Up the Apple Isle
Part 2
Meeting Mavis
When she left the old man at the service station, Dee made a mental note to turn left at the fork in the road where the purple house sat; just as the man said she needed to do to find the Thomas farm. She hoped the new owners would know where the Thomas family had moved.
After parking her car off the road, and in a ditch near the creek, Dee picked her way over the road and up the uneven path to the pastel pink painted house. Chooks ran amok in the front yard, scratching and pecking at the patchy lawn. A silver-haired blue heeler trotted around the yard after the chooks, sniffing and checking out where the hens had visited.
The door creaked open before Dee had time to knock, and a plump woman in her early 40’s looked at her and asked, ‘Are you lost?’
Dee replied, ‘No, actually, I’m an old friend of a lady who worked here with the Thomases back 40-years ago. Name of Lillie von Erikson? Did you know her? I’m trying to track down the daughter she had here back then…Adopted out…’
‘Ah, me mum…’ a knowing smile spread across the woman’s face, ‘always suspected that woz the case. So, now the truth comes out.’
She laughed, her tummy jiggling under her apron that covered with her latest cooking venture. Then she beckoned to Dee to come inside.
Offering a side of the table free of papers, the local lady said, ‘Cuppa? I have some delicious apple pie what’s just been cooked.’
Dee, who had a weakness for dessert and anything sweet, gladly accepted.
Over tea and heavenly pie with cream, straight from the cow cream, so the woman called Mavis boasted, Dee learnt the history of the little Huon hamlet, the days of the lives of each of the inhabitants, who was related to who, how many partners each had as well as offspring. Dee’s head spun with all these extraneous details but struggled to put in even one question related to her enquiry. Mavis rabbited on and on, barely pausing to take a breath.
The apple pie was good, though, and Dee accepted a second, then third piece in the quest to ask at least one question.
When Dee glanced out the window and saw the hill presiding over the river all black in the darkness of night, she decided to move the conversation along. She pointed at Mavis’s pie and melted cream. ‘Aren’t you going to have some?’
Mavis stopped mid-sentence about her son and ex going Mutton birding, and she stared at her plate. ‘Oh, yeah, forgot about that,’ she remarked and shovelled a spoonful into her mouth.
As she chewed, Dee said, ‘Can you tell me where the Thomases went?’
At the mention of the Thomas family and Mavis’s mouth was off again, full gallop. Dee could see that at this rate it’d be midnight before she had an opportunity to leave. She didn’t fancy navigating these tricky Huon valley roads in the darkness of night and hoped Mavis would offer her a spare room or couch to sleep…if she ever stopped talking.
Dee tolerated the whole Thomas history, from convict beginnings of their ancestors, a ship that never was that they built and sped them to the coast of Chile, another daring escape from most certain hanging, to finally straightening out their lives to buy this patch of land on God’s earth.
Dee was sure Mavis was making it up as she went along.
A few hours later after weaving through the Thomas family history over the last century, Mavis announced, ‘You see, that’s why Zoe never fitted in; she wozn’t one of us.’
Before Dee could utter, “How so?” Mavis raced on, ‘Me mum grew up with Janine, went to school wif her and they got married at the same time. But while me mum went on to have ten kids, Janine had none. That was until that girl, Lillie come to work wif them. Me cousin worked wif her on the apple farm. She reckoned something woz wrong wif that girl. You can tell if someone’s up the duff, ya know. It’s the way their tummy sits, no hiding it.’
Mavis took a quick sip of her now, stone-cold tea, gulped and continued, ‘Then the next thing, off Janine goes on a holiday and bingo, comes back wif a baby. By that time, the girl, Lillie, so me mum says is gone. She woz preggers with me at the time.’
‘Did you…?’ Dee began.
Mavis cut in. ‘I went to school with Zoe. All brains that girl, and you could tell she wozn’t one of us. She definitely had the makings of a mainlander. But Janine never budged. As far as she woz concerned, Zoe woz hers and nothing could persuade her to tell the ‘onest truth. But we all knew…I mean, the Thomases, bof of them dark haired, Irish, and here they have a blonde who looked like one of them German kids that Hitler used to go on about. What were they called, them kids?’
‘Aryan,’ Dee replied and then zipped in, ‘so where are the Thomases now?’
‘Ah, well, Janine, the mother, she’s passed, so I heard. Cancer got her, they said, but Mister Thomas, he lives in Strahan. They moved to the West Coast a few years back when Zoe woz still in high school. Told ya, she never fitted in. Heard she became some hotshot lawyer in Melbourne. If that doesn’t tell ya, once a mainlander, always one, I tell ya.’
After this comment, Mavis yawned.
‘Have you been…?’
‘No, never, why would I do that?’ Mavis said. She straightened up and puffed out her generous chest. ‘We have it all here on the apple isle, why would I go there, to the mainland?’
Dee prepared to stand. ‘I must…’
Mavis jumped up and pushed her down. ‘No, no, you can’t go out now. Here, you stay here tonight. I have a couple of spare rooms; me kids are all grown up, ya see. ‘sides, it’s dark out there and dangerous to drive at night. All the animals come out and I wouldn’t want ya having an accident. No, you must stay and have a good sleep, and, in the morning, I’ll draw a map for how you get to Strahan, okay.’
Dee thanked Mavis for her offer. She’d forgotten about the wildlife. She’d seen more animal carnage on the roadside from Hobart to Huonville than she’d seen in a lifetime of driving in the Adelaide hills and surrounds. She would prefer not the add to the native wildlife body-count.
© Tessa Trudinger 2025
Feature Painting: Huon River Tributary, Tahune, Tasmania © L.M. Kling 2023
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