A Crying in the Wind

Elizabeth Fleetwood

A Tasmanian Story

“This rich and absorbing story’s other ending is still out there, waiting in the wind to be heard…”
– Dr Alison Bleaney

This epic and sweeping 200-year saga of an ancient island and its violent transformation from Eden-like paradise to the tourist-destination Tasmania of today, is told through the lives of four families. 

The Aboriginal child Tom, stolen in 1812 and forced into early adulthood with no family, no identity, and no love;  the hard working Scottish Fairfield family who leave all that is familiar to establish themselves in an alien place; the convict George Turner whose gentleness and conscience are finally destroyed by hard fate; and later the Dijkstras - displaced from Java and then from the Netherlands by WWII – come seeking a new home in the fabled isle that their own Abel Tasman had discovered in 1642.   In the wake of invasion and genocide, the remnant Aborigines struggle for bare subsistence and recognition on the remote Bass Strait Islands while the pastoral settlers build their empires on someone else’s land;  the convict’s sons try to create a new identity, and the Dutch search for peace but bring memories of other wars.  All of them are in an alien environment full of ghosts and strange presences. 

As their descendants – ordinary people whom you might meet on the streets of Hobart today - interact around the troubled boy Ty, a threatening environmental mystery, and a fiery climax on the slopes of the grand Western Tiers, this is raw history as well as the heart-warming story of ordinary people, loving, hating and battling along in a difficult setting, indelibly marked by their past, yet striving to rise above it and seek redemption.

 

About the Author

Elizabeth Fleetwood has lived in Tasmania since 1982.  Having previously farmed in Cornwall, she and Tom purchased a dairy farm on the North West Coast, where they raised their three children, Michael, Sara and Frank.  They gave up dairying when they could no longer bear the cries of separation between the cows and their calves, although they really rather missed the routine and the comfortingly warm, hay-scented bodies filling the milking parlour.  Elizabeth got a job managing a local bookshop, and Tom built them a home on a smallholding; many adventures were had camping or beach combing, the house was always overrun with pets of all kinds, and the garden yielded wonderful organic produce, including the hated broad beans, which the children were made to eat despite protests.  There was magic in the peace of golden evenings, the chickens gently chuckling their way to bed in the large orchard, and the deep stillness of the land.

Elizabeth has always loved writing, has edited numerous newsletters and contributes articles regularly to local papers, including the Tasmanian Times and Drumbeat.  Social conditions, justice, equality and access to education, as well as the environment and living eco-consciously, are her major concerns.  She runs a local discussion group focussing on the big questions of Life, attends others, and considers herself a Quaker in spiritual practise.
With the end of the marriage and the children independent, Elizabeth moved to Hobart and started her own tourism business, which she ran for 10 years.  Having come as an adult to a land she knew nothing of, and thus experiencing the real starkness of ‘being a stranger’, she set out to learn the Tasmanian history, and when later being continuously asked by hundreds of tourist clients about what made the Island unique, this required considerable in-depth study.  Having sold her business, Elizabeth now lives in Hobart, still missing the cows and the chickens but loving the garden full of birds, Brutus the over-size goldfish in the pond, Sooty the Cat who actually runs the place, rejoicing in friends, family and grandchildren, and is grateful to be living in this fascinating but mercifully quiet corner of the world.