It was a warm summer’s day; the overly ‘fresh’ smell from the fishing boats mingled with the aroma of thousands of herded, bundled, tightly penned sheep waiting to board the next freighter. My cousins and their friends and I were sitting on, in, and around my grandfather’s boat, in the various gaps between our family members, as we diligently lived up to the old saying ‘kids were seen and not heard’. My father, grandfather and a few of my uncles had been talking and began to move between boats, settling into dad’s wheelhouse.
After a pause in the conversation, my grandfather decided he was driving back to his house where we were staying. He gently hinted we should join him, but I decided to walk.
As we slowly left the pier, leaving my father’s boat tied to my grandfather’s boat, I could see my Uncle Bruce was coming to the shore in his usual daredevil manor, on his small, sixteen-foot aluminium dinghy, after mooring his boat on an offshore line. Between the boat and the shore were the crayfish coffs, mooring buoys and a myriad of other small and large fishing boats.
Looking back at the wharf, I could hear my great grandfather’s putt-putt gently chugging between the islands as it headed back to his mooring in the family bay.
Where does legacy begin, where is the local history at its most powerful, is it something we see and hear at the time or something we recall as we get older, as a fond memory, and what details do we remember?
As I walked past the fish factory with its unique odour, I remembered how I’d seen this factory change from its previous iteration. How it now represented the latest machinery and processes for cooking and packaging crayfish, for snap-freezing split scallops, and for boxing and icing the scaled fish that were filleted inside the factory. Another uncle was a skilled filleter and fisherman.
I walked along the ruins that were previously the canning factory and which is now the place where the farmers of the island store fertiliser. I walked past small houses of all sorts of descriptions. This is a small fishing village, Lady Barron, on the south of the island known as Flinders Island.
I am slowly walking back to my grandparents’ place, which sits close to the shoreline, about four kilometres down the right-hand road of the intersection.
It is late 1978 and I am walking back to have my dinner and a bath. My grandmother had kept the combustion stove going all day to heat the water we would need for our baths. She would take advantage of this and bake some bread, biscuits and cakes.
I am about two kilometres down the gravel road, scarred with large potholes caused by the rain. I am passing the island fuel depot, occupied by three gigantic tanks, which are standing on their ends, while a couple lie on their sides. The yard is littered with forty-four-gallon drums filled with everything from aviation fuel to diesel. The large tanks supplied the diesel lines to the wharf to fuel the fishing and freight boats and the wharf crane.
This area also used to have a series of small sheds where my Aboriginal relatives would be seen in and around. I continue to walk along the twisting last kilometre of road, following the irregular shoreline that zig-zagged its way towards the yellow beach. At the time this was the prime mooring area for my family’s fleet of fishing boats, my great-grandfather’s and great-uncle’s and other closer relatives.
As I wandered down the hill that preceded the property, I could see the three sheds erected on my grandfather’s portion of the large family plot of land. Each shed was in various states of repair. The oldest shed was the first that you saw while walking down the road and it was filled with old ropes, pulleys and fishing gear that in most cases were no longer in use or were not applicable to the modern fishing fleets.
In the oldest shed was an old sawmill, powered by a belt-driven system, which was linked to other machinery scattered throughout. The second shed was almost double-storeyed, with the open end facing south and a mezzanine that accommodated a heap of fishing equipment being kept out of the weather. It was mostly nets and ropes but there were wooden boxes of bait savers and wires.
The last shed, just before the house, was the newest. It held the ute and some timbers — it was also made of newer materials and was eventually converted into Nan’s shop for selling her craft materials. Pop and Nan’s house sat on a shared twenty-acre plot, which disappeared up Vinegar Hill; it was mostly covered in tea trees and large pine trees and gums.
There were three houses on the property, my great-grandparents’, my grandparents’ and my Auntie Patsy’s place, which used to be our house before my parents decided to move my sister and me to mainland Tasmania.
This ‘walking’ was more than just history and legacy in motion, to a place where great-grandparents lived alongside their kids, who were living with their kids. As a young fella I had the good fortune to have three generations of wisdom passed on to me as I sat and listened to stories, tales, adventures and humorous accidents.
This walk is an interwoven multiverse of time and storytelling, infused with history, legacy and memory, but it’s only the first walk.
Dean Greeno is an artist and researcher who was born on Flinders Island following a long succession of ancestral generations in the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait. Dean relocated to Launceston with his parents (Lola Greeno and Rex Greeno) in the 1970s. Dean’s practice responds to his cultural origins, family legacy and connections with Country. Known for his practice with driftwood sculptures, Dean has also become active in research and advocacy projects focused on the effects of climate change, in particular, the management of oceans, coasts and waterways. Through his work, he advocates for solutions which draw upon Traditional Knowledge, working closely with Aboriginal Elders.