Cleveland

Cleveland is the remote Tasmanian hamlet where Dorrigo Evans spends his childhood, and its importance extends beyond its small size: it is both the material setting of his family’s hard-won rural life and a storehouse of memories that resurface decades later. The railway siding, the former coaching road and the scattered households place the Evans family within a community marked by isolation and limited means. In old age, as Dorrigo and his brother Tom Evans revisit childhood stories, Cleveland also becomes a place preserved through recollection, where comic local exploits and troubling family histories remain intertwined.

Setting and isolation

Cleveland is described as a settlement of about forty people, remote even among Tasmania’s outposts. Once a convict coaching village, it has fallen into hardship and obscurity. By the time of Dorrigo’s childhood it survives as a railway siding, a handful of crumbling Georgian buildings and scattered wooden cottages. The description of a place shaped by exile and loss gives its physical remnants a history older than the children who grow up there.

The town’s isolation is reinforced by the limited arrival of modern infrastructure. Electricity and radio have not yet reached Cleveland, and the account suggests that its conditions could belong to decades earlier than the 1920s setting. The surrounding bush and harsh seasons are part of the residents’ ordinary circumstances: summer is difficult, and winter is difficult in a different way. Cleveland is not presented as a picturesque refuge from hardship; its remoteness is bound to the constraints of everyday life.

The Evans household and local life

Dorrigo’s father works as a railway fettler, and the family lives in a weatherboard cottage beside the line, owned by the Tasmanian Government Railways. Their dependence on local resources is concrete. When the water runs out in summer, they draw it from the tank used by steam locomotives. They sleep under possum skins, eat rabbits they trap and wallabies they shoot, and supplement these with potatoes they grow and bread they bake.

The father’s sense of security is relative to the deprivation he has seen. Having lived through the depression of the 1890s and witnessed starvation in Hobart, he regards the family’s circumstances as fortunate: steady work and a means of subsistence amount to a workers’ paradise by comparison. Yet he also recognizes the cost of that existence, describing a life in which people live and die like dogs. Cleveland’s hardship is therefore conveyed through the household’s practical routines and through the tension between gratitude for survival and awareness of its severity.

The former coaching hotel, put out of business by the railway, has become a near ruin inhabited by several poor families, including the Maguires. When a motorcar approaches every few days, local children run out to chase it. The episode registers both the novelty of the vehicle and the small scale of a community whose children gather around an occasional interruption to the familiar road.

Roads, journeys, and childhood memory

Cleveland is also a point of departure. During holidays with Tom, Dorrigo rides on the back of Joe Pike’s dray to the Fingal Valley turnoff. From there he walks to Llewellyn, a still smaller town, then crosses paddocks and bush toward the snow country behind Ben Lomond, using the mountain to take his bearings. Tom works as a possum snarer, spending two weeks at work and one week off; his home is a cave beneath a ridgeline, small enough that he must bow his head to stand at its highest point.

These journeys connect Cleveland to a wider rural geography without making the hamlet less central to Dorrigo’s childhood. The dray ride, the turnoff and the walk onward form a repeated route to Tom, while the remembered journey is also carried forward into Dorrigo’s dreams. Much later, conversation with Tom returns Dorrigo to Cleveland through remembered people and incidents rather than through a description of a changed town.

Stories preserved in later recollection

In a late conversation, Tom becomes unusually talkative and tells Dorrigo childhood stories, some familiar and some new to him. One concerns Doughy Yates, who boasted that he could outrun a train. Challenged to prove it, he raced the Launceston-to-Hobart express through the bush in long white underpants, then fell exhausted and had to concede defeat. Tom remembers the spectacle with affection, but draws a darker conclusion from it: a person may imagine he can outrun life, only to be overtaken and left behind. The train that gave Cleveland its role as a railway siding thus reappears in a local anecdote as an image of inescapable passage.

The same conversation alters Dorrigo’s understanding of Jackie Maguire’s family. Tom reveals that Doughy was Jackie’s cousin and recalls Jackie as a good man who knew the bush. He also says that Jackie’s wife was Aboriginal. Dorrigo had heard vague stories of Spanish ancestry, a conventional local explanation, but had not known this part of her background. The disclosure brings forward a memory that had long troubled and shaped him: shortly before Jackie’s wife vanished, Dorrigo had seen her with him. Tom explains that Jackie sometimes beat her, though he loved her, and that she was unhappy. He does not know where she went at first; many years later, a letter reaches him in Sydney. She had moved to Melbourne and then New Zealand, married a bricklayer in Otago, and arranged for her daughter to send the letter after her death. The message says little more, leaving the history of her departure only partly known.

Other childhood stories hold a different kind of conflict. Tom and Dorrigo remember local football matches and Joe Pike’s dray, as well as the day Colonel Cameron’s employee came to their kitchen with a rifle, accusing Tom’s dog of killing sheep. Tom emerged with his own rifle and threatened to shoot the man if he shot the dog. The recollection places the Evans household’s fierce attachment to its own animals alongside the economic tensions of rural life. Taken together, these stories make Cleveland more than a childhood setting: it is the place through which Dorrigo encounters both the warmth and the unresolved injuries of community memory.