. The last few trips he had collected Tasmanian devils, wombats, even the almost non-existent swift parrot.

Dan picked up his beer and took a long swallow, draining the other half of the pint. ‘This Moo Brew is good.’

Manna rolled her eyes but stayed silent.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Oh, sorry Manna, what was I saying?’

‘The animal, Dan. What was it?’

‘Oh, that’s right. It was a whale. Pygmy whale, to be exact. It was dead by the time we got to the beach.’

Manna grimaced, reaching a hand to him in sympathy, but he shrugged.

‘There was nothing we could do. It stank to bloody high heaven. We had to bring some back for DNA testing. It went into the cool room with the rest.’

The rest? Manna’s mind wandered for a moment down the Nature Conservation Branch’s storage unit – along alleyways