NOVEL Rachel Leary’s new tale about a female bushranger
In her new book, which centres on the life of a female bushranger, author Rachel Leary tells a tale of outsiders who live on the margins of society
It was bushranger Michael Howe who used kangaroo blood to write in his journal and exalt at the beauty of the Tasmanian bush. Of course, a poetic eye and its related emotions, sensibilities and propensities to the sublime are not what Howe is remembered for. What he is remembered for are swashbuckling acts of escape and defiance, as well as brutal and inhuman acts of violence. It was Howe who, making good on an agreement with fellow bushranger John Whitehead, cut off his fallen mate’s head and took it to town for reward. It was Howe who robbed houses and burnt ricks. It was Howe who was known as the Demon Bushranger. If not perhaps for James Boyce’s electrifying, terrifying Van Diemen’s Land, we might have forgotten Howe’s connection with the bush altogether and remembered only the ranger.
“There are so many stories out there about the wilderness, the bush, being hell,” says Rachel Leary, author of the new novel Bridget Crack. “So it was interesting to come across this story of someone who’d actually fallen in love with the bush.”
Leary’s voice is not what I expected. After reading her novel about a female convict-turned-bushranger, I anticipated something graver, darker. But there’s a smile in what she’s saying, something playful, almost cheeky. I soon find out why.
Leary grew up in Hobart, on the fringes of Lenah Valley where the suburban tidiness of wide streets and prim lawns gave way to the unchecked proliferation of the bush and the foothills of kunanyi/Mt Wellington beyond.
“I had a horse, so I spent a lot of time in the bush riding,” she says. “And my family were big campers, so at Easter and over summer we’d always be camping. Then at university I got into bushwalking and white-water rafting. Some of my friends were rock-climbers.”
As a child, with her family, Leary explored the tamer regions of the state: Fortescue Bay, Cockle Creek, Bicheno. But she’d never really been to the wilderness, she tells me.
“The South-West was only a place I’d heard of. It wasn’t until I was about 19 that I went out there and said, ‘Wow. It’s another world’. It had quite a big effect on me.
“But it can be hostile, too. If you don’t have your backpack and your tents and supplies, if you don’t have what you need out there, you’re in pretty big trouble.”
In Bridget Crack, the titular character is transported from England to Van Diemen’s Land and immediately put to work as a domestic servant. She flees and is quickly recaptured, sent to the Female Factory, then on to more domestic servitude. She escapes again, but this time is packed off to “the Interior”, to a more brutal master from whom she absconds to the bush, falling in with the wanted and very dangerous bushranger Matt Sheedy and his gang.
The whole idea for the book came from a letter Leary unearthed while researching a creative-writing project. “I came across a family history document,” she says. “A female convict wrote a letter to a lunatic asylum asking about her husband. This got me curious about women convicts and their experiences. Then I did an honours thesis in cultural geography and became interested in Tasmanian history more specifically.
“And, of course, we all know about the male heroes, the Michael Howes and Ned Kellys. But increasingly I was looking for stories of female heroes, asking whether there was a female equivalent in the mythology of bushranging.”
Leary’s interest in people who live on society’s margins is not limited to her new novel, nor even to her writing. She has trained in physical theatre and has been a professional performer for more than 15 years. In 2013, she took her solo show, Everything Must Go, on a successful 30-date tour of Victoria.
It was a show that had a very different woman at its core. Nancy “Nance” Browne is “an eccentric, country recluse” who has to move from her farm when developers close in.
“She’s a character quite influenced by clown, which I did a lot of training in,” she says. “Clown in Australia is often associated with face-painting and balloon animals. But essentially it isn’t that at all. Clown is an old tradition in Europe that’s often physically based – it comes out of physical comedy, physical theatre, and it’s about spending time in a place of ridiculousness. It’s about being in a place of not knowing. And it’s a very liberating thing.
“So much of the world is about knowing, about getting it right, being successful and not failing. And clown gives you an opportunity to go, ‘I really don’t know’. And it gives people watching a chance to go, ‘Well, I don’t know either’.”
Having studied writing for many years, the time at her desk required some sort of balance. Leary was looking for something more physical. “I literally almost ran away and joined the circus,” she says. All of a sudden, the playful tone in her voice makes sense.
“But I suppose, because I am word and language-oriented, it all comes back to text. Through my love of physical theatre I suddenly had 50 minutes of text. That was Everything Must Go.
When she isn’t writing novels or performing one-woman shows, Leary works for the Arts Health Institute, an organisation in which health professionals and artists work together to use creativity as a form of health care.
“Studies have found that comedy, or music and humour, are really good for people with dementia,” she says. “I started with the Arts Health Institute as part of a program called Play Up, which brings humour and music into aged care, and working with people with dementia. And now I’m running a program with them called Word Power, which is for these people if they are, say, wanting to write a memoir, or [learn] storytelling. It’s all about facilitating storytelling in those areas.”
Whether it’s writing, performing, teaching or facilitating health care, Leary’s existence seems to dovetail into telling stories that have, at their heart, some sort of cultural value.
“It’s all to do with story. Even though there’s the theatre medium, or the medium of fiction, or whatever, they’re very similar in that they come back to storytelling,” she says. “Even my interest in landscape and cultural geography has a story element.”
Bridget Crack is, in a way, a story about outsiders, about people on the margins of society who slip through the cracks: convicts, domestic servants, bushrangers, the indigenous people of Van Diemen’s Land. Each of these people view and utilise the landscape differently. To some it is hell; to others a haven, a source of liberty. To others still, a home.
“It’s not necessarily one thing to one group of people,” Leary says. “It means different things to different people, depending on what your culture is, what your story is. And you will affect that landscape in different ways depending on how you understand it.
“I started off writing about bushrangers, but as I progressed I realised I was actually more interested in these characters’ relationships with the landscape than I was so much in their being or not being bushrangers.”
Leary seems to gravitate towards people on the peripheries, and her writing highlights the link between landscape and psyche, between the wilderness and the bewildered, and uses metaphors of the city and the bush to accentuate knowing and not knowing, order and disorder, incarceration and freedom.
In going bush, Bridget Crack sheds the veneer of civilisation and becomes someone else, taking on the ways of the bushranger. In much the same way Leary had a transformative experience in the Tasmanian wilderness, so does the character she has created.
We are reminded again of Howe, who dressed in kangaroo skins a la the natives, the way he drew up lists of seeds, vegetables, fruits and even flowers, the way his words were expressed in the blood of a kangaroo. It was a place, as Boyce tells us, where Howe found freedom, and not just in a penal sense: “His dreaming place was the heart of Van Diemen’s Land.”
This is a mighty observation. And Leary’s heroine Bridget Crack is cut from the same cloth. It’s well worth remembering and even lauding this side of the bushranger, his or her facility with the landscape, the sensitive, almost spiritual, element of the hardened outlaw. It might be romantic, but it is also revolutionary; the bushranger stereotype (male, violent, destructive) causes trouble in terms of how we think about the country we inhabit, who we are within it, and what we do to it.
Telling the stories of a certain kind of bushranger, of those from the margins, provides valuable nuance and perspective – qualities Leary excavates in droves. As she, and her book, reminds us: “We can’t actually control [the landscape]. We are part of it and we are also at its mercy.” Rachel Leary, author of Bridget Crack (Allen & Unwin, $29.99), will be a guest at the Tasmanian Writers and Readers Festival in September