They Found a Cave Read online

  NAN CHAUNCY was born Nancen Beryl Masterman in England in 1900. She moved with her family to Tasmania when she was twelve, to Bagdad, north of Hobart.

  Nan grew up surrounded by the bush that would inspire her writing. Her love of the outdoors led to a lifelong association with the Australian Girl Guides. She returned to the UK in her early thirties and lived for a time on a houseboat on the Thames. She travelled in northern Europe and taught English at a Girl Guide school in Denmark.

  On the voyage back to Australia in 1938 Nan met Helmut Anton Rosenfeld. They changed their name to Chauncy soon after marrying and lived in the family cottage at Bagdad, turning the property into a wildlife sanctuary, Chauncy Vale. Nan worked as a scriptwriter for the ABC and they had a daughter, Heather.

  In 1947 Nan published her first novel, They Found a Cave, set in the hills around Bagdad. She published a further thirteen books, including Tiger in the Bush, Devil’s Hill and Tangara, which were awarded CBCA Book of the Year in 1958, ’59, and ’61. Her works demonstrate her respect for the environment, and her fresh style marked the beginning of shift towards a greater realism in Australian children’s novels.

  Nan Chauncy was the first Australian writer to be awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Diploma of Merit, and the CBCA presents the biennial Nan Chauncy Award in her honour. She died at Chauncy Vale in 1970.

  JOHN MARSDEN is one of Australia’s most-loved authors. He has written more than thirty books for children and young adults including the hugely popular Tomorrow series. His books have sold more than three million copies in Australia and have been published around the world. John Marsden is the founder/principal of Candlebark School in the Macedon Ranges in Victoria.

  johnmarsden.com.au

  ALSO BY NAN CHAUNCY

  World’s End was Home

  A Fortune for the Brave

  Tiger in the Bush

  Devil’s Hill

  Tangara

  Half a World Away

  The Roaring 40

  High and Haunted Island

  The Skewbald Pony

  Panic at the Garage

  Mathinna’s People

  Lizzie’s Lights

  The Lighthouse Keeper’s Son

  textclassics.com.au

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Nan Chauncy 1948

  Introduction copyright © John Marsden 2013

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by Oxford University Press, London, 1948

  This edition published by The Text Publishing Company 2013

  Cover illustration by WH Chong after original illustrations by Margaret Horder

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Text

  Typeset by Midland Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press, an Accredited ISO AS/NZS 14001:2004

  Environmental Management System printer

  Primary print ISBN: 9781922147196

  Ebook ISBN: 9781922148261

  Author: Chauncy, Nan, 1900-1970 author.

  Title: They found a cave / by Nan Chauncy; introduced by John Marsden.

  Target Audience: For children.

  Series: Text classics.

  Subjects: Children—Tasmania—Conduct of life—Juvenile fiction.

  Country life—Tasmania—Juvenile fiction.

  Caves—Tasmania—Juvenile fiction.

  Tasmania—Juvenile fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  A Child’s First Primer of Subversion

  by John Marsden

  They Found a Cave

  WHEN I was nine years old and living in Tasmania, my infant sister had to spend some time in Royal Hobart Hospital. We visited her every day, but the crowd around her bedside was dense, and I found it hard to be noticed.

  Bored, I turned to the bed next to her. Occupying it was a little boy, aged perhaps six or seven. Wan and listless, he lay there with no one to talk to. In those days visiting hours were enforced by stern nurses. For only one hour a day were visitors permitted near the children, so the isolation of this boy was very obvious.

  I was quite obsessed with little toy cars, and I started playing with some of my cars on his bedspread, involving him in the stories I created. He seemed to enjoy this, but it wasn’t for a week or so that one of the nurses told my mother his story.

  He came from a remote settlement on the west coast of Tasmania, and no one in his family could afford the long trip to Hobart to visit him. He had been in the hospital for more than two months. I was rather gratified when the nurse told my mother that my visits had transformed him, and that all day long he lay in bed waiting eagerly for our game with the cars. It made me even more enthusiastic about playing with him, and I’m afraid that I neglected my sister completely.

  That was 1959. Stories about the hardship and isolation experienced by families in bush communities were commonplace in Tasmania then, and no doubt in other states of Australia as well.

  These were the people Nan Chauncy wrote about. The battlers, the hermits, the fringe dwellers, the nonentities. Many had hardly been to school; many were illiterate. Badge, the child-hero of Chauncy’s book Tiger in the Bush has never seen canned food, never seen a camera, never seen electric light. When a visitor extends his hand, Badge stares at it, bewildered. No one has ever offered to shake his hand before, and he doesn’t know what to do.

  No one else in the post-war world wrote about these people. Perhaps no well-known Australian writer since Banjo Paterson or Henry Lawson had taken much interest in them. But Chauncy, the privately educated daughter of a professional family from Middlesex, England, who emigrated to Tasmania with her family when financial troubles beset them, somehow developed an admiration, a respect, and affection for them which permeated most of her books. She was clearly affected by the bonds which held their families together, and the loving relationships they often developed. An ardent conservationist long before it was fashionable, she recognised that these bush people loved, in an unsentimental way, the Tasmanian landscape and the native creatures which inhabited it.

  People like Badge and his family were not educated in the conventional sense of the word, but Chauncy showed them to have an extensive knowledge of their environment, and outstanding bush skills.

  In They Found a Cave, Chauncy’s first novel, we are introduced to a family which seemingly mirrors Chauncy’s own—well-educated immigrants from England. With names like Nigel, Brickenden and Anthony, the children seem like aliens in the rough-and-tumble world of the Tasmanian bush. Sent from England to stay with their aunt when the Second World War broke out, they expect that they will soon be going to boarding school, but in the meantime they flourish in the free atmosphere of farm life. We can imagine the young Nan Chauncy being equally exhilarated by the contrast between Tasmania and the well ordered world of Middlesex.

  However the success of They Found a Cave rests not upon the shoulders of the young travellers who are adjusting to a very different lifestyle, but upon the remarkable Tasmanian boy aptly nicknamed Tas.

  Tas personifies everything Chauncy admired about the uncivilised, unschooled, knowledgeable and enterprising Tasmanians with whom she must have mingled when the family moved to the quaintly named Bagd
ad, a tiny rural community north of Hobart. Tas has ‘never had a chance’ at formal education, but he has spirit, initiative, bush skills and farm skills. He is a born leader.

  ‘It seemed impossible to climb higher, but always Tas pointed out a way…’

  Tas is marked out as special for another reason however. There is something quite extraordinary about him; an aspect of his life that is almost unknown in children’s books prior to the publication of They Found a Cave. It is this: Tas has a mother and step-father who are simply awful. They are bullies, liars and thieves. They have no redeeming qualities. Not even Charles Dickens dared give his fictitious children such horrible parents. One has to skip ahead to Roald Dahl’s Matilda to find parents equally repellent, but the Wormwoods are slapstick figures, whereas Chauncy’s Pinners are credible in their viciousness.

  And even more remarkably, Chauncy gives children, via They Found a Cave, tacit permission to leave such parents. Given that the book was written in a conservative era—a time when middle-class parents had a shared understanding of the term ‘family values’—the idea that children could and even should take the initiative to extricate themselves from damaging family environments and become responsible for their own care was truly revolutionary. We do not find this level of subversion in the works of that mass-market phenomenon of the 1940s and 50s, Enid Blyton. We do not find it in popular American titles such as the Nancy Drew mysteries or the Bobbsey Twins series. We do not find it in the distinguished Australian children’s authors of the period, such as Joan Phipson, Colin Thiele, or Ivan Southall.

  There is not a word of criticism of the children in They Found a Cave for going bush, for living rough, for defying adults, for walking out on the grownups who treat them badly.

  Nigel even escapes from police custody without any negative consequences.

  They Found a Cave is not a cartoon or comic strip however. For all that Tas plots against his mother and stepfather, undermines their authority, and effectively ‘divorces’ himself from them, his sense of honour remains intact. When the police ask him for help as they prepare to prosecute Pa and Ma Pinner, Tas replies: ‘Look, Mr Bentley, I’m not giving evidence against Ma. Better leave me out of this.’

  Given that it was published in 1948, They Found a Cave does contain a few anachronisms and at least one episode that causes twenty-first-century readers to cringe. The sale of the skeleton of an aboriginal Tasmanian to a ‘scientific party’ makes for awful reading nowadays. It is at odds with Chauncy’s great respect for Indigenous Tasmanians and her compassion for the suffering they endured at the hands of white settlers. But it is also social history: a reminder of the ignorance and thoughtlessness that were endemic in Australian society when Chauncy wrote her first novel.

  That aside, what strikes the contemporary reader most about They Found a Cave is that it is remarkably modern. The pace is lively, the language accessible, the characters memorable, and the politics progressive. The respect for young people is palpable. Above all it is an entertaining story, ‘a good read’.

  Filmmakers recognised its cinematic qualities, and in 1962 it was given a new lease of life when a film version was released. This was another remarkable achievement, as films adapted from Australian children’s books of the period were few and far between.

  With They Found a Cave Nan Chauncy launched one of Australia’s most important literary careers, and redefined the tone and style of children’s literature in this country.

  Specially for Heather of course

  and

  Avian Grenfell

  1

  ‘Kangas’

  Hollow Tree was a fine mark on the landscape. It hung above the Homestead with enormous roots grasping the boulders of the mountain side. Up and up went the mountain behind, up with its load of tall gum-trees and bush scrub, ever more steeply up to the wild, unknown heights of weather-beaten sandstone on top.

  But Cherry looked down. She wriggled her skinny back more comfortably against the trunk of the old tree and stared between her brown knees at the house below. She wore shorts and a red shirt, and the two big toes showed through frayed holes in her canvas shoes.

  The peaceful scene in the valley rather annoyed her than otherwise: the dog asleep in the yard, the green hedge, and the red roof of the house baking in the sunshine. The natty rows of peas looked smug, she considered, in their lines along the vegetable strip, while the eternal cries of lambs who had mislaid their mothers were irritating.

  If she pushed a large stone with her toe would it roll down the steep incline and bounce on to the iron roof with a bang? Would that make a frightful crash and wake them all up inside? Would Tas run out, grinning as he guessed who had done it? Would it bring old Ma Pinner chasing out to look for a tree-branch blown down on the roof?—Ah! That would be good! For a moment she was tempted to give a push, till she remembered Jandie. It would not be fair to disturb Jandie’s after-dinner rest.

  Cherry closed her eyes to shut her thoughts from temptation. She sniffed the air and thought how good the gum-trees made it smell, and how untidily they dropped their bark in brown twists everywhere, and why didn’t they shed their leaves instead? This brought her to think in turn of beech leaves, tender green in spring, and brown as nuts in autumn in big heaps on the lawn—when there was a lawn, before the bomb crater took it all…was it really true there was nowhere to sweep up beech leaves now? Half dozing, with her head on her arms, she could see that lawn again so clearly…

  Only Cherry’s thoughts were active, leaping over to England. The rest of her, from the mop of dark curls to the toenails sticking through her shoes, slept in the sunshine of Tasmania.

  Suddenly the sack behind her, which served as a door into Hollow Tree, was jerked aside and Nigel poked his head out.

  ‘Look, boys! Here’s our old sentry asleep at her post! What do you think of that? Cherry, you’re a fat lot of use keeping watch with your eyes shut!’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep, Nig. I was just thinking. Anyhow, I don’t believe Tas will come now.’ She got up and stretched and glanced at Brick and Nippy, who had followed their big brother outside. ‘You do look like a lot of owls!’ she jeered.

  ‘’Course we do!’ Brick stood in the strong light blinking. ‘Can’t see a thing coming out of the dark in there.’ He rubbed his eyes.

  ‘That’s right, Nippy! You would copy Brick,’ scolded Cherry. ‘Now your face is black as ink.’

  ‘Well, it’s my face, Cherry.’ He gazed proudly at his hands, which were the colour of the charcoal inside the burnt tree-trunk, and wiped them carefully on his yellow curls, which he hated.

  ‘Stop yabbering, you two!’ commanded Nigel. ‘Listen, can’t you?’

  From the valley came sounds of loud voices and general noise. There was a sudden yell, and someone shot from the back door, which banged behind him.

  ‘That’s Tas all right.’

  They crowded to the edge to see better what was going on at the Homestead.

  The door shot open again, and Ma Pinner came out and raged on the doorstep. Through the still peace of the early afternoon they caught every word she flung after her retreating son.

  ‘Git outter here—you! Don’t dare show so much as the skin of yer nose inside my kitchen! You jest bring them things in here again and—and see what you’ll git!’ She paused a moment with folded arms, as though about to say more, then abruptly went inside, and once again the door banged with a thud which echoed round the hills.

  ‘He’s watching from the chaff-house shed till she’s gone. Tell him where we are, Nig.’

  So Nigel, with two fingers in his mouth, whistled a private signal, and soon Tas, a grin splitting his lean face, came swiftly up the hill to join them.

  ‘What’s up, Tas?’

  ‘Nothing’s up but me! Look, the Boss give me the afternoon off—said she didn’t feel too good and might have to lay down. Ma overheard her, of course, and had to chip in. “Yes, do have a lay down,” she says. “It will do you all the good
in the world,” she says, sweet as a bee’s bag and with the sting underneath. “I’d do the same meself if I hadn’t such a lot to do,” sez she, “but my boy Tas will give me a hand with the washing-up and cleaning if you don’t need him, won’t you, son?” Cripes, the sting was underneath all right!’

  ‘Ooh! The flabby pig!’

  ‘Yeah! After I’d cut all that wood for her this morning, too! Wait on, though, and listen…There’s Ma speaking sweet and handing me a look that would curdle cream (and I reckon I give it back with interest!) and me asking the Boss if I hadn’t better take that swarm of bees first? “Of course!” agrees your Aunt Jandie. “Good-oh!” thinks me.’

  ‘But Tas,’ Brick interrupted, ‘I thought you took those bees before dinner.’

  ‘So I did.’ He winked slowly, and stretched his lanky frame along the warm rock as he talked. ‘She didn’t know that, see?’

  ‘Oh? What happened then?’

  ‘Bees,’ continued Tas unhurriedly. ‘Bees are the things to settle my Ma. Dead scared of ’em she is. Only thing that does git her down that I knows of. Well, I went out quick and lively, put on hat and bee veil, and got the bee smoker well going. Then, when I was sure Ma was alone, I poked my head in at the kitchen door, first puffing smoke all over meself.

  ‘“Quick, Ma!” I yells, so loud that she nearly drops all the dishes. “Quick! They’re stinging mad! Help brush ’em off of me, will you?” And I rushed round the room slapping at the air and meself. My word! It didn’t take her long to pitch me out, I can tell you!’

  ‘We heard from up here.’

  ‘Did you hear her tell me not to go near the kitchen? Right! I’ll see I don’t! So I reckon I’ve got the time off after all. What’s this about a new game?’

  ‘It’s called “kangas” and played up here. The kangaroos hop from rock to rock to get away from a gorilla who may tread anywhere.’

  ‘Huh! What is there but rock up here!’

  ‘Just you wait till you’re chased and you find a lot that isn’t rock. Why, Brick even carries flat stones about with him in case he gets stuck and can’t reach his “home”. You see each kanga has a hiding-place where no gorilla may come, though he may lurk about outside waiting to pounce.’