Ernie Bond (1891–1962) was more than a highland farmer: he was a facilitator, one of those figures who introduced Tasmanians to the bush. John Watt (JW) Beattie, Stephen Spurling III, Fred Smithies, Ray McClinton and Herb (HJ) King did it with photos and lantern lectures. Gustav Weindorfer, Paddy Hartnett, Bert ‘Fergy’ Fergusson and Ernie Bond played the facilitator role by establishing themselves in the highlands and inviting people to join them. They were ‘bush magicians’ whose personal charm brooked no argument.
Bond’s journey from Hobart businessman to highland guru was a strange one. It probably began with his need to address a drinking problem. It is also possible that his decisions to mine and then farm in the bush were a rejection of expectations that he would follow in his father’s footsteps as a business tycoon. There is something humbling about a failed produce merchant who sets out to ‘get his hands dirty’ by learning how to actually grow produce, just as, perhaps, he saw becoming a miner as a rebuke to his father, the razor-sharp mining investor who probably never once plunged his dish into the wash dirt.
Ernie Bond as a boy. Courtesy of Roger Nutting.
Early life
Hobart-born, Ernie Bond was the youngest of four sons of well-to-do, self-made businessman and parliamentarian Frank Bond (c1856–1931), and Sarah Bond, née Cowburn (c1863–1934).[i] Frank Bond was enterprising in the manner of many children of ex-convicts. He became probably Tasmania’s leading mining investor, eventually buying one of the state’s major silver producers, the North Mount Farrell Mine, where he employed about 130 men.[ii] He is said to have been so astute financially that he even profited from the collapse of the Bank of Van Diemen’s Land in 1891 by buying scrip at a low price, then doubling his money when it declared a dividend.[iii]
Gattonside, formerly 41 Montpelier Road, now 51-53 Sandy Bay Road, Battery Point, built for the Scott family in 1885, initially rented by Frank Bond and then owned by him 1899-1904. Roger Nutting photo.
Ernie Bond grew up at an imposing ‘gentleman’s residence’, Claremont House, Claremont; and at Gattonside, Battery Point, where the family moved c1897; while his adolescence and early adulthood were lived at Mimosa, in Elizabeth Street/New Town Road, North Hobart from 1905. Like his older brothers, George (1883–1934), Basil (1885–1932) and Percy (1888–1929), Ernie attended Buckland’s School, a boarding and day school for boys opened by former Hutchins School assistant master WH Buckland at the Barracks, Hobart.[iv] In 1905, the year that Buckland’s school amalgamated with Hutchins, Ernie achieved one pass in the Junior Public Examination which determined eligibility for the state public service.[v] He instead took a clerical job at AG Webster and Sons, produce merchants, which meant that, like his brothers, he was trained in his father’s line of business.[vi]
In October 1916 he fronted City Hall as one of 70 or 80 men between the ages of 21 and 35 with surnames beginning with A or B to enrol that day for World War One service.[vii] There was no military conscription as such, but young unmarried men were compelled to contribute to the war effort. There was also enormous public pressure to participate and, as the son of a public figure, Bond’s absence would have been noted. Perhaps he failed his medical, as he did not serve in the armed forces, and what part he subsequently took in the war effort is unknown. His brother George, who left Hobart with the original 26th Battalion in May 1915 and was awarded the Military Cross, was the only one of the Bond brothers to reach the battlefront.[viii]
Through the South Hobart Progress Association Bond became involved in local politics, supporting the political journalist Leopold Broinowski’s unsuccessful 1922 National Party candidature for the House of Representatives seat of Denison.[ix] Broinowski advocated ‘Tasmania first’, adopting the familiar theme of state rights in the federal sphere.[x] Accordingly, Norman Laird summed up his friend Ernie Bond’s political beliefs as ‘Victorian in period’.[xi]
Mimosa, 446 Elizabeth St, North Hobart, which Frank Bond bought from Dr Henry Benjafield in 1905. Roger Nutting photo.A hall screen inside the house features Frank Bond’s initials. Roger Nutting photo.
In 1921, 29-year-old Bond took possession of a house in Ferndene Avenue, South Hobart, and married seventeen-year-old Birdie Louisa Gatehouse.[xii] Like him, she came from a well-to-do family with an enterprising convict forebear. The newlyweds had a son, Ernest Edward Bond (Ernie junior), born 18 November 1922.[xiii]
Bond’s future wife Birdie Gatehouse receiving her Diploma of Associate for Pianoforte in December 1919. From the Tasmanian Mail, 6 May 1920, p.20.A domestic wedding gift engraved by its presenters, Bond’s friends in the Commercial Travellers Association. Roger Nutting photo.
Bond at Adamsfield 1927–34
Bond would have been aware of Tasmania’s osmiridium mining industry. In the years 1918–26, before cheaper substitutes were found for it, Tasmania had a virtual world monopoly on ‘point metal’ (granular) osmiridium used to tip the nibs of fountain pens. Osmiridium won favour because of its durability. Having travelled only a short distance from its host rock, serpentine, the best metal was coarse or ‘shotty’, perfectly sized to be glued onto a nib in a New York, London or Berlin fountain pen factory. In October 1919 osmiridium reached £42 per oz., making it far more attractive to prospectors than gold.[xiv] The alluvial osmiridium of the north-western fields was worked out by the mid-1920s, but the Adams River (Adamsfield) osmiridium rush about 120 km west of Hobart in the spring of 1925 was a sensation, with several prospecting partnerships initially returning about £1000 per month.[xv] Even though many diggers only made a subsistence wage at Adamsfield, the rush was seen as something of a godsend, because Tasmania’s mining industry, like its agricultural sector, was in dire straits.
Born in comfortable circumstances, well educated, Ernie Bond was far removed from many of the osmiridium diggers, who were from poor rural farming families. At the time of the Adamsfield rush, he was a married father wielding the hammer as an independent produce merchant and auctioneer in greater Hobart and the Tasman Peninsula.[xvi] Yet for all his enterprise the business went belly up, with his own father bailing him out to the tune of £2500.[xvii] Not yet 36 years of age, Bond announced his retirement from business—which is a dignified way of withdrawing to rethink one’s options.[xviii] He had taken many steps down the path of emulating his father as public leader, businessman and politician, but all he had to show for it was public humiliation.
Perhaps his marriage was not rosy either, because in September 1927 he left wife Birdie and young son Ernie junior and went bush.[xix] ‘Mid-life crises’ were a luxury at the time, especially for a family man. It seems likely that Bond was just another of the many people—men, women and children—who trudged 42 km through mud and rain from the railway terminus at Fitzgerald to seek sustenance at Adamsfield when the osmiridium price made a temporary recovery after the market had been glutted during the initial rush. With the easily-won alluvial osmiridium now almost gone, the era of the reef miner, the hydraulic company and the investor was dawning. Bond must have invested a considerable amount of his scarce capital in buying the old ten-acre Stacey and Kingston reward claim from Turvey and Robinson in August 1928.[xx] It was worked by a horse-drawn puddling machine which separated the ‘point metal’ from ‘pug’ (clay).
Ernie Bond, left, with the puddling machine at Adamsfield. Jack Thwaites photo, NS3195/1/1515, Tasmanian Archives.Ernie Bond puddler site in April 2023. Nic Haygarth photo.
Did Bond know anything about mining? Given his father’s leanings, he probably knew something about mining investment, but when it came to the nuts and bolts of it he would have been a ‘new chum’. Acting as an osmiridium buyer at Adamsfield would not have helped him much, given the low demand. The price dipped dramatically to below £9 per oz. during 1932.[xxi] ‘The diggers are desperate and starving at Adamsfield’, the old digger JS Fenton told Phil Kelly MHA in May 1934. ‘The storekeepers with there [sic] cunning can get all the metal for food alone …’ Only the government, Fenton believed, could save the miners from the colluding forces of shopkeepers and precious metal dealers who oppressed them.[xxii]
Bond’s new career on the osmiridium fields was fast evaporating, but he wasn’t destitute. When his mother died in October 1934, Bond had lost all his siblings and both his parents in the space of five years, severing some of his ties to Hobart. However, in her will Sarah Bond provided £250 for educating Ernie junior while he attended the private Hutchins School, to be expended at a maximum of £30 per year. Bond was to receive half the balance of that £250 if any remained when his son left school, plus half her trust fund.[xxiii] He owned some shares, and he received rent from his former marital home after his wife and child vacated it.[xxiv] Additional relief came Bond’s way in 1935 when he won a court battle against an alleged £2500 debt to his father’s estate, that is, the money he believed his father gave him to bail him out his business failure.[xxv]
Bond hydraulic sluicing at Adamsfield, with J Beaton, left, and Billy McCafferty, background right. From the Ernie Bond collection, courtesy of Roger Nutting.
It is clear that Bond wanted to stay in the bush. While squelching in the mud and snow as an Adamsfield digger, he would have noticed the more lucrative support services operating around him. The Quinn brothers were not miners. Hop, berry and dairy farmers, they supplemented their incomes by hunting in winter, so they knew the back country and supply routes well and were already equipped with a team of horses. Merv and Jim Quinn packed supplies to the osmiridium field and operated a store, first at the Florentine River, then at Adamsfield itself.[xxvi] However, the Quinns were less enterprising than the sly-grog merchants, Ralph Langdon and Elias Churchill, who both earned enough money on the mining field to advance to keeping legitimate, licensed premises in Hobart.[xxvii]
Perhaps Bond was also stung into action by mining field prices. One miner bought £3 worth of potatoes and onions at Fitzgerald, which cost him £28 by the time they were delivered to Adamsfield, 42 km away.[xxviii] What if he could farm closer to the osmiridium fields, undercutting all competitors? Bond’s new regime of earning a living by market gardening, plus hunting in winter, along with a little prospecting, would be a variation on the models of the bushman adopted by people like William Aylett and Paddy Hartnett and that of the Quinn brothers.[xxix] He had found a way to retain the bush lifestyle that he apparently loved. All he needed was a venue.
[ii] ‘North Mt Farrell’, Mercury, 10 April 1931, p.6; ‘Obituary’, Mercury, 16 December 1931, p.7.
[iii] Joe Cowburn; interviewed by David Bannear, 27 August 1990, in What’s the land for?: people’s experience of Tasmania’s Central Plateau Region, Central Plateau Oral History Project, Hobart, 1991, vol. 3, p.1.
[iv] ‘Scholastic’, Tasmanian News, 28 September 1893, p.2.
[v] ‘Buckland’s School’, Mercury, 1 April 1903, p.7; ‘Separate subjects list’, Mercury, 1 January 1906, p.7. For the amalgamation of schools, see Margaret Mason-Cox, Character unbound: a history of the Hutchins School, the Hutchins School, Hobart, 2013, p.22.
[vi] ‘Criminal Court’, Mercury, 28 October 1916, p.10. In 1916, at the age of 25, Bond’s position was auctioneer’s clerk (‘Police Courts’, Mercury, 7 October 1916, p.4).
[vii] ‘Proclamation Day’, Daily Post, 4 October 1916, p.5.
[viii] ‘Personal’, Mercury, 20 September 1916, p.3.
[ix] ‘Macquarie St tram’, World, 4 November 1922, p.7; ‘Denison” Mr Broinowski’s candidature’, Mercury, 13 December 1922, p.7.
[xi] Norman Laird, ‘Thylacine reports—Queen Victoria Museum—Launceston: Ernie Bond …’, NS463/1/1 (Tasmanian Archives, afterwards TA).
[xii] Conveyance 15/4889 from Robert M Ross, 21 September 1921; Bond mortgaged the property to Marion Nicolson, 16/171, on 10 February 1923 and later to Perpetual Trustees, 16/2902, 16 September 1923 (NRET); ‘Family notices’, Mercury, 30 December 1921, p.1. They married 26 October 1921. Her parents were Cecil Leonard and Elsie Harriet Gatehouse. Birdie Gatehouse was born 31 January 1904 (‘Births’, Mercury, 4 February 1904, p.1).
[xiii] ‘Family notices’, Mercury, 20 November 1922, p.1.
[xiv] Secretary of Mines (Tasmania), Annual Report, 1919, p.36. For the Tasmanian osmiridium industry generally, see Nic Haygarth, On the ossie.
[xv] ‘Register of osmiridium buyers’ returns of purchases, September 1922–October 1925’, MIN150/1/1 (TA).
[xvi] ‘New produce business’, Huon Times, 27 July 1923, p.2; conveyance 16/1651, 11 June 1923 (NRET).
[xvii] ‘Kingborough Show’, Mercury, 22 April 1924, p.2; ’Nubeena sale’, Mercury, 3 March 1926, p.10; ‘Gift or Loan?’, Mercury, 11 December 1934, p.5.
[xviii] ‘Auctioneers’ notices’, Mercury, 22 April 1927, p.10; Bond recalled the tenth anniversary of his arrival in Adamsfield in his diary entry 10 September 1937, NS1331/1/1 (TA).
[xix] The Electoral Roll for the seat of Denison, Subdivision of Hobart South for 1928, p.5, lists Birdie Louisa Marshall Bond and Ernest Bond living at 2 Ferndene Avenue, South Hobart.
[xx] ‘Mining’, Mercury, 27 August 1928, p.4; PB Nye, The osmiridium deposits of the Adamsfield district, Geological Survey Bulletin, no.39, Department of Mines, Hobart, 1929, p.42.
[xxi] Ernie Bond offered diggers £8 5 shillings per oz in November 1932, in which year the average price paid in Tasmania was £11 5 shillings 6 pence. In 1933 the average price was £8 8 shillings 4 pence. See ‘Osmiridium slight rise in price’, Mercury, 2 November 1932, p.4.
[xxii] JS Fenton to Phil Kelly MHA, 22 May 1934, MIN2/1/585–87 (TA).
[xxiv] Electoral Roll for the seat of Denison, Subdivision of Hobart South for 1937, p.6; Ernest Bond diary, 15 January 1937, NS1331/1/1 (TA). Whether Ernie Bond was making maintenance payments to his wife Birdie Bond is unknown.
[xxv] See, for example, ‘Son’s claim upheld’, Examiner, 14 December 1934, p.9.
[xxvi] See Nic Haygarth, On the ossie, pp.131 and 143.
[xxvii] ‘Sly-grog’ in this case does not refer to the illegal distillation of spirits, but to the illegal sale of bottled alcohol from unlicensed premises. There was no licensed public house at Adamsfield.
[xxviii] Percy O Lennon, ‘The Adams River osmiridium field and the surrounding country’, Illustrated Tasmanian Mail, Christmas number, 1 December 1926, p.105.
[xxix] For Aylett and Hartnett see Simon Cubit and Nic Haygarth, Mountain men: stories from the Tasmanian high country, Forty South Publishing, Hobart, 2015. Bond continued to make occasional prospecting trips to the Boyes River (see, for example, ‘Adamsfield’, Mercury, 29 December 1932, p.3) and in 1941 prospected the old Reward Claim at Adamsfield without success (Ernest Bond diary, 10 July 1941, NS1331/1/5 [TA]).
James ‘Tiger’ Harrison, Wynyard native animals dealer, snarer, prospector, track cutter, estate agent, shipping agent, Christian Brethren registrar, tourist chauffeur, human ‘cork’ and Crown bailiff of fossils. Photo from the Norman Larid files, NS1143, Tasmanian Archives (TA).
In the mid-1920s thylacines were still reported by bushmen in remote parts of the north-west. Luke Etchell claimed there was a time when he caught six or seven ‘native tigers’ per season at the Surrey Hills.[1] Like Brown brothers at Guildford, Van Diemen’s Land Company (VDL Co) hands at Woolnorth were still doing a trade in live native animals—although the latter property was out of tigers. On 7 July 1925 Hobart City Council paid the VDL Co £60 10 shillings for what can only be described as two loads of ‘animals’—presumably Tasmanian devils and quolls—recorded as being carted out to the nearest post office at Montagu during the previous month.[2] A further transaction of £30 was recorded in October 1925, when it is possible Woolnorth manager George Wainwright junior hand delivered a crate of live native animals to Hobart’s Beaumaris Zoo.[3]
James ‘Tiger’ Harrison (1860–1943) of Wynyard took his animals dead or alive. He bought and sold living Tasmanian birds and marsupials, including tigers, but also hunted for furs in winter. In July 1926 Harrison and his Wynyard friend George Easton (1864–1951) secured government funding of £2 per week each to prospect south of the Arthur River for eight weeks.[4] However, their main game was hunting: the two-month season opened on 1 July 1926.
James Harrison’s collaborators George Easton and George Smith with a bark boat used to rescue Easton at the Arthur River in 1929. Photo courtesy of Libby Mercer.
Easton, an experienced bushman in his own right, made snares most evenings until the pair departed Wynyard on 14 July.[5] At Trowutta Station they boarded the horse-drawn, wooden-railed tram to the Arthur River that jointly served Lee’s and McKay’s Sawmills.[6] Next day, Arthur Armstrong from Trowutta arrived with a pack-horse bearing their stores, and the pair set out along the northern bank of the Arthur towards the old government-built hut on Aylett’s track.[7] However, on a walk to the Dempster Plains to shoot some wallaby to feed their dogs, Harrison injured his knee so badly that he couldn’t carry a pack. So before they had even set some snares the pair was forced to return home.[8] On their slow, rain-soaked journey they sold their stores to the Arthur River Sawmill boarding-house keeper Hayes—the only problem being delivery of said stores from their position up river.[9] While Harrison went home by horse tram and car, Easton had to help Armstrong the packer retrieve the stores.[10]
Martha Crole and her daughters. From the Weekly Courier, 10 April 1919, p.22.
The Crole house at Trowutta. From the Weekly Courier, 10 April 1919, p.22.
‘Tiger country’ around the Arthur River
If not for the injury Harrison may have secured more than furs over the Arthur. One of the European pioneers in that area was grazier Fred Dempster (1863–1946), who appears to have rediscovered pastures celebrated by John Helder Wedge in 1828.[11] Out on his run in 1915 Dempster met a breakfast gatecrasher with cold steel. The elderly tiger reportedly measured 7 feet from nose to tail and being something of a gourmet registered 224 lbs on Dempster’s bathroom scales.[12] In dramatising this shooting, anonymous newspaper correspondent ‘Agricola’ mixed familiar thylacine attributes with the fanciful idea of its ferocity:
This part is the home of the true Tasmanian tiger … This animal must not be confounded with the smaller cat-headed species [he perhaps means the ‘tiger cat’, that is, spotted-tailed quoll, Dasyurus maculatus] so prevalent beyond Waratah, Henrietta and other places. The true species is absolutely fearless in man’s presence, and if he smells meat will follow the wayfarer on the lonely bush tracks for miles, stopping when he does and going on when he resumes his walk. It has been proved beyond question that these brutes will not shift off the paths when met by man, and they will always attack when cornered.[13]
One mainland newspaper was apparently so confused by ‘Agricola’s’ account that he called Dempster’s thylacine ‘a huge tiger cat’.[14]
Trowutta people had no problem distinguishing quoll from tiger. They caught the latter unwittingly while snaring. Fred and Martha Crole and family of Trowutta made hundreds of snares on a sewing machine, eating the wallaby meat and selling the skins they caught. One of their boys, Arthur Crole (1895–1972), landed a tiger alive in a snare, killed it, tanned the hide and used it as a bedside rug.[15] While south of the Arthur, Harrison and Easton were unlucky not to run into Trowutta farmers Fred and Violet Purdy, who caught a tiger in a footer snare there during the 1926 season. When the Purdys approached the captured animal it broke the snare and disappeared. However, tigers also frequently visited their hut south of the river at night and they saw their footprints in the mud next morning.[16] Violet Purdy claimed to have spent six months straight living in the ‘wild bush’ (the hunting season in 1926 was only July and August), and her observations of the thylacine suggest someone with at least second-hand knowledge. Like ‘Agricola’, she knew of the tiger’s reputed habit of refusing to move off a track to let a human pass. Unlike him, she attested to the animal’s shyness. Purdy recommended ‘a couple of good cattle dogs’ as the means of tracking it down. She and her husband found thylacine tracks at the Frankland River as they crossed it to reach the Dempster Plains.[17] Decades later Purdy regaled the Animals’ and Birds’ Protection Board with her tales, illustrating them with a map of ‘tiger country’ between Trowutta and the Dempster Plains.
‘Tiger country’ between Trowutta and Dempster Plains, as it looked in 1926, according to Mrs V Kenevan, formerly Violet Purdy of Trowutta. From AA612/1/59 (TA).
Snaring at Woolnorth
By the time Easton got home to Wynyard, Harrison, apparently recovered from his knee injury, had arranged for them both to snare at Woolnorth, where no swags needed to be carried, since stores were supplied. The VDL Co employed hunters every season to kill ‘game’, this serving the dual purpose of saving the grass for the stock and bringing the company income at a time of low agricultural prices. At this time hunters paid a royalty of one in six skins to the company.
Easton’s diary entries give rare insight into a hunting engagement. Harrison and Easton took the train to Smithton and caught the mail truck to Montagu, from which they were borne by chaise cart to the Woolnorth homestead. That night the snarers were put in a cottage generally reserved for the VDL Co agent, AK McGaw.[18] Next day station manager George Wainwright junior showed them their lodgings (tents next to a lagoon which served as the water supply) and how snaring (using springer snares but also neck snares along fences) and skinning were done at Woolnorth. Wainwright, an old hand, claimed to be able to skin 30 animals per hour.[19] Storms, horse leeches, which had a way of attaching themselves to the human scalp, and cutting springers and pegs kept the snarers very well occupied between snare inspections, an 11-km-long daily routine. The game was nearly all wallaby and ringtails, and Harrison and Easton dried their skins not in a skin shed but by hanging them in trees.[20] Bathing meant a sponge bath with a prospecting dish full of cold water—which also constituted the laundry facilities.[21] The last day of the season at Woolnorth was traditionally an all-in animal shoot, after which the season’s skins were baled, treated with an arsenic solution to kill insects and delivered to a skins dealer.[22] In the two-month 1926 season the VDL Co made £493 from the fur industry, a big reduction on the previous year (£1296) when the season had lasted three months.[23]
However, Harrison didn’t last the distance, calling it quits on 13 August after barely two weeks, leaving Easton to carry on alone until the season ended eighteen days later. Their skin tally at 13 August stood at 16½ dozen—198 skins or 99 apiece.[24]
Returning to ‘tiger country’
Once again ‘Tiger’ Harrison was in the wrong place at the wrong time to live up to his nickname. While he was working at tiger-free Woolnorth, timber worker, hunter and sometime miner Alf Forward snared two tigers, one alive, one choked to death by a stiff spring in a necker snare at the Salmon River Sawmill south of Smithton.[25] Forward is said to have exhibited the living one in Smithton before selling it to Harrison.[26] He almost had another live one in the following month, when a tiger detained by Forward’s snare for two days bit his capturer’s hand, thereby effecting its escape.[27]
Harrison eventually decided to cut out the middle-man. From 1927 he conducted expeditions specifically to obtain living thylacines to sell. He had no luck until in June 1929 he caught one 3 km south-west of Takone.[28] The Arthur River catchment remained ‘tiger country’ in the mid-1930s when ‘Pax’ (Michael Finnerty) and Roy Marthick claimed to have seen them while prospecting.[29] The question of whether they are there today still entertains Tarkine tourists and the worldwide thylacine mafia.
[1] MA Summers’ report, 14 May 1937, AA612/1/59 H/60/34 (Tasmanian Archives, henceforth TA).
[2 Payment recorded 7 July 1925. On 9 June 1925: ‘W Simpson taken animals to Montagu’; 22 June 1925: ‘W Simpson went to Montagu with load of animals’, Woolnorth farm diary, VDL277/1/53 (TA).
[3] Payment recorded on 13 October 1925. On 4 October 1925 George Wainwright junior and his wife departed Woolnorth for the Launceston Agricultural Show (Woolnorth farm diary VDL277/1/53). It is possible that he took a crate of animals on the train to Hobart.
[4] GW Easton diary, 1 July 1926 (held by Libby Mercer, Hobart).
[11] JH Wedge, ‘Official report of journeys made by JH Wedge, Esq, Assistant Surveyor, in the North-West Portion of Van Diemen’s Land, in the early part of the year 1828’, reprinted in Venturing westward: accounts of pioneering exploration in northern and western Tasmania by Messrs Gould, Gunn, Hellyer, Frodsham, Counsel and Sprent [and Wedge], Government Printer, Hobart, 1987, p.38.
[12] See for example ‘Boat Harbour’, North West Post, 22 February 1915, p.2. Dempster probably didn’t have any bathroom scales with him. Rather mysteriously, the author of ‘A huge tiger cat’, Westralian Worker, 19 March 1915, p.6, put the animal’s weight as ‘2 cwt’ (224 lbs).
[13] ‘Agricola’, ‘Farm jottings’, North West Post, 24 February 1915, p.4. In another column ‘Agricola’ claimed with equal dubiousness that under Mount Pearse trappers caught tigers in pits, and that if more than one tiger was collected in the same pit at the same time the captured animals would fight to the death. See ‘Agricola’, ‘Farm jottings’, North West Post, 10 July 1914, p.4.
[14] ‘A huge tiger cat’, Westralian Worker, 19 March 1915, p.6.
[15] Fred and Graham Crole, in Women’s stories: different stories—different lives—different experiences: a Circular Head oral history project (compiled and edited by Pat Brown and Helene Williamson), Forest, Tas, 2009, p.192.
[25] ‘Hyena choked in snare at Salmon River’, Circular Head Chronicle, 11 August 1926, p.5.
[26] ‘TT, from New Town’, ‘Tasmanian tiger’, Mercury, 24 August 1954, p.4, claimed that Alf Forward caught the animal in a kangaroo snare at the Salmon River ‘less than 30 years ago’ and sold it to Harrison after putting it on show in Smithton.
[27] ‘Hand bitten by a hyena’, Circular Head Chronicle, 29 September 1926, p.5.
[28 GW Easton diary, 17 June 1929; Circular Head Chronicle, 29 May 1929.
[29] See ‘Pax’ (Michael Finnerty), ‘A “bush-whacker’s” experience in the north-west’, Mercury, 6 May 1937, p.8; Roy Marthick to the Fauna Board, 10 February 1937 (TA); Roy Marthick quoted by Charles Barrett, ‘Out in the open: nature study for the schools’, Weekly Times (Melbourne), 10 July 1937, p.44.
The collection of farms known as Narrawa in north-western Tasmania produced some tough old buggers. The small community west of Wilmot was home to the Carters, Vernhams, Williamses, Bramichs, Lehmans and others, bush farmers resigned to grubbing out, burning and stump jacking their way to cleared pasture. Crops like potatoes were planted in the ashes of the burnt trees as the beginning of farming operations.
Jack (aka Johnny) Carter, Bill ‘Yorky’ Smith and Jack ‘Boy’ Griffiths clearing land at Narrawa. Griffiths, standing precariously on the log stack, was later killed in a similar operation on the Williams farm. Courtesy of Peter Carter.
After the harvest came the hunt. This was a chance to earn enough money to keep self and family for the rest of the year. Each hunter had his own territory somewhere in the north-western highlands.
Harry ‘Poke’ Vernham/Vernon/Varnham (c1885–c1954)[1]
By the age of 20 Narrawa farmer Charles Henry Vernham already knew his way around Cradle Mountain, being conscripted in the search for hunter Bert Hanson who had gone missing near there in a winter fog.[2] Harry excited more legends than probably any other bushman in his neck of the woods. He was a small man who, paradoxically, wore sandshoes (sneakers) in the bush. Harry was ‘square as a brick’ but so tough ‘you could drive nails into him and you wouldn’t hurt him’.[3] Two stories bear out his toughness. In the snaring season of 1906 Harry cut his knee with an axe in the snow at Henrietta south of Wynyard. He covered the wound with salt and bandaged it with a green wallaby skin, telling his hunting partner ‘You’ll have to do all the snaring. I’ll peg out the skins and do all the cooking’.[4] Eventually Harry presented himself to a doctor, who told him that he was just in time to prevent the onset of gangrene.[5] Harry was then admitted to the Devon Cottage Hospital at Latrobe.[6] Hearing of her son’s accident, Harry’s mother walked about 30 km from Wilmot to Latrobe to prevent a surgeon amputating his leg. She succeeded, but Harry was left with a stiff leg for the rest of his life.[7]
A young Harry Vernham sitting second from right in the second Bert Hanson search party, Weekly Courier, 30 September 1905, p.20.
On another occasion Harry’s nose was virtually detached from his face in a motorcycle accident.[8] A doctor told him, ‘I’d better give you a whiff of something before I stitch it back on’. Harry is said to have replied, ‘I didn’t have a whiff when it come off so I don’t need one putting it back on’.[9]Hunting exploits
In 1914 Harry married Annie Eliza Carter, from the neighbouring family.[10] They had a boy and three girls over the next four years, but Harry’s nickname Poke suggests that his sex life didn’t end there. At least the hunting seasons were celibate. Harry and his brother George Matthew ‘Native’ Vernham (1889–1966)[11] had a hut on the south-eastern side of Mount Kate and a little log hut near the site of the present-day Cradle Mountain Lodge, the latter being pretty schmick as it was a lock-up affair.[12] Other Harry Vernham hunting companions included Ernest ‘Son’ Bramich (1914) and Harry Leach (1933).[13] Ted Murfet recalled camping with Harry in later years at Middlesex Station, the Twin Creeks Sawmill huts, the hut at Learys Corner, Daisy Dell and Robertson’s on the track into the Vale of Belvoir.[14] They took a dozen balls of hemp for a season and used an old eggbeater to make up their treadle snares on a board about 1.2 m long. Usually they’d need 1000 snares for the season. In their worst season the pair shared £300 and in their best the take was £700—£350 each.[15] By this time Harry had moved beyond the medicinal qualities of a green wallaby skin, developing new home remedies. He treated an ulcer on his leg with a plaster of onion wrapped up in a sock as a bandage and addressed a cold with swigs of Worcestershire sauce.[16]
Harry Vernham (right) hunting much later in life. Courtesy of David Ball.
Gordon Murray ‘Bull’ Connell (1889–1972)[17]
The slow farm development ritual undertaken at Narrawa also applied to the Connell family when they took up the Dunlavin property at the top of Chinamans Hill, Lower Wilmot, in the 1890s. While his older brother Lionel Connell (1884–1960) became a miner, Gordon stayed on the farm.[18] He married Alice Jacklin in 1911, and the couple had at least four children during the next decade.[19] In 1915/16 Lionel Connell and Dick Nichols built a hunting hut in the Little Valley, south of Lake Rodway, and in 1917, when Lionel took a 3-month sabbatical from the Shepherd and Murphy Mine to go hunting, his younger brother Gordon joined him at Cradle.[20] Known as Bull because of his huge shoulders and great physical strength, Gordon hunted with Lionel as far south as the plains between Barn Bluff and the Fury River. He also worked over the so-called Todds Country at the head of the Campbell River.[21] Gordon had a big kangaroo dog called Slocum which would take him to his kills. One day Gordon put his feet up and smoked for 30 minutes before Slocum returned. ‘Where is he then?’, the master prompted, setting the dog off towards Lake Carruthers to a big kangaroo he’d killed. But Slocum wasn’t finished, refusing to budge. ‘Well where is he then?’. Off they went again beyond Lake Carruthers to another big kangaroo carcass.[22]
Gordon Connell, courtesy of Malcolm Dick.
Gordon hunted with Harry Vernham at Cradle in 1925 and 1926 and in other years around Middlesex and the Vale of Belvoir.[23] They developed a regime of line camps or temporary shelters to get around their extensive snare lines, arriving at base camp only every three days. Gordon recalled icicles forming on Harry’s formidable body hair as he lugged his bag of skins about the snare lines. When Harry stripped off his shirt a huge cloud of steam arose from his singlet, an unusual form of enveloping fog. Wild bulls remaining from Field brothers’ Middlesex grazing operation were an occasional problem for hunters. The worst of these was a territorial bull called Bob because of the ‘bob’ in his tail. Another bull they put a bullet in roared back to life as they approached its apparent corpse. Gordon had a way of cutting a cartridge with a knife to concentrate its potency, but on this occasion it seems to have had the opposite effect.[24]
How the area looked in 1949, showing the position of the hunting hut. Crop from aerial photo 0196_483, 15 April 1949.
In the 1930s Poke and Bull selected and started to pay off a 99-acre-block at Pencil Pine Creek enclosing the log hut and the old FH Haines sawmill site—land now partly occupied by Cradle Mountain Lodge, the Cradle Mountain shop and rangers’ quarters. Presumably they were either safeguarding their hold on valuable hunting territory or foresaw future tourism development. The pair failed to pay it off, and Lionel and Margaret Connell took over the payments. Lionel’s family were still using the log hut in 1940. Like most hunting huts in the area it had a skin shed chimney, that is, a very large timber chimney in which skins were pegged to dry close to the fire.[25]The tiger stories
Peter Carter, Harry Vernham’s nephew, claimed that Harry caught thylacines (Tasmanian tigers) in ‘hell-necker’ or ‘hellfire necker’ snares positioned at each end of a hollow log that contained a live wallaby. The ‘hellfire’ appears to have been a heavy-duty neck snare—not terribly surprising, as plenty of tigers were strangled in neck snares. What is surprising is Peter’s claim that his uncle sold skun tigers, that is, tiger carcasses, for £5. Perhaps he meant that he sold tiger skins for £5.[26] Harry Vernham’s name was never entered on the list of payees for the £1 per head government thylacine bounty, although it is possible he claimed bounties through an intermediary. Still, the question needs to be asked why he went to so much trouble to strangle a tiger in a neck snare, when he could just have easily snared it alive by the paw in a foot or treadle device which would have earned him much more money. The story would only make sense if Harry had learned the whereabouts of a tiger or family of tigers and set up the hollow log trap as above, making sure the wallaby was restrained so that it couldn’t spring the snares while making its escape. Prices paid for tigers, dead or alive, varied wildly, so it’s hard to put even an approximate year on Vernham’s tiger sales.[27]
Gordon Connell is another name missing from the government tiger bounty register. He once caught a thylacine dead in the snare—presumably a necker snare which strangled it—but he encountered others in the wild. Bull was said to have found a thylacine lair in one of three rock shelters down in the Fury Gorge while hunting nearby. He shouldn’t have been surprised then when, hunting the button-grass plains above it out of season, he heard an animal yelp. A big kangaroo hopped up the slope, as if disturbed, convincing Gordon and his mate that the police were below them. Then a tiger came up the slope in pursuit of the kangaroo. At regular intervals it stopped and gave three sharp yelps before continuing the chase, as did a second tiger behind it.[28]
What a pity neither Poke nor Bull put pen to paper! We know so little about hunters’ experiences with tigers, but at least these anecdotes give glimpses of what they passed down through family and the hunting community.
[1] Years of birth and death are from Ancestry.com.au, no birth certificate or will was found.
[2] ‘Lost in the snow: a second search party’, North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times, 25 July 1905, p.3.
[3] Peter Carter, interviewed by David Bannear, 16 July 1990, in What’s the land for?:people’s experiences of Tasmania’s Central Plateau region, Central Plateau Oral History Project, Hobart, 1991, vol.3, p.4.
[4] Warren Connell, interviewed 8 September 1997; David Ball, interviewed 25 April 2020.
[5] Warren Connell.
[6] ‘Latrobe’, North Western Advocate and the Emu Bay Times, 29 August 1906, p.2.
[7] Len Fisher, Wilmot: those were the days, pp.46–47
[8] ‘Ulverstone’, Advocate, 26 March 1934, p.6.
[9] David Ball, 24 April 2020. Ted Murfet also told this story to Len Fisher in Wilmot: those were the days, the author, Devonport, 1990, p.82.
[10] Married 15 October 1914, marriage record no.801/1914, registered at Wilmot (TA).
[11] Born to Blackwood Hill, West Tamar labourer William Varnam [sic] and Christina Bowers on 1 February 1889, birth record no.736/1889, registered at Beaconsfield, RGD33/1/68 (TA), https://librariestas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/search/results?qu=george&qu=varnham, accessed 3 October 2023; died 7 February 1966, Will no.47656, AD960/1/105 (TA), https://librariestas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/search/results?qu=george&qu=vernham, accessed 3 October 2023.
[12] Gustav Weindorfer diary, 12 July 1914 (Pencil Pine Creek), 23 July 1914 (east side Mount Kate), NS234/27/1/4 (TA); 10 July and 10 August 1925 (Pencil Pine Creek) (QVMAG). Es Connell, interviewed by Nic Haygarth on 23 September 1997, confirmed the location of this hut.
[13] Gustav Weindorfer, in his diary, 16 and 18 June 1914, NS234/27/1/4 (TA), recorded Harry Vernham and Bramich hunting Cradle Valley and Hounslow Heath with dogs. For Leach see ‘Taking game in close season alleged’, Advocate, 12 September 1933, p.2.
[14] Ted Murfet, interviewed 15 October 1995.
[15] Ted Murfet, interviewed 15 October 1995.
[16] Ted Murfet, in Len Fisher, Wilmot: those were the days, the author, Devonport, 1990, p.81.
[17] Born 29 April 1889 to Michael Connell and Frances Sayer, birth registration no.2639/1889, registered at Port Frederick, RGD33/1/68 (TA), https://librariestas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/search/results?qu=gordon&qu=murray&qu=connell#, accessed 18 August 2024. The family was living at Torquay (East Devonport).
[18] Commonwealth Electoral Roll, Division of Wilmot, Subdivision of Kentish, 1914, p.10; Wise’s Tasmanian Post Office Directory, 1919, p.277.
[19] Married 28 March 1911, file no.1384/1911, registered at Gunns Plains (TA).
[20] Gustav Weindorfer diary 29 December 1915 (Lionel Connell and Dick Nichols arrive at Cradle from Moina), NS234/27/1/5 (TA); 1–26 April 1917, NS234/27/1/7 (TA). Weindorfer possibly also referred to Gordon Connell in diary entries in May and June 1917, NS234/27/1/7 (TA).
[21] Todds Country was a name given by snarers to territory hunted by Bill Todd (1855–1926).
[22] Warren Connell.
[23] Gustav Weindorfer diary, 14 July 1925 and 23 March 1926 (QVMAG).
[24] Warren Connell.
[25] RE Smith diary, 29 June 1940, NS234/16/1/40 (TA).
[26] Peter Carter, p.10.
[27] For example,in James 1928 Harrison sold a tiger carcass to Colin MacKenzie in Melbourne for £12 (Harrison’s notebook). In 1930 Wilf Batty sold the carcass of the tiger he killed at Mawbanna for £5 (Wilf Batty; quoted in ‘The $55,000 search to find a Tasmanian tiger’, Australian Women’s Weekly, 24 September 1980, p.41).
[28] Warren Connell.
At Pisa Cemetery the Parkers, O’Connors, Gatenbys and Smiths are all equals. Some of course are more equal than others, having large, decorated headstones and obelisks, but their bones moulder in the same clay and their spirits, should they have any, mingle on the same windswept plain rolling back to the blue profile of the Great Western Tiers. It is remarkable that the graves of John (c1822–1903) and Hannah Jane Smith (c1819–1903) are marked at all. It doesn’t get more anonymous than being John Smith, and the anonymity of a bare patch between the plinths of their betters awaited most of the likes of these two. Perhaps their old employer Roderic O’Connor (1849–1908) gave them a monument as a mark of respect.
Pisa (St Mark’s Anglican, Lake River) Cemetery. Nic Haygarth photo.
The irony of that action wouldn’t have been lost on John Smith, one of 314 bearers of that name conscripted to Van Diemen’s Land. A native of Nottingham, Jack was a single, semi-literate, 170-cm-tall labourer when sentenced to 7 years’ transportation for stealing a pair of shoes and a hatchet as a 20-year-old in 1842. The hatchet was a token of a combative life. He had a prior conviction and five short prison terms under his belt, being, apparently, ‘a bad irreclaimable lad, connected to other lads who live by plunder’. Transported on the Forfarshire, he appears to have laboured in a probation gang at Westbury before his attempts to abscond landed him in the Port Arthur Gaol. Jack spent 3½ years in the probation system, enduring 179 lashes, 88 days of solitary confinement and 21 months of hard labour in chains before being released for private service in 1847 at the age of about 25. What would his opinion have been at that time about whether transportation was a sentence or an opportunity?
The monument marking the graves of John and Hannah Jane Smith, Pisa Cemetery. Nic Haygarth photos.
Jack then worked for Edward Archer of Northbury, Longford (nearly two years), and Joseph Oakley of Oatlands, achieving freedom by servitude at the expiry of his sentence in 1849.[1]
Perhaps he still brandished that hatchet, because within a few years Jack was living by plunder once more, working out of a hide-out near Millers Bluff. Known as ‘Jack the Hunter’, in the mould of the Irish outlaw ‘Jack the Shepherd’, he was accused of rustling sheep from the large properties adjoining the slopes of the Great Western Tiers. In 1856 graziers Arthur O’Connor of Connorville and Charles Parker of Parknook tracked him down and sent a volley his way. Jack raised his weapon at O’Connor but it failed to discharge, and he made his escape.[2] The threat Jack posed to wool-growing was raised in parliament.[3] An armed police party sent to apprehend him mistakenly pounced on a roving entomologist at the Hummocky Hills.[4] A posse led by District Constable Thomas Kidd of George Town did better, finally arresting Jack the Hunter or ‘Hellfire Jack’[5] at Hells Bottom on the slopes of Millers Bluff in 1858. Here they also found the evidence of his ovine crimes in a veritable maze of hideouts, including an underground wool store. Jack was shot in the arm while trying to escape, newspaper reports varying in their accounts of his injuries.[6] His victims, the Gatenbys and O’Connors, secured two of his hunting dogs as a form of recompense.[7] The ex-convict was sentenced to four years’ gaol for stealing 15 sheep worth £8 from George Gatenby of Barton.[8]
In 1870 a newspaper writer recounting Jack’s tale commented that ‘Poor Jack, now in confinement, must look back with harrowing regret to his wild hut high on the tier’.[9] In fact Jack was already back on the tier.[10] Somehow Arthur O’Connor had forgiven his depredations and allowed him back onto Connorville—presumably as a shepherd! After all, there’s no substitute for local knowledge. Jack’s residence was Boomers Bottom, a sheep run where the Lake River cut a passage down through the mountains. Adam Jackson’s 1847 survey of the upper Lake River didn’t recognise Hells Bottom but mapped Scrubby Den and the even more tantalising Tigers Bottom.
Adam Jackson’s 1847 survey of the upper Lake River where there be tigers. Copyright State of Tasmania.
Jack was certainly at Connorville in 1885 when ‘Jimmy the Sailor’ Casey saved his five-year-old from drowning in the mill race.[11] But Jack was more than a father and a hunter: he was a serial thylacine decapitator. He buried his hatchet in tigers’ necks. The submission of severed animal heads to unsuspecting public officials sounds like something out of The Godfather.[12] However, this seems to have been acceptable behaviour at the time. At least twelve thylacine heads were presented to the Longford warden or police office for payment in the years 1888–97, Connorville and Parknook being star killing fields.[13] Jack produced eight of these, probably securing them in necker snares.[14] In 1897 he claimed to have killed about 130 tigers during 30 years’ residence at Boomers Bottom.[15] It is possible that Jack managed a line of necker snares across a gully through which tigers were thought to be entering the Connorville property, in the fashion of the Woolnorth ‘tigerman’ at Green Point in the far north-west. Even so, four tigers per year hardly constitutes an invasion, and we do not know if any of those 130 savaged any of Connorville’s 14,000-strong grazing flock.[16]
Jack’s partner Hannah Jane Smith predeceased him by nine months.[17] Her story, like those of so many other anonymous wives and female partners, is unknown. Their child or children are also untraceable, their births seemingly evading the registrar. Perhaps Hannah helped Jack secure his sixteen £1 government tiger bounties.[18] That would have paid for some sugar, tea, tobacco and snaring hemp or wire but not saved them from kangaroo leather ensembles and a diet of macropod and potato. Perhaps Jack’s hunting was a lot more lucrative than that in the backblocks of Connorville. Perhaps Jack and Hannah lived at a distance in mutual contempt. We will never know. They keep their secrets beneath the loam at St Mark’s, Lake River, where the tigers once roamed.
[12]The Godfather, a 1972 movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola, included a scene in which a severed horse’s head was placed in the bed of a sleeping man.
[13] Longford notes’, Launceston Examiner, 2 August 1888, p.5; ‘Longford notes’, Launceeston Examiner, 2 July 1889, p.4; ‘Police Court’, Launceston Examiner, 13 March 1890, p.3; ‘Longford’, Mercury, 4 October 1890, p.2; ‘Current topics’, Launceston Examiner, 30 September 1891, p.2; ‘Country intelligence’, Tasmanian, 27 August 1892, p.30; ‘Longford’, Tasmanian, 10 June 1893, p.2; ‘Longford Police Court’, Launceston Examiner, 9 February 1897, p.5.
[14] ‘Longford’, Launceston Examiner, 13 March 1890, p.3; ‘Longford notes’, Tasmanian, 4 October 1890, p.22; ‘Country intelligence’, Tasmanian, 27 August 1892, p.30; ‘Longford’, Tasmanian, 10 June 1893, p.22;
[15] ‘Longford Police Court’, Launceston Examiner, 9 February 1897, p.5.
[16] The size of the sheep flock is from E Richall Richardson, ‘A tour through Tasmania (letter no.73): Connorville’, Tribune, 12 November 1877, p.2.
[18] Bounties no.582, 17 December 1889; no.81, 18 March 1890; no.354, 20 August 1890; no.463, 7 October 1890; no.62, 26 March 1891; no.184, 22 May 1891; no.822, 1 April 1892; no.272, 12 September 1892, LSD247/1/1; no.123, 19 June 1893 (2 adults); no.13, 5 March 1895; no.37, 30 [sic] February 1896; no.39, 5 March 1897 (3 adults); no.45, 17 March 1898 (‘2 March’), LSD247/1/2 (TA).
Lasseter’s Reef wasn’t the first pot of gold to go missing.[1] Many goldfields have their holy grails, the tale of a fabled reef found but then lost, tantalising generations of prospectors. On Tasmania’s Arthur River it was the reputed reef at the Blue Peaked Hill,[2] but even ‘Australia’s biggest dairy farm’ Woolnorth, in the state’s north-western corner, wears a tale of gilded woe.
The unlikely claimant at Woolnorth was John Elmer (1801–80), who is said to have been born at Barnham, St Edmundsbury Borough, in Suffolk, England. He married Frances Kemp in that town in 1823.[3] On 22 March 1832, along with their four daughters and five other men, they arrived at Stanley on the barque Forth as indentured servants to the Van Diemen’s Land Company (VDL Co).[4]
The Woolnorth property showing its original eastern boundary. TOPOGRAPHIC BASEMAP FROM THELIST copyright STATE OF TASMANIA
The settlement on the coast at Woolnorth Point was then only three years old, consisting of a store, six cottages, a stable, a blacksmith’s shop and a jetty where produce could be loaded and goods landed.[5] The place was isolated, conditions primitive and rations meagre. Indentured servants were required to stay long enough to work off their passage fares, but three Forth arrivals and two other indentured servants voted with their feet by absconding in October 1832.[6] The Elmers stayed, John’s employment even surviving an incident in October 1834 when he struck Woolnorth overseer Samuel Reeves during a pay dispute.[7] A splash of gold across the drudgery of tending Saxon ewes, draining marshland, milking cows and keeping house would have been welcome.[8] However, nobody entertained ideas of a gold bounty in the years before the Californian rushes of 1848–55. Few would have known gold if they fell over it.
Shepherd at Woolnorth and Cheshunt
The Elmer family endured a decade at remote Woolnorth before taking up a Launceston butchery.[9] That move landed John Elmer in the Insolvency Court, after which he appears to have joined the wool-grower, architect and botanist William Archer IV’s Cheshunt property south-west of Deloraine.[10] Elmer would have been an interesting witness on the subject of thylacine predation on sheep, having been a shepherd at a time when few attacks were reported at either Woolnorth or Cheshunt. In 1851, when Elmer was hired or rehired as a Cheshunt shepherd and overseer at an annual salary of £40, he and Frances already had a family of six young children.[11]
James (Edward James) Elmer and his wife Louisa Annie Diprose. Courtesy of Bruce Hull.
James Elmer
One of their offspring was Edward James Elmer (c1835–1916), who called himself James Elmer.[12] He claimed to be ‘the oldest white born under the VDL Company’. Many seventeen-year-olds must have raced off to the goldfields at Forest Creek, Loddon River or Creswick with their fathers circa 1852 when the mosquito fleet plying Bass Strait was laden with garrulous Van Diemen’s Land diggers. No shipping records place John or James Elmer among them.[13] A tour of the Victorian goldfields would have guaranteed the Elmers a familiarity with the appearance of alluvial gold and the conditions under which it was found. But it seems they stayed home keeping sheep and saving their pennies to take up a tenant farm at Cheshunt.[14]
A deathbed confession
John Elmer died as a supposedly senile 78-year-old at Bridgenorth, West Tamar in 1880.[15] On his deathbed he told James that at Woolnorth he’d done more than keep tigers from the sheep, having found ‘plenty of gold’.[16] The question of how exactly a Suffolk shepherd could have recognised gold a decade or two before the global gold bonanza began doesn’t seem to have fazed James. Nor did his father’s prescribed senility. Then there was the matter of why John Elmer—assuming he was literate—hadn’t exploited the reef himself by, for starters, sending rock samples to an assayer or a geologist. James’ problem was that he had developed a touch of gold fever, which is exactly what happened when you hung around with that ne’er-do-well Henry Weeks.
Chief Chummy’s gold chaser Henry Weeks. Courtesy of John Watts.
Henry Weeks and Chummy’s gold
Native Rock farmer Weeks (1832–99) was a staunch Rechabite.[17] His weakness didn’t come in a bottle but with a geological pick: he lost his nut to mineral prospecting and mining investment. Weeks had also missed the Victorian gold rushes, only arriving in Van Diemen’s Land from Monmouth, Wales, as an assisted immigrant coalminer in 1854.[18] He must have made up for lost time. Weeks’ discovery of the rich Mount Claude (Round Hill) galena mine in 1881 distracted him from the farm but did nothing for his bank balance.[19] Chasing Chummy’s gold didn’t help much either. This Lasseter’s Reef story involved George ‘Chummy’ Webb finding a fabulous gold reef in the Forth River high country—and taking the location to the grave with him, leaving his mate Henry Weeks to rediscover it. The only surviving clue to the site, ‘with the Western Tiers behind you and Cradle in front of you’, led all comers on a merry dance.[20]
The VDL Co goes mining
Weeks wasn’t alone in taking this tack. Frustrated by poor farming returns and tantalised by rich metal discoveries just outside its property, in 1882 the VDL Co began to examine its holdings for minerals.[21] Weeks or James Elmer evidently got wind of this, and with Henry Cooper put their names to a proposal to the company. The spelling is James Elmer’s:
‘I have been told that you want some party to prospect the companys land at Woolnorth if so we wold like to take the work, as have some knowledge of the place and my Father found gold thare fifty years ago and when he was dyen he told me as near as he cold were it was. My Father was shepherd there for manney years. I was down thare some few years ago and my mates got tired before we got thare and wold not stay when we got thare so wold not stop we are astickon [sic] party now thare are three of us but only two will be abell to go at a time. If you will let me know what terms we will try and agree as we wold mutch like to go down and find the big reef for thare is plenty of gold down there. We have all had a deal of practice in mining fore gold …’[22]
No VDL Co response has been found. After decades of dealing with mostly lackadaisical prospectors, VDL Co local agent James Norton Smith probably never took Elmer’s proposal seriously. The company’s prospector, a Cornishman named James Rowe, later found nothing of value at Woolnorth or any other VDL Co property, advising it to give up prospecting.[23]
Chummy keeps his secret
James Elmer didn’t give up. He still had the bug two decades later as a 70-year-old, repeating his father’s tale to Norton Smith’s successor Andrew Kidd McGaw:
‘I wold like to go and see if I cold find it. I wold have to drive down and cannot walk as I cold 50 years ago but am [not] a crippel yet. My horse wold do on the run aney ware so long as I got my tucker down. If I can go I will call and see you as am goen down I wold like to go soon …’[24]
This time James Elmer got there. The Woolnorth farm diary records that on 7 January 1906 Edward J Elmer and son arrived at Woolnorth to go prospecting, leaving nine days later.[25] There was no report of a gold strike.
Chummy also kept his secret. Camped near Bonds Peak in 1918 on a Chummy’s gold mission, Bill Johnson even believed he heard Henry Weeks’ ghost try to give him directions.[26] Hobart mining investor EC James was still searching for Chummy’s gold in the years 1925–30. James believed the gold may have been somewhere near Mount Emmett in today’s Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park.[27] Just as Harry Bell Lasseter’s central Australian mirage still triggers adventurers, revival of the Stormont Gold Mine in 2014 stirred the legend of Chummy’s gold.
No gold-bearing quartz reef is known to exist at Woolnorth. If John Elmer did find one, his discovery would pre-date that of John Gardiner (aka James Roberts), who claimed to have struck gold in a limestone quarry on Cabbage Tree Hill near latter-day Beaconsfield in 1847.[28] This has been cited as the first Tasmanian gold discovery. Gardiner only confirmed that it was gold he had found when he saw the precious metal later on a Victorian goldfield. Perhaps John Elmer had a similar eureka moment years down the track from his Woolnorth days, at Mangana, Mathinna, Lefroy or Beaconsfield, when the spirt was still willing but the body wasn’t up for the rigours of a gold rush.
[1] Harry Lasseter (aka Lewis Hubert Lasseter) died trying to relocate his fabled gold reef in central Australia in 1931.
[2] See Nic Haygarth, ‘SB Emmett: a pioneer Tasmanian prospector, from Bendigo to Balfour’, Circular Head Local History Journal, vol.1, no.1, 2004, pp.36–69.
[3] FHL film no.950448, sourced through Ancestry.com.au.
[4] CSO1/1/591/13412; GO1/1/13, p.517; Edward Curr to Samuel Reeves, 30 March 1832, VDL23/1/5 (Tasmanian Archives, afterwards TA).
[5] ‘Our Own Reporter’ (Stuart Sanderson), ‘The VDL—VIII’, Advocate, 22 December 1925, p.12; Edward Curr to Samuel Reeves, 12 January and 25 September 1832, VDL23/1/4 and VDL23/1/5 respectively; Edward Curr to John Hicks Hutchinson, 11 April 1833, VDL178/1/1 (TA).
[6] Edward Curr to the Court of Directors, VDL Co, London, Outward Dispatch no,230, 15 October 1832, VDL5/1/4 (TA).
[7] John Hicks Hutchinson to Samuel Reeves, 8 November 1834, VDL23/1/6 (TA).
[10] John Elmer was declared insolvent on 15 April 1844 while working as a butcher in Launceston (advert, Launceston Examiner, 17 April 1844, p.5). William Archer was the informant for the birth of Henry Thomas Elmer to John Elmer and Frances Kemp on 31 July 1844, birth record no.410/1844, registered at Launceston, RGD33/1/23 (TA), https://librariestas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/search/results?qu=frances&qu=kemp&rw=24&isd=true#, accessed 1 July 2023.
[11] William Archer IV diary, 11 July 1851 (University of Tasmania Special Collections, Afterwards UTas).
[12] He was presumably the baby born in October 1835. See Edward Curr to Adolphus Schayer, 28 September 1835, VDL23/1/6 (TA).
[13] Another John Elmer, a free immigrant who arrived in the colony on the Water Witch, departed from Launceston for Melbourne on the brig William Hill on 27 April 1852 (POL220/1/2, p.13, TA). John E Elmer, a free arrival in the colony on the Bee, also sailed from Launceston to Melbourne on the steamer Clarence on 16 November 1852 (POL220/1/2, p.238, TA).
[14] By 1862 both John and James Elmer were tenant farmers on Cheshunt, leasing 170 and 150 acres respectively, William Archer IV diary, 15 April 1862 (UTas).
[16] James Elmer, Henry Weeks and Henry Cooper to James Norton Smith, VDL Co, 12 June 1883, VDL22/1/11; James Elmer, Kimberley, to Andrew Kidd McGaw, VDL Co, 17 December 1905, VDL22/1/36 (TA).
[17] The Independent Order of Rechabites was a friendly society which encouraged abstention from alcohol. Weeks’ property Native Rock was near latter-day Railton.
[19] ‘Auction sales’, North Coast Standard, 17 July 1894, p.3. Bankruptcy forced Weeks to sell four properties.
[20] See, for example, ‘Lorinna’, Daily Telegraph, 11 January 1911, p.2.
[21] See Nic Haygarth, ‘Mining the Van Diemen’s Land Company holdings 1851–1899: a case of bad luck and clever adaptation’, Journal of Australasian Mining History, vol.16, October 2018, pp.93–110.
[22] James Elmer, Henry Weeks and Henry Cooper to James Norton Smith, VDL Co, 12 June 1883, VDL22/1/11 (TA).
[23] James Rowe, ‘Report of Captain James Rowe’, 1886, VDL334/1/1 (TA).
[24] James Elmer, Kimberley, to Andrew Kidd McGaw, VDL Co, 17 December 1905, VDL22/1/36 (TA).
