Tasmania

Tasmania is both the setting of Dorrigo Evans’s childhood and a landscape that re-enters his life decades later, carrying family memories into the immediate danger of the 1967 bushfires. The island first appears as a remote world shaped by railway sidings, difficult living conditions, and close-knit communities; in adulthood, it becomes the destination of a family holiday interrupted by fire. Between those moments, Tasmania persists in remembered journeys, songs, poems, and stories that bind Dorrigo to his brother Tom Evans and to the lives left behind in Cleveland.

Cleveland and the island’s material world

In the 1920s, Cleveland is a hamlet of about forty people, among the most remote and forgotten settlements on Tasmania. Once a convict coaching village, it has fallen into hardship and now survives as a railway siding, a few deteriorating Georgian buildings, and scattered wooden cottages. The description makes isolation more than a matter of distance: old buildings and families endure amid a history of exile and loss, while the settlement seems scarcely changed from earlier decades.

The Evans family lives in a weatherboard cottage beside the railway line because their father works as a railway fettler. Their circumstances are practical and precarious. In summer, when the water supply runs out, the family carries water from the tank used by steam locomotives. They sleep beneath possum skins, and their food comes largely from trapped rabbits, shot wallabies, potatoes they grow, and bread they bake. Their father, remembering the men who starved during an earlier depression, regards the family’s position as fortunate; his more bleak assessment is that people live and die like dogs. The contrast captures the limits of security in Cleveland: work and self-sufficiency offer a measure of stability, but hardship remains close at hand.

Cleveland’s apparent remoteness is also measured by the changes that have not yet reached it. Electricity and radio have not arrived, and the 1920s can seem almost indistinguishable from much earlier periods. The railway is at once the family’s workplace and a defining feature of the settlement, while the old coach road and the abandoned coaching hotel preserve traces of the transport system the railway displaced. Several impoverished families, including the Maguires, live in the near-ruinous former hotel. The occasional motorcar becomes a local spectacle: children run after it as it approaches in a cloud of dust, briefly turning the road into a stage for the island’s uneven encounter with modernity.

Journeys and remembered landscape

Dorrigo’s childhood connection to Cleveland extends along the road to the Fingal Valley turnoff, where he sometimes travels to visit Tom Evans. Riding on Joe Pike’s dray, he absorbs the journey through its movement, sounds, and surrounding bush. The peppermint gums and silver wattle form a landscape of bending branches overhead; the horse’s pace and the cart’s creaking equipment accompany the birds. Years later, such experiences return in dreams. The journey matters not simply as a route between places but as one of the forms through which Tasmania becomes deeply lodged in Dorrigo’s memory.

The family’s literary life also begins in these isolated surroundings. When Tom, then in his early twenties, works with Jackie Maguire, he sometimes sings at night. By the fire, Dorrigo reads aloud from old newspapers to Tom and Jackie, who cannot read. He also memorizes poems from a schoolbook, with Tennyson’s Ulysses becoming a particular favorite. Reading makes a shared gathering possible across differences in literacy: Dorrigo supplies the words, while the others listen and respond. Tasmania’s remoteness therefore frames not only material deprivation but also the small, sustaining exchanges through which stories and poems acquire a local audience.

Cleveland holds memories that Dorrigo does not fully resolve. Shortly before Mrs Jackie Maguire disappears, he witnesses a private moment between her and Tom and keeps what he saw to himself. He never learns her real name. Later, that missing name persists in his memory as something he cannot quite recover, and eventually he thinks of her less and then no longer at all. The episode gives the childhood setting a quieter dimension of absence: people can vanish from a small community without leaving Dorrigo a complete account of who they were.

Family dispersed, childhood retold

The Evans family’s roots in Tasmania do not keep its members together. Their father dies of a heart attack in 1936, only a few years after their mother. As the youngest of seven, Dorrigo has little connection with his older siblings, many of whom have left in search of work before the Depression. Four sisters go to the woollen mills in western Victoria; Dorrigo never really knows them and later attends their funerals as they die during the 1950s. Albert, his eldest brother, works as a cane-cutter in far north Queensland and dies in a sugar-refinery explosion in 1956. Dorrigo still helps the relatives who come to him, even though their children and spouses seem like strangers. Tom, who settles in Sydney, is the sibling with whom Dorrigo renews a particularly close relationship.

Their childhood home survives in conversation after their lives have moved elsewhere. When Tom suffers a heart attack in 1967, Dorrigo travels to Sydney to see him. Once Tom is able to talk, the brothers return to memories of Tasmania. He recalls Doughy Yates trying to outrun the express train from Launceston to Hobart, racing it through the Cleveland bush before falling exhausted and conceding defeat. The incident becomes a way for Tom to reflect on the limits of human confidence: the remembered runner cannot outpace the train, just as a person cannot outpace life. In the present of the conversation, the tale also restores a shared childhood world, allowing Dorrigo and Tom to meet through details that need little explanation between them.

Return and the 1967 bushfires

Tasmania returns as a present-day setting when Ella Evans plans a week-long holiday there with the children, staying with her sister near Hobart. Dorrigo is not involved in making the plans. When news arrives that Tom has suffered a heart attack, he travels to Sydney instead, missing the beginning of the family’s holiday. After speaking with Tom, Dorrigo flies to Melbourne and then takes a morning flight to Hobart. The plane descends through violent winds and smoke from fires in the island’s south; at the airport, the heat and ash make clear that the landscape he has come back to is under threat.

Dorrigo’s visit initially has two purposes: an honouring luncheon in Hobart and a journey to Fern Tree to join Ella and the children. At lunch, news arrives that the fire situation has worsened and that Fern Tree is among the threatened places. The family’s holiday setting becomes a site of emergency. When Dorrigo reaches his family, he gathers Ella and the children close before they flee to the car, a moment of affection more openly expressed than his children have previously seen between their parents. The reunion is brief, but it changes the meaning of the trip: Tasmania is no longer a place to visit together but a landscape from which they must try to escape.

Dorrigo decides that their best chance lies in driving farther into forest that has already partly burned, rather than toward the fire sweeping toward Hobart. The route passes places altered by the fire: one former home is reduced to smoking metal and ash, and the smoke makes it difficult to distinguish another property from its surroundings. Then, around a bend, a new wall of fire appears ahead, joining smaller fires into a larger inferno. The episode brings the book’s two Tasmanias into sharp proximity: the remembered island of childhood roads and stories, and the adult landscape transformed by immediate danger. The island remains Dorrigo’s place of origin, but return offers neither a recovery of the past nor a guarantee of safety.