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  AFTER PIERRE DARQUIER BECAME acquainted with his daughter-inlaw Myrtle Jones, he would explain the provenance of his son's bride as “the pendant that hangs on the bottom of Australia.”1 This jewel began its European life as “that island between heaven and hell,”2 a place where Britain sent its criminals—men, women, children— politically suspect persons, Irish rebels, and the impoverished dregs of its rich earth. The colony was named Van Diemen's Land by the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman, after the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, which sent Tasman to explore the South Pacific in 1642.

  By the eighteenth century the shores of Terra Australis Incognita were another battleground in the continuing contests of strength between France and Britain. The French connection is most obvious in Tasmania, where exploratory French vessels complete with artists, zoologists and scientists preceded British settlement and carried out so much exploration and research. Marion Bay, for instance, is named after the French explorer Marion Dufresne, the first European to reach the island after Tasman. Myrtle Jones grew up on an island studded with French names: Cape Tourville, Freycinet Peninsula, Cape Baudin, D'Entrecasteaux Channel, Bruny Island, Huon River.

  In 1769 the British despatched Captain Cook to the South Pacific. He entered Botany Bay on the Australian mainland in April 1770; later, when Britain was no longer able to send its convicts to its former colonies in America, over a thousand of them were sent to establish a new penal colony there.3 The First Fleet reached Botany Bay in January 1788. Six days later the French explorer Jean-François la Pérouse arrived. Though their countries fought five wars between 1701 and 1815, the French and the British passed an equable six weeks together on Australia's east coast before la Pérouse sailed off, never to be seen again.

  Hobart, the capital of Van Diemen's Land, became Britain's third antipodean penal setttlement in 1803, and in 1804 the settlement around Launceston became a fourth. By 1825, when Van Diemen's Land became a separate colony ruled directly from Britain, the island had become perhaps the most barbarous penal establishment of the British Empire, and expressed its objection to this by renaming itself Tasmania two years after it received its last convict from the Mother Country in 1853.

  Australia was to develop as a nation divided in three, not two as in France: Anglo-Australians, devoted to King, Queen and Country, and others—workers, republicans, dreamers of different freedoms for their New World. Overarching this division were, and are, the original inhabitants of Australia. Their suffering and centuries of mistreatment became something every white Australian lives with, with varying degrees of shame.

  About three or four thousand Tasmanian Aboriginals—slightly different physically from those on the mainland, being darker of skin and curlier of hair—were on the island when the first convict ships came to land. The island became a British gulag of starvation and punishment: dark cells and solitary confinement, chains and leg irons, diabolic instruments of torture, horrific wounds and the stench of men flogged almost to death time and time again. For the Aboriginals it was even worse. Though admonished by their betters that it was “absurd to call the Tasmanian aborigine an upright-walking monkey, a talking brute,”4 the brutalised convicts and early settlers, victims themselves, demonised and hunted down the Aboriginal Tasmanians, already ravaged by imported European diseases. The savagery and brutality of Van Diemen's Land was so great that its name still has a sulphurous odour about it, like Devil's Island.

  Carrick, the little town near Launceston where Myrtle Jones was raised, has a ghostly, faintly eerie atmosphere. By 1853 Tasmania's Aboriginals were all but exterminated, but the white communities flourished: when Queen Victoria died in 1901 and Myrtle was eight years old, Australia had become a federated nation with a population of nearly four million. Myrtle's island was always a special place. Divided by Bass Strait from Melbourne on the mainland's southern coast, facing the Antarctic below, everything about Tasmania is slightly different from the vast continent above. Its winters are mild, its summers generous, and it has a limpid southern light, and naked-nose wombats and Tasmanian Devils which it shares with nowhere else.

  By Myrtle's time free settlers, the discovery of gold and the wealth of its pastures meant that the major settlements of Australia were proud and prosperous cities of the British Empire. Before 1900, 80 percent of the white inhabitants came from the British Isles, with a sizeable proportion of Irish convicts and immigrants to provide a permanent irritant to the British status quo. Tasmania, isolated from the mainland, became the most English of the Australian states. The mountains and valleys, lakes and uninhabitable wildernesses of most of the island are not conducive to this ambition, but the northwest is different. Launceston's polite parks and squares, its colonial buildings and the rolling hills and pasturelands which surround it, tell the visitor: “This is Australia, but we—and you— really wish it were England.”5

  Mainland Australians tease the islanders about their undiluted Anglo-Saxon population, about inbreeding and the similarity of the island's outline to the female pudenda, but most of all for their enduring desire to hide their convict past. The Tasmanian proverb “Here, men are men, women are knocked up and sheep watch their backsides,” and its convict days, when the island was known as the “Isle of Sodom,” seem to have given birth to nostalgia for a past and a country which were never theirs.

  The convicts who survived mixed with indigent settlers to provide a collection of eccentric rogues and bolters, reformed felons of questionable virtue, lecherous prelates, ranting nonconformists, remittance men, political firebrands, Scottish evangelicals and personifications of English gentility. This latter species became the Tasmanian elite of which Myrtle was an arch-representative, “so English, they wish that England could go to war so they could fight for her again.”

  Something like half of all woman convicts transported to Australia were sent to Van Diemen's Land, where men outnumbered women seven to one. About four hundred had survived the long voyage by the 1820s, and two of them were Myrtle's ancestors—Sophia Edwards, transported in 1800 “for feloniously stealing a silver mug,” and Mary Shea, convicted in County Cork in August 1816 for stealing muslin. After earning her Free Certificate on 28 January 1825 Mary Shea married William Saggers, sentenced to transportation at Middlesex in 1798; their fifth child, Myrtle's grandmother Elizabeth, was born in 1826.

  Pardoned at the same time as Mary Shea and William Saggers was the ebullient Britton Jones, who arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1820.A waterman by trade, he was sentenced to seven years at Bristol Quarter Sessions on 14 July 1817 for stealing a piece of lead.6 In 1822, still serving his sentence, Jones married Sophia Kirk, the daughter of Sophia Edwards and another convict, Matthew Kirk. Sophia Kirk was the thirteenth white girl born on the island. This collection of former “incorrigibles” was, like Louis Darquier's ancestors, mostly illiterate.

  The island became infamous as the “dust-hole” of Britain. “Drunkenness, especially, was all but universal.” By 1825, when Britton Jones became a free man, there was only one church in Launceston, where the clanking of convicts' chains disturbed the Anglican congregation, but thirty taverns—the Cat and Fiddle, the Jolly Sailor, the Help Me Through the World: names of jollity and hope. This was where Jones was to make his money; he became one of the earliest brewers and innkeepers in Launceston. A fine swearer, boozer and adventurer, in 1833 he called his public house the Sir William Wallace, a good rebellious Scots name, even though Jones claimed to be Welsh and proud of it. These early Tasmanian pothouses, exuding fumes of tobacco and erupting with “shrieks of passion,” oaths and laughter, in which prostitutes like Fat Catherine and Carroty Kate earned their keep, meant that prelates of every persuasion descended upon Van Diemen's Land to inject the word of God or sprinkle holy water upon the sinful.

  Apart from depravity and rum, whaling and sealing were the staffs of island life; but Britton Jones looked to property and the land, and became a prosperous farmer and livestock breeder. In 1838 he built for himself wh
at was to become one of Tasmania's stately homes, Franklin House, a confident Georgian construction now open to the public. A few years later he sealed the status of his progeny by bestowing land for the erection of a church and school.

  Sophia Jones meanwhile had eight children, and many of these had even more. Three of the Jones children married children of William Saggers, and one of these couples, Elizabeth Saggers and Britton's eldest son, William “Tiger” Jones, were Myrtle's grandparents. Elizabeth had nine children, in twenty years, and died at the age of forty-five. A year later William Jones, a farming man, propertied and well-to-do like his father, married again. This second marriage produced a further six children, and the vast brood settled around Launceston, so that even now Joneses are thick on the ground.

  In 1864, five years before the birth of Pierre Darquier in Cahors, Myrtle's father Henry was born. Many of the family lives have been recorded in a booklet, Keeping up with the Joneses, written by one of Britton's descendants. The genteel aspirations of Anglo-Australia, later immortalised by Barry Humphries, flourish in this whitewashed account in which Britton Jones, their onlie begetter and a man not to be ashamed of, is described as the son of a Bristol portrait painter to George III, who once had a letter from Queen Victoria.7

  Today, for most Australians a convict ancestor is the equivalent of royal blood, but in this family history all Myrtle's convict ancestors are portrayed as adventurous pioneers who “came ashore” or “landed” or “settled” in Van Diemen's Land. There is not a word about convict ship or chain gang. Myrtle grew up at a time when fantasy was already well in the air, and many incriminating records of convict ancestry were removed from state archives and destroyed. The price paid for such pretensions in Launceston, as in Cahors, was an anxious silence about anything that might damage a family name so recently acquired.

  The Jones family encountered a more severe form of gentility when Henry Jones—Harry—married Myrtle's mother, Alexandrina—Lexie— Morrison in 1891 according to the rites and ceremonies of the Free Church of Scotland, later known as the “Wee Frees.”8 Lexie's maternal grandmother Ann MacLeay, an indigent crofter's widow, brought this harsh fundamentalist faith from the remote island of North Uist in the Western Isles of Scotland in 1855, and she also brought three of her six children with her—Colin (farm labourer), Murdoch (ploughman) and Ann (housemaid). The following year Ann the housemaid married another hardy Scot from the Western Isles, Donald Morrison, a schoolteacher and small farmer, who arrived in Launceston with his violin in 1840.

  The Wee Frees are zealous Calvinistic Christians, fiery preachers, often in the Gaelic, and their flock keep themselves to themselves, upright folk, careful, dedicated to the professions and to teaching in particular. Ann MacLeay Morrison, her Wee Free grandmother, lived until Myrtle was twenty-three. The fortress against sin constructed by followers of the Wee Free persuasion, made up of strict opinions about the Sabbath, Popery, gambling, alcohol and dancing, together with a grim view of women's lot, was certainly shaken when Lexie married Harry.9 The Joneses' world of brewers, hoteliers and graziers extended to the Turf and Racing Club in Harry's case, because he was a fine horseman, a noted judge and breeder of horses who trained and raced his own Thoroughbreds and was an avid racing man. According to Myrtle, in her family “the Mother is always Sacred,” and Lexie seems to have won the day with most of their progeny, who, at least outwardly, became pillars of respectability.

  Myrtle, who did not, was born on 26 November 1893, as summer began, at Freshwater Point, on the Tamar River eight miles north of Launceston, just as Pierre Darquier was graduating as a doctor in Paris. This lovely old colonial homestead, encircled by verandahs, with lawns sloping down to the banks of the river, is a place of beauty exceeding anything offered by the rue du Tapis Vert or the rue du Lycée. In the following year Harry purchased his first property at Carrick, eleven miles from Launceston, and later bought again, calling his house and estate Armidale.

  Carrick is a rural township—of about three hundred people in Myrtle's time—set on the River Liffey. There was a great deal of wealth amongst the “Families of Launceston”; the rich grazing land produced some of the best merino wool in Australia in those days. To wool and wheat Harry added stockbreeding. Like Pierre Darquier he became a notable of his district, and his business dealings and positions were so numerous that by 1927, when Louis Darquier met Myrtle, his “Yankee style” heiress, he was easily able to check on Harry's wealth by consulting the Launceston directory.

  Harry and the tall and handsome Lexie had nine children: Myrtle was the second. As a child Myrtle was neither pretty nor otherwise, just a female version of her many siblings, with good wide eyes and dark hair. Her personality made up for any physical inadequacies, and her warmth and vivacity were qualities she was never to lose, just as Lexie, however far she moved into the Anglican establishment, always remained the daughter of her careful Scots parents.

  “I was brought up,” Myrtle's younger sister Olive wrote in 1991, “in the early part of this century when values and principles were high… That seldom heard word ‘self-discipline’ was encouraged and expected. Bad language and vulgarity were not permitted in our house.”10 Discipline, rectitude, duty and concern for education and social position seem to have formed the circumference of Lexie's life. She made her children's clothes, taught them music, gave them their lessons; they were raised to be “true believers in Christian principles.” As the “children of the big house” they were kept away from the township and, like the Darquier boys, each Jones child was encouraged always to be top of their form.

  By the time Harry moved his family into the house he built at Armi dale, Carrick's heyday as an important grain town had given way, along with the bushrangers, poachers and riffraff of earlier days, to graziers and pastoralists who lived with the inhabitants of Carrick in the English way—they employed them, but did not mix with them socially. On Sundays Lexie combined hymns around the piano with attendance at St. Andrew's Anglican church, taking her children there on a route which avoided the township. Here too the Jones children went to Sunday school, sang in the choir, or played on the small organ, transported from the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, encased in English oak, a relic of “Home.”

  Except for the mill-owning Monds family, the other pastoralists of the district and the rectory, there was little company, although there were plenty of children the Jones clan could have played with had vulgarity not been an issue. Carrick still had all the usual requirements of a small Australian country town: wide gravel roads, gum trees, wattles, neat little cottages of brick and weatherboard, hotels lining the main street, a police station, a school, two churches, a Public Hall and Monds Roller Mills, which dominated and gave work to the town. Myrtle's incapacity to earn her living may well have come from seeing the motto of this enterprise on the factory flourbags every day of her young life—“Work Conquers All.”

  Even today there are horses everywhere in Carrick. Then, the big race days on Boxing Day and Queen Victoria's birthday were highlights of the Carrick year. There was a Carrick Hunt, complete with pink coats, bugles and tally-hos, a Turf Club and a racecourse. Harry Jones was treasurer, clerk of the scales and secretary of the West Tamar Race Club, and his horses won more races at Carrick and throughout northern Tasmania than those of any other owner. All the Jones children were taught to ride, but Myrtle particularly seems to have been her father's child. She insisted that one of her numerous uncles teach her show jumping, and she raced one of her father's horses at the annual Launceston Show, and won.

  Armidale was in its way the manor of Carrick, a large wooden Federation house, set amongst trees and reached by an imposing avenue of poplars and pines. The River Liffey bordered the property, and the house, complete with running water and one of the first telephones in the district, had a charming landscaped garden rolling down from its handsome verandah to a wandering picket fence. There were climbing roses and lilac trees, shamrocks and daffodils, orchards and stable
s. Weeping willows lined the banks of the Liffey, where the children paddled and swam. Lexie looked after the basse cour and dairy, and until 1912, when Harry acquired one of the first motorcars in the district, drove a horse and buggy into Launceston to do her shopping.

  As the daughter of a Scots dominie, above all Lexie was ambitious for her children, whose outdoor life and access to the racetrack were balanced by her passion for education and for music. The Jones children were taught to play and to sing, and to forge useful social contacts; they were not permitted to attend the village school, but they were allowed to encounter the townspeople at Carrick penny concerts, where Myrtle and her brothers would play and sing the songs of the day, poetic—“Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms,” “Come into the Garden, Maud”—and music hall—“My Grandfather's Clock,” “Two Little Girls in Blue,” and of course “Soldiers of the Queen.” In the town there were shows and competitions, concert artistes in the Public Hall, and dances where Myrtle could play for the matrons of Carrick, “in long flowing gowns gliding gracefully to the strains of a waltz or Pride of Erin.” Otherwise, the Jones children grew up behind the picket fence of Armidale. Olive remembered: “My wonderful mother gave us our lessons every morning and for the rest of the day we were free as the fresh air we breathed. We wandered and walked all over the place, visiting our make-believe friends. We rarely played with other children, and at the table we spoke when we were spoken to.”11

  Not opening one's mouth seems to have been as important at Lexie's Armidale as it was in Louise Darquier's rue du Lycée. Myrtle's world of fantasy was nurtured here. While the larrikin children of Carrick enjoyed real Australian childhoods of bush and river, birds like flying jewellery in the skies above, the Jones children were placed in the best schools: the boys in the Anglican Launceston Church Grammar School, and the girls in Methodist Ladies' College, which sent them on the way to university and propertied gentility. Except for Myrtle and her brother Will, the next-born. Myrtle boarded at Miss Windeatt's modest little private school in Launceston, where manners and deportment were the order of the day. For Will, the First World War was to be his education. All the Jones girls were musical, but Myrtle was exceptional. At the piano she could captivate the world; the instrument came alive under her flying fingers as she played and sang.