What made you write this book?
How can you not scratch when you itch?
My father shared snippets about his Tasmanian childhood with me from our first encounter, and at every opportunity thereafter. As he discovered more about his ancestors, their stories became part of a large mud-map in my mind. I kept thinking how very like my father some of his forebears sounded.
I started to catch the same fervour and thought there was a story worth telling. How would it be if I traced these passions and traits down through the family lines, and show how they fused together to make Reg the complex puzzle that he always seemed to be? It seemed a huge task.
Initially my plan was to make this history accessible to all the folk in our family, not as a dry tome, but as a living tale with real characters, overlaying the facts gleaned from documents, files, newspaper articles, letters, photos, and Reg’s own recollections.
As I wrote, I realised this was the story of an average human being, coping with the churning waters of life, using the resources he had been given. While the story starts on the other side of the world, attention comes to focus on Australian history as a nation forms, and how history itself affects each life.
I found it immensely satisfying, exciting even, as each character became a friend for a while. It’s my hope and prayer that many will find this tale fascinating, encouraging, and even inspirational.
When did you realise you wanted to write a family history?
In 1970, I wrote to Great Uncle Joe who just turned 101, asking for stories he could remember, as ‘I wanted to write a Family History’ one day. When he died a year or so later, my Aunty Eva returned the letter, published here, leaving me with thousands of unanswered questions.
When did you actually start writing it?
It’s hard to say. Early on, I realised it would be difficult to write an accurate history as there were so many unknowns. I made a concerted effort to gather everything I could, and visit locations and research libraries and the web. At the same time, I listened and recorded Dad’s recollections. When he died in 2009, he left me five boxes of treasure. I only wrote one chapter while Dad lived, of him climbing Mount Wellington. It was like a down-payment, a promise to him that I would write his story one day. The prologue was originally a short story about how my father exasperated me, and penned in 2005.
Did you do any on-site research?
Researching the setting is exciting. Smelling the smells, hearing the sounds, feeling the heat, or shadow, intensifies the telling of the tale, and also adds enjoyment to the writing, as you picture yourself right there.
Two trips to Hamburg inspired realistic background for the start of the story Finding Reg.
It was exciting to authenticate verbal history I had heard from Dad, such as seeing this program.
From Hamburg, we explored further north to Kiel where William started his life at sea, Ecklesford where he witnessed the last great sea battle of ships under sail, and Barth on the Baltic where William Dreier was born.
The dozen or so trips to Tasmania added to the hundreds of tales Dad told. Exploring pathways with a map in your hand, looking for the probable site of John Hincks’ house was memorable.
And the day spent with the knowledgeable Don and Sue Clarke at Cascades (Koonya) was powerful background for the convict chapters.
Thomas Ashe was stationed for 10 months as a timber cutter, gathering huge logs and preparing them for market.
Even visits to Port Adelaide, Bethany in the Barossa Valley, and Hill End proved profoundly satisfying in laying down a setting in which to plant characters. Museums proved a great source of inspiration and information.
The covid lockdown meant cancellation of a trip to Leicester in England in 2020. Fortunately we had been to Hinckley previously, and had toured in that area in previous visits to England. Thank goodness for the internet. I am so grateful that so many people have been so selfless in putting up wonderful information, available at no cost.
I must confess to hitching a ride with Google Maps, during lockdown, and touring many of the sites when I had addresses, and able to get the lay of the land.
Having enough material was never a problem with writing this book.
What genre is the book?
Originally, ‘Finding Reg’ was to be a memoir, however, no amount of research could answer some questions. For instance, ‘why would a man allow his eleven-year-old son to travel from England to Tasmania, accompanied only by his 15-year-old brother?’ Or, ‘why would a youth leave a cultured and wealthy family to endure wet and windy decades at sea?’ Despite endless research, I had to settle on the most likely explanation, but it remains conjecture which may or may not be true. To make the history accessible, likely conversations and relationships are woven through true facts. Again, I was not there, and most are fiction, though some of the letters quoted were real. Consequently, the genre for this book is Historical Fiction. I wish the term ‘Faction’ was more widely used, as it describes the book perfectly: fiction based on verifiable facts. And yes, there are elements of memoir there also, but I’ve settled on Historical Fiction.
Did Reg write any of the Story?
Reg left copious notes, some stories written twenty times, and mostly not very well. Many were about his childhood, but a good number covered all parts of his life. All needed to be re-written. As mentioned elsewhere, my father was given to exaggeration. Cut past that, and there was a solid footing, and great accounts of bygone life, and I draw heavily from his writings.
How Long did it take to write “Finding Reg?”
With a fairly committed life and part-time work, I struggled to lay down the first 60,000 words between 2012 and 2020. However despair turned to relief as Covid restrictions handed me hours of undisturbed time. I was able to complete the book in the next two years, taking ten in all. In truth, the Prologue was written in 2005, but not much else.
Were there any surprises along the way?
Among the five boxes of treasures Dad left me were two catalogues of Coogans where my grandfather, Ernest Hincks was Head of Work. Coogans had been asked to make a minute bedroom setting for Princess Elizabeth for her first birthday, when the Duke and Duchess of York visited Hobart, as a gift from the children of Tasmania. One catalogue pictures a suite of bedroom furniture of which Ernest had designed and overseen the painstaking building. It was greatly appreciated.
When I wrote that chapter, I thought Queen Elizabeth might be heartened to hear the story behind the building of her gift, and of the secret compartment where they all signed their names.
I received a delightful and personal message from her, expressing her appreciation.
And perhaps the other amazing surprise was the discovery of Max. If you’ve read the book, you’ll know about this delightful bombshell.
IS THE STORY TRUE?
The story is based on real people. Those who lived long ago, I have used their names. Where I haven’t known their names, I have endowed them with an appropriate one.
Where I have mentioned people still alive, I have only stated facts. People such as Phillip, my brother, has read through the appropriate chapters, and given his approval to mentions of his name and story.
Max has given me permission to use his words.
Where there are facts, they have been used as a basis of the story. Where there was no explanation, I used my imagination.
Going through the material in the five boxes my father left me, I read again a smudged photocopy of an article from The Mercury dated Thursday 20 July, 1939 from Page 6. The heading : Mr. W.E.G. Dreier, with bi-line Celebrates 99th Birthday Anniversary Today.
The whole article challenges me, but the outstanding statement that hits me like a sledgehammer is that he “married Miss Kathleen Ash, whose parents had come to Tasmania from the United States.” This I know to be untrue. I’ve seen documents.
William’s father-in-law, Thomas Ashe was, in fact a convict!
Bad reporting perhaps? For instance his wife was Catherine with a C, not Kathleen. Surely William wouldn’t get that wrong, but he was 99! Another more likely explanation is that the population at that time were desperately trying to cut themselves loose from the convict stain.
For instance, one of Catherine and Williams’ daughters called Letitia Ashe came to Burwood, NSW, and established the Burwood Boys’ Home and ran it as Matron for many years. She was highly esteemed in the community. On her papers, she makes the uninvited but strong statement, “free,” after writing place of birth as Hobart.
It seems, everyone wanted to distance themselves from convict blood. In NSW, there was a mysterious fire in Sydney, which destroyed hundreds of valuable records which would have bridged the population’s transition between penal colony to thriving metropolis. Now, we acknowledge that having a convict in our family tree is very colourful; perhaps we are far enough removed from the taint.
Just to make the job of those following our family tree even more confusing, after William and Catherine married, they named their first daughter exactly the same name, Catherine Ellen, though this time with the surname Dreier. Catherine Ellen, the second, was Letitia’s older sister, and my grandmother, though I never met her.
I look again at the article: my dilemmas come thick and fast. The article even opens with claims that William went to sea at the age of eight years. I have found it hard to fit the other verbal history into eight years, and don’t think this is right. I have written William as leaving at 13, which was the age when most young men who lived in Northern Germany and the Baltic, also left to go to sea, thousands of them.
The maths in the article are provably wrong too! It claims William sailed the world for 50 years, and that he left when his second child was born about 1890, which would put the age of going to sea at one-year-old!
William claimed he was involved in a South American revolution, and was shot in the leg, and on another occasion, was shipwrecked. Ah, a colourful life indeed! There could indeed be some truth in these events.
So I am faced with the dilemma: do I try to put the problems down to poor reporting, or accept that these were the ramblings of an old man? Having lived with my own father for 20 years, and known him for 63 years, I have to accept this family’s trait that tells the story that best reflects how truly remarkable is the teller of the story. I also know from experience that things are not always reported properly.
So is the story true? Where possible it is.