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Chapter One

A Troubled Family

‘… and my words are burning words and I appear as a strange being.’

— Henry Reed, c.1880

Cynthia was the last of six children born to Edwardian Anglo-Australian gentry in Tasmania, Henry and Lila Reed. English born and educated, Henry married Lila Dennison in 1895, then travelled to Tasmania to take on the profession of pastoralist, the landed elite in Australian society. An admiring journalist described Henry, who was tall, handsome and proud, as a ‘democratic aristocrat’, inadvertently identifying the paradox typical of the Edwardian elite who strived to accommodate and control the radical social changes that threatened their privilege and power. Lila could have posed for the painter Rupert Bunny, forever young and beautiful, whose self-determination seems limited to the exercise of taste and the cultivation of sensibility.

The Reeds lived in style at Logan, the homestead of a family property in the rich farmland of Evandale, south of Launceston. All six children were born here. The family’s social status is underlined in the newspapers, where their comings and goings, their births, deaths, marriages, and other family occasions were duly reported.

The elite status of the Reed family rested on the spectacular fortune made from Van Diemen’s Land by their emigrant orphan father, Henry Sr. Status rather than class mattered in a society that evolved largely from convict stock and working-class migrants. Henry Jr was the youngest of ten children, and ten years old when his father died at home in Mount Pleasant in 1880. His father’s potent influence over the large extended family was perpetuated by his widow, Margaret. In each of the Reed homes in England and Tasmania, oil paintings, etchings, photographs and marble busts memorialised the heroic patriarch, and stories about him still circulate in the local histories.

Henry Sr had begun making money on an industrial scale. Apprenticed to a merchant in Hull when he was thirteen, he had watched the ships with their cargoes of imports and exports come and go. In Launceston, with the Tamar River leading to Bass Strait, he saw his opportunity. Beginning with whaling at Portland, he turned to farming, assisted by Governor Arthur’s land grants and convict labour; the larger the land, the more convicts to work it. Henry had chosen his property in the fertile north-east wisely. In just three years, he had enough to build an elegant and entirely functional three-storey warehouse from quarried sandstone in Launceston, and began importing and exporting direct from Launceston to London. Accessing the larger agricultural areas, the port of Launceston soon outgrew Hobart’s.

Having made a great fortune so soon, Henry Sr was saved by God from drowning in the Tamar River. He renounced his sinful ways, drinking and gambling on his thoroughbred horses, and returned to England as an Evangelist with his first family in 1847. He and William Booth became close friends, united by their shared radical religious beliefs and social concerns. Both were capable of attracting thousands to their fervent open-air services.

He built another mansion for his family home in Tunbridge Wells, sustaining his income from his Tasmanian properties and castigating himself for the sins of his youth in wild Van Diemen’s Land. The great wealth he enjoyed sat oddly with his soul’s torment. He confided in a late letter:

My heart aches as I look upon the fashion and worldliness and spiritual death I see before me and my words are burning words and I appear as a strange being.1

God called Henry Sr back to the island in 1875, when Cynthia’s father was just five years old. He was concerned for his tenant farmers in the grip of a depression after wool prices plummeted. Having made a triumphant entry on his own ship up the Tamar, he provided for his tenants and busied himself building a mansion on his picturesque property near Deloraine, calling it Wesley Dale. Eager to extend his religious ambitions, he moved to Launceston and bought the Mount Pleasant estate, crowned by a mansion on top of Prospect Hill, and set about renovating it.

The two-storey home was flanked by a single-storey skirt verandah supported by tall Corinthian columns, with a conservatory added on the northern end. A balcony extended above the verandah outside the main bedroom, offering extensive views over the front terrace, flower gardens, oaks and elms, with a winding avenue of trees leading down the long driveway. Parkland and pleasure gardens extended around the mansion. Behind the house the land sloped away to acres of pasturage. At the bottom of the hill Henry had a dam built, with an elaborate iron pump to reticulate water up to the orchard, vegetable and flower gardens. Flanked by woodland, it too formed a picturesque and practical playground. Mount Pleasant became the premier family home, and Henry parcelled his other estates out to his children. His devout daughter Mary and her family lived at Wesley Dale, and when Henry Jr came of age he was placed at Logan.

The patriarch had penned a memoir, Incidents in an Eventful Life, which Margaret had published after his death in 1880 by a religious press in London, dedicating it to their children and grandchildren. How much she censored is unknown, except for the drinking and gambling. There are stories about his reputation as a good master to his convicts, which protected him from attacks by bushrangers who terrorised the first settlers in the rich northeast frontier of the island. He stayed with convicts overnight in their locked cells to win their souls before they were hanged outside the prison walls. He once rode a hard journey at night to clear a convict’s name and spare his life.

While Henry wrote that ‘there was a fearful war of extermination against the natives’, nothing remains to indicate what he witnessed or what role he might have played during the twenty years he spent on the island before 1847.2 The dispossession and destruction of Aboriginal lives and country was an ongoing subject of international scandal. Louisa Meredith in My Home in Tasmania (1852) fancied there was something in the surrounding air that transmitted home the idea of the settlers being lawless.3

There is only one other acknowledgement of racial violence in Henry Sr’s memoir. He had been a partner in John Batman’s venture across the straits to find more grazing land for flocks of sheep. Henry expressed the pious hope that they might claim 600,000 acres without the violence that had dominated on the island. Their friendship dated from Henry’s arrival in Launceston. John Batman was farming under Ben Lomond, and Henry selected his first land grants in this fertile country in Evandale and Deloraine. He stood witness to Batman’s wedding to an escaped convict Eliza, having been given permission to do so by Governor Arthur in return for rounding up ‘troublesome natives’. Their neighbour, painter John Glover whose paintings testify to the fertile, temperate and panoramic locale, was unequivocal in judging Batman a ‘murderer of blacks’.4

The troublesome subject of the colony’s racial strife was consigned to the grave with Truganini’s much publicised death in 1876. Memorialising of the ‘last of the tribes’ in verse, photographs and sculptures became common practice over the generations and across the country. Benjamin Law sculpted Truganini young and strong, her nakedness covered with a loose possum rug around her shoulders and a white shell necklace around her throat. In 1878, dignitaries in Hobart exhumed her grave, and exhibited her skeleton in the museum until 1947, to symbolise a lost ‘primitive’ past.

The Edwardians as a generation distinguished between their own modernity, with electric light, motorcars, home telephones and international cables, and the lifestyle embodied in the late queen’s example of bucolic domesticity. Like the new king, they styled themselves as urbane and delighted in society. Their vernacular was whimsical, teasing and ironical rather than serious and sentimental. Cynthia’s father, with his impeccable clothes and English accent, enjoyed the fiction of Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling, and nicknamed all his children. In fashion, Lila turned to the new haute couture from Paris, favouring comfort, simplicity and elegance. Her taste in art was influenced by the current arts and crafts movement in Tasmania, which celebrated the use of local materials, especially timbers and images of native fauna and flora. She chose Percy Whitelaw’s politely bohemian studio to have her children photographed in their perfect clothes. That she was artistically inclined is underlined by her patronage of the Tasmanian Art Society.

Cynthia’s parents made a handsome, fashionable couple in Launceston. Their names began appearing in the papers when they settled at Logan in 1896, Lila for her charitable activities and Henry for his prizes at agricultural shows, or when he hosted hunting parties for the gentry. In Launceston, the civil-minded town had emerged from the depression with the beginning of industrial mining in Tasmania. It was led by the Mount Bischoff tin mine in the northwest — the biggest tin mine in the world — and the gold mine at nearby Beaconsfield. Declared a city in 1888, Launceston was transformed by stately public buildings and picturesque parks. Albert Hall was erected on the boundary of the Town Park to house a major international colonial exhibition in 1891, featuring the riches of the new mines. It boasted the eleventh largest hall in the world, and was used for balls, concerts and exhibitions. Henry and Lila would have welcomed the opportunity to hear music and see theatre, a staple in their family entertainments.

Lila bore their first child, Lila Coralie, in 1896, and their first son, Dick, two years later. Margaret, named for her formidable grandmother, followed in 1900, John, the year colonial government gave way to federated Australia, and Barbara in 1905. Cynthia was born in the spring of 1908, on 18 September, and christened Violet Cynthia. Flowers were an important feature both outside, where gardeners worked to produce a rich abundance, and inside, where they were displayed. Their selection and ordering was one of too few methods of self-expression for Lila — for her flowers did have a language.

Violet seemed a frail child, and her naming marked out the difference between her and her robust sisters. That she was born closest to the collapse of the Edwardian era also made for difference.

Edwardian children of wealthy families were raised in comfort and privilege, but for the most part separated from their parents and often under a strict regime. Their first years were spent sequestered in the nursery, tended to by a nurse whose costume identified her role in the house. Having reached the age of reason, they joined the family downstairs, spending some hours a day being schooled by a governess. At the age of ten, the older children were sent home to be properly educated at boarding schools. Only the Great War would change this Reed tradition.

While Cynthia was still a baby, the Reeds moved from Logan to the premier family estate, Mount Pleasant, high on a hill above Launceston. Her cousin Hudson Fysh remembered it well:

In the early days of [last] century, Mt Pleasant was a magnificent property on the lines of an English manor house … with a colonial style veranda on two sides. We children had cause to remember this veranda as there was a highly varnished portion from the front steps to the entrance of the house itself with its two glass panels on which was inscribed … ‘Nothing without the Cross’. We were not allowed to walk over that sacred entrance if we had nails in our boots for fear of scratching the highly polished surface; and that is how Mt Pleasant was kept in those days under a fleet of highly efficient housekeepers, cooks and maids, with Curtiss the head gardener presiding over the surroundings with the help of his many assistants.

What a place to keep up. From the lodge gates, always kept closed, and opened by the lodge-keeper on a ring or a hail, up a wide half mile of gravel drive to the well situated house. As one pulled up in front the air was redolent with the odour of Mt Pleasant’s prize chrysanthemums on the veranda if the season was right. The bluestone stables attracted attention, and the family tomb close to the house. There were spacious lawns, English elms and oaks, and down a slope, tennis courts and a full size bowling green. Mt Pleasant had a large orchard, the apples and pears being carefully stored for winter. Down at the hot houses the rather famous Reed grapes were grown. Further through the trees water gleamed from the surface of an artificial lake, with its swans, and trout rising. Here we used to swim after Christmas dinner in the great dining room, with the portraits of Grandfather and Grandmother looking down on us.5

Here Henry’s mother Margaret, Victorian matriarch and active Evangelist, ruled. Widowed in 1880, Margaret had seized the chance to manage her husband’s numerous financial and evangelical pursuits in his name. After his death, Margaret commissioned a new row of cottages in Launceston to house destitute widows, called Dunorlan after their home in England. She bought the Royal Hotel, rejoiced at its demolition, and had built the Memorial Church with a complex to feed and school the needy in Launceston.

At Mount Pleasant, she commissioned a landscaped retreat for a tomb ground to serve as the family vault, set into the side of the hill where the patriarch was interred behind bluestone. The martyr’s descendant (Irish-born Margaret traced her heritage back to a Protestant martyr) had every intention of joining him there. His towering biblical image appeared among embroidered religious texts, in oil paintings, etchings and marble busts. She had his memoir and religious tracts published in London, and continued his commitment to missions in China and New Guinea.

For the rest of her life Margaret dressed in mourning, in gowns of black silk or satin, depending on the season, the black offset by her white lace cap and shawl of lace or soft Shetland wool. She made time for her last grandchild, Cynthia, welcoming her into her room upstairs with long white lace curtains at the windows and evangelical texts on the walls. She saw in the child’s delicate face, under a crop of curls, a likeness to her lost first son, Walter. She held a powerful attraction for the child. It would have been Cynthia’s grandmother who gave her the mournful Victorian children’s books, Eric, or, Little by Little and Foxe’s Martyrs, on the same birthday.6

Perhaps the most marked change Henry and Lila would make was to shift from their parents’ demanding Nonconformism to mainstream Anglicanism, the religion of state and country. Anglicans chose a comforting and less demanding God, one more at ease in society. However, the family preserved the convention of servants addressing the family formally, including the children.

In 1911, the Reeds travelled to England, in part to see the older children. Coralie was nearly fully grown at fifteen, and Margaret was eleven. No record seems to exist about their English schooling; they were destined for domesticity, their duty to be good and hopefully marry well. Dick, at thirteen, graduated from a preparatory school in London to enter Cheltenham College. The college had two streams, the Military and the Classical; Dick was meant for the Military stream:

His father wrote on his admission form that he was intended for an army career, and he was accordingly placed on the Military side, proceeding from class Upper 2 Military to class Special 6 in the time he was here.

John, at ten, was to begin at the preparatory school. When his time for Cheltenham came in 1913, Henry enrolled him in the Classical stream, ‘where the curriculum included Greek as well as Latin and was designed to prepare boys for university entrance and professions such as law’.7

The Reeds spent time visiting various family branches and friends; Henry would also have attended to business affairs. Dick, Margaret and John remained behind at school when the others returned to the Mount Pleasant Estate in 1912. The family returned with a Daimler and a chauffeur, Joseph Holmes, along with fashionable wear for motoring. Lila chose an elegant blue motoring veil.8

Margaret, after some forty year’s management, relinquished control of the business to Henry, her only remaining biological son. The Reed fortune, linked to branches in Melbourne and England, had survived the bank crashes of the 1890s and the threats to their shipping by newly united dockworkers. Margaret remained the domestic matriarch around whom the extended clan of Reeds gathered. Henry Sr had added a large hall for use as a chapel in the courtyard behind the house, conveniently close to the stables, with a garden wall extending to a romantic arbour. The services had ended with Henry’s death, so the chapel became known as the ‘Big Room’, used as a schoolroom when it wasn’t required for large family occasions.

Lila had little influence in the home. Cynthia’s adored nurse was a friend from Lila’s earlier life in England. All three were distressed by the matriarch’s decision for Cynthia to be schooled by a governess, though the child was precocious, provocative, and a source of irritation to her father. Her large, often blackened eyes haunted Henry, as the memory of his brother Walter might have done.

Having lost her only ally in the house, Lila looked to the town below to find some use for her talents. She began by fulfilling her family duties to charitable works in town, and her social obligations, such as hosting visiting vice-regal governors and their entourages. Each fortnight, the widows at Dunorlan Cottages had to be visited and paid a small stipend, a duty she shared with her stepsister-in-law, Hudson’s mother at Wesley Dale. Like Cynthia, Hudson remembered visiting them and the bright silver coin they received. Lila regularly presided over charity bazaars and flower shows, soon establishing herself as a charming and persuasive public speaker.

In 1914, Coralie was eighteen and out in society. In June, Margaret and John were returned to Australia, leaving only Dick behind to finish at Cheltenham. When war was declared, many Tasmanian boys, especially country boys, confident of their horseriding and bush skills, enlisted. This included their cousin Hudson Fysh, who would draw on his piloting experience after the war to found Quantas Airways.

None imagined the catastrophe of modern, mechanised warfare. The children at home added a prayer for soldiers and sailors to their evening observance. The Union Jack was raised high on the roof of Mount Pleasant; the daily papers carried growing lists of local boys killed, wounded or missing.

At home, Cynthia discovered the delights and disadvantages of being among her siblings. She was experienced enough outdoors for John to include her on his bird-watching and egg-collecting adventures. They were often out on their ponies, exploring the surrounding countryside. When summer came they could fish, go boating or swim in the lake. She also had to endure the teasing older brothers seem to find irresistible.

They also spent time with their governess, Miss Greenfield, in the Big Room. (Years later, when John saw the elderly Miss Greenfield, she greeted him as ‘Master John’.)9 The Big Room made an ideal schoolroom, with a high-panelled wood ceilings and long narrow windows punctuating the whitewashed walls. Double doors led down into the enclosed courtyard garden, where the arbour was protected by garden walls and bathed by morning sun. The Big Room housed a harmonium and a piano, a desk Dick kept locked for his guns, and cabinets for John’s ornithological collection — specimens laid out on cottonwool with explanatory notes neatly appended. Books, maps, writing and art materials sat alongside the white marble bust of the patriarch in his prime.

Here, Miss Greenfield taught Barbara and Cynthia, and advised Margaret, who thought she might follow in her step-aunt’s footsteps and become a missionary. Of the daughters, serious-minded Margaret was most like her formidable grandmother, regarded as ‘the plain one’. Like her grandmother, she had a soft spot for the baby of the family and was always ready to take care of Cynthia.

In the new year of 1915, Margaret and Barbara left home to board at the Hermitage in Geelong, while John was enrolled at Geelong Grammar. Now Cynthia was alone at home, but would see her siblings every three months.

Dick returned home as the war was revealing itself as a catastrophe. He was eager to join his friends already fighting — it was, after all, what he had been educated for. However, he was rejected on medical grounds. Ten years older than Cynthia, the two were fast friends, and Cynthia loved to escape the house and go riding with him. Often arguing with his father over new farming methods, Dick left home, taking out his inheritance in farming in the northwest. His cousin Hudson was flying planes in combat.

Enlisting was out of the question for Henry at forty-six, but he was impatient to be doing something. There were rumours and allegations against the Red Cross about inefficiency and corruption impeding the work so many Australians supported. In the winter of 1916, Henry went to Egypt to investigate the claims. Launceston’s Examiner reported him as being back home in September, and conveyed his guarded defence of the Red Cross, which he felt was necessary for the war that was going so wrong.

Some of Henry’s discontent focused on the choices his older children were making. Coralie was bent on marrying a man of their class but one known to be a spendthrift. Dick had left to succeed on his own terms and Henry probably worried about his future. Margaret, who had graduated from the Hermitage as Dux of the school, now wanted to become a doctor, a profession only just opening up for women. Her headmistress Elsie Morres was an example to her of the new independent, professional woman.

Cynthia remained the only child at home until she was almost twelve, tutored by Miss Greenfield. She spent time outdoors, where she might have met with the head gardener Curtiss, to find out about his latest project, and visit newly born farm animals. Most of all, in the good weather, she loved reading in the seclusion of the landscaped tomb ground. She often accompanied her mother in the chauffeur-driven Daimler to Launceston. Lila had turned her attention to needy mothers, many widowed by the war, and their offspring, working for the Queen Victoria Hospital and a baby clinic cted to the Anglican St John’s Church. The town and countryside remained in a kind of stasis after the war’s end, frozen in the misery of lives lost and crippled. The war shadowed Cynthia’s childhood and her years at boarding school. She saw the walking wounded in town, while at home a gardening hand, Harold, had returned from the war, coughing, lungs poisoned by mustard gas.

In 1919, with the opening for women to graduate as doctors in Cambridge, Margaret at last persuaded her father to let her enter the profession. Coralie was engaged and soon to marry. Henry’s youngest daughter, like his eldest son, worried him. She disappeared for hours at a time, often taking some reading with her, and it angered him that she could forget to bring the books back inside.

It was 1920, and Henry decided it was time Cynthia learnt discipline. Henry’s letters to John make plain his fondness for capitalising words like ‘Duty’ and ‘Class’; he was big on discipline. When his children opened their presents on Christmas Day they had to fold the wrapping paper and roll the string in a neat ball before examining their gift.

Shortly before the beginning of the next school term, the Prince of Wales came to town. He was touring Australian cities and towns as royal tribute for the country’s contribution to the Great War. He was popularly dubbed the ‘digger prince’, but ‘playboy prince’ fitted him better. The plans made to entertain him in Launceston had been regularly updated in the newspapers. He was to stay at Mount Pleasant, tempted by the prospect of good hunting. Then the Examiner published the news that the Prince would stay in town at its leading hotel, the Brisbane, which was put entirely at the disposal of the royal party, free of charge by the grateful publican. At Mount Pleasant, Margaret Reed took great offence.

In June, Cynthia sailed to Melbourne with Barbara and John to begin at the Hermitage. The school was abuzz about the Prince and who had seen him. Armistice Day, Empire Day and Anzac Day dominated the school calendar.

Sources include the Reed Family File at Launceston Public Library; Trove digitised newspapers (trove.nla.com.au); Reed Papers, State Library of Victoria.

1 Hudson Fysh, Henry Reed: Van Diemen’s Land Pioneer, Hobart: Cat & Fiddle Press, 1973, pp. 148.

2 Henry Reed Sr, Incidents in an Eventful Life, London: Dunorlan Tracts, 1907, p. 175.

3 Louisa Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, London: J. Murray, 1852, p. 215.

4 John McPhee, The Art of John Glover, South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1980, p. 41.

5 Hudson Fysh, Henry Reed, p. 143–5.

6 Cynthia Nolan, Open Negative: An American Memoir, London: Macmillan, 1967, p. 78.

7 Excerpt from Cheltenham College Archives.

8 Cynthia Nolan, A Sight of China, London: Macmillan, 1969, p. 72.

9 Miss Greenfield, in Neil Douglas, A Far Cry, Karella Publications, 1979, p. 139. Douglas, a horticulturalist, was then an employee at Heide.