Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [7]
Coming out into a clearing, I was struck immediately by the strange spectacle of a monkey puzzle tree growing on the edge of what had once been the lawn. I had seen old black-and-white photographs of this tree from the 1920s, but nothing could have prepared me for its utter South American foreignness on this wild, coastal Scottish property.
“Probably planted by Major Allan Macdonald in the early 1800s,” Mum said. “The major took a great interest in horticulture and farming. He had a prize herd of Highland cattle and he also loved cairn terriers. He actually started the breed, or whatever you say when you invent a dog. He bred them to kill all the wild otters around the estate that were messing up his fishing.”
Aside from the killing of otters (Mum had wept for a week after reading Gavin Maxwell’s autobiography, Ring of Bright Water), it was clear that Major Allan Macdonald had Mum’s firm stamp of approval. Being a loyal one million percent Scottish Highland Macdonald of Clanranald, Mum won’t say a word against cairn terriers even though she bears a scar on her lip where one named Robert savaged her when she was a young woman. “Well, it was my fault,” she said. “I surprised him and cairn terriers don’t like surprises.”
Major Allan’s son, Captain Allan—known to the family as Muncle—was also fond of dogs and cattle. He sailed one of the last convict ships to Tasmania in the late 1840s. He took several cairn terriers with him on the journey, and family lore has it that he brought back two Tasmanian Palawa Aborigines in their place. Supposedly, the Aborigines lived, until their deaths, on Waternish Estate along with a pet deer that Muncle (an avid hunter) had blinded, but not killed, and a pack of yappy terriers.
I am haunted by those two alleged Palawa. God only knows what awful memories they stored inside their souls from their native land, but their ability to tell of their ordeals was locked in their tongues on this strange, Gaelic-speaking island. “By the 1820s horrible things were happening in Tasmania,” Jan Morris writes in Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress. “Sometimes the black people were hunted for fun . . . sometimes they were raped in passing, or abducted as mistresses or as slaves. The sealers of Bass Islands established a slave society of their own with harems of women, employing the well-tried discipline of slavery—clubbing, stringing up from trees, or flogging with kangaroo-gut whips. In one foray seventy aborigines were killed, the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out.”
On December 1, 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times announced, “We make no pompous display of Philanthropy. We say this unequivocally SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES—IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS AND DESTROYED!”
At my most charitable, I imagine that Muncle might have rescued the two Palawa, and brought them back to Waternish so that they might avoid the genocide that was surely their fate in Tasmania.
“I doubt it,” Mum says. “I don’t think Muncle was that sort of man.”
I have seen photos of Muncle with his terriers and his deer, but the Palawa are ghosts, appearing nowhere. I have no way of knowing, even, what gender or age they were. So in the absence of any evidence I picture two homesick, middle-aged men sitting in this rain-lashed garden under a tree from South America with a blind deer, driven to distraction by ill-tempered and unpredictable terriers.
“That’s so awful,”