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‘Poke’ Vernham, ‘Bull’ Connell and those tiger tales

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.
TOPOGRAPHIC BASEMAP FROM THELIST© STATE OF TASMANIA

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]

The Vernham and Connell 99-acre block at Pencil Pine Creek. TOPOGRAPHIC BASEMAP FROM THELIST© STATE OF TASMANIA
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.

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Jack the Hunter, the tiger decapitator of Boomers Bottom

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.

[1] Conduct record for John Smith per Forfarshire, CON33/1/44, p.197 (Tasmanian Archives, afterwards TA), https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/CON33-1-44/CON33-1-44p197; Conduct record for John Smith per Forfarshire, CON37/1/9, image 216 (TA), https://libraries.tas.gov.au/Digital/CON37-1-9, both accessed 4 August 2024.

[2] ‘Bushranging’, Launceston Examiner, 18 September 1856, p.3.

[3] ‘House of Assembly—last night’, Courier, 9 October 1858, p.2.

[4] ‘An Old Vet’, ‘Jack the Hunter: an episode in a VDL policeman’s life’, Daily Telegraph, 4 January 1895, p.6.

[5] ‘Capture of another bushranger’, Courier, 8 October 1858, p.3. ‘Hellfire Jack’ was also the nickname of the ex-convict John Snelson.

[6] ‘Bushranging in Tasmania’, Courier, 8 October 1858, p.3.

[7] George Gatenby diary, 31 August and 1 September 1858, NS1255/1/1 (TA).

[8] ‘Oatlands Supreme Court’, Hobart Town Advertiser, 3 January 1859, p.7.

[9] ‘Aegles’, ‘Notes in north Tasmania’, Launceston Examiner, 15 February 1870, p.5 (reprinted from the Leader [Melbourne]).

[10] ‘Longford Police Court’, Launceston Examiner, 9 February 1897, p.5.

[11] ‘Cressy’, Mercury, 22 September 1885, p.4.

[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.

[17] Headstone, Pisa Cemetery.

[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).

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John Elmer’s lost gold reef, or Chummy’s gold goes to Woolnorth

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).

[8] Monthly returns Woolnorth Estate, VDL62/1/1 (TA).

[9] Paylists for Woolnorth, VDL 82/1/1 (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).

[15] Died 6 June 1880, death record no.861/1880, registered at Westbury, RGD35/1/49 (TA), https://librariestas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/search/results?qu=john&qu=elmer, accessed 1 July 2023; ‘Another old colonist gone’, Launceston Examiner, 9 June 1880, p.2.

[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.

[18] Descriptive list of immigrants for the Merrington. CB7/12/1/2, book 20, p.330 (TA), https://librariestas.ent.sirsidynix.net.au/client/en_AU/names/search/results?qu=henry&qu=weeks&qf=NI_INDEX%09Record+type%09Arrivals%09Arrivals+%7C%7C+Departures%09Departures, accessed 3 March 2024. Both Henry and his wife Priscilla were literate Wesleyans. Resident Mersey–Don River coalminer Zephaniah Williams applied to bring them to the colony along with other coal-mining families to work for the Mersey Coal Company.

[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).

[25] VDL277/1/34 (TA).

[26] Graham Riley, Sheffield, interviewed 23 May 1993.

[27] EC James, ‘Forth Valley prospecting’, Mercury, 8 April 1925, p.12; EC James, ‘An old gold find’, Examiner, 18 December 1929, p.11; EC James, ‘Chumey’s [sic] claim’, Examiner, 4 February 1930, p.9.

[28] See for example ‘Gold in Tasmania’, Mercury, 27 March 1869, p.3.