The Last Tasmanian

Published in 1991, two years after The Americans are Coming, The Last Tasmanian is the second novel in Herb Curtis’s The Brennen Siding Trilogy. Picking up where Curtis left off in his previous novel, The Last Tasmanian focuses on Dryfly Ramsey’s and Shad Nash’s growth into adulthood. Along with this transformation comes the boys’ acceptance of the reality of their situations in Brennen Siding. With his mother married to Nutbeam and a baby on the way, Dryfly has to renegotiate his relationship with Lillian and with the town. Shad, on the other hand, not wanting to work with his father in the woods, needs to decide upon how to make money. Through these two characters’ struggles, Curtis demonstrates that “the times they were a-changing” in Brennen Siding—long hair and the Beatles where beginning to outdo cowboy boots and rockabilly music.

In particular, this second installment of The Brennen Siding Trilogy indicates that for the town to survive these changes it must come together and collectively address the problems it faces. With most of its shoreline bought up by Americans, Brennen Siding citizens no longer have the tangible and immediate relationship with the river that they once had. Nevertheless, residents’ lives are still measured by their activities on the river. As the narrator points out, “In Brennen Siding, when you consider yourself too grown up to be playing cowboys and Indians, you start hanging around the river, swimming, canoeing, fishing, skipping stones, making rock formations, whatever catches your fancy. When you’re too old to justify these activities, you get a net and a boat and sweep a mile of the river for salmon.” Furthermore, on one occasion when Shad goes to illegally net the river, almost the whole community secretly sneaks out to be on the lookout for game wardens. Even though they no longer own the shore, the citizens express a very real sense of ownership over the river itself. It is through these collective actions that the novel suggests there is still hope in Brennen Siding.

While not initially hopeful, John Kaston’s attempt to build a church and start another congregation in Brennen Siding reflects the importance of collective identity in facing the challenges of the future. Initially all fire and brimstone, John Kaston alienates all those whom he approaches. He does not anticipate the outcome of what happens after he suggests to Palidin Nash—who has returned from Toronto to see his new sister—that he preach at Nutbeam’s and Shirley’s new house. Nutbeam’s and Dryfly’s decision to hold a rollicking housewarming party on the same night produces a funny overlap. The events unfold in a tone reminiscent of Robert Altman’s Nashville as John Kaston tries desperately to deliver a sermon in the midst of a house party where none of the guests were informed there would be a preacher. John, however, thinks everyone is there to hear him. At first everyone listens but then slowly the music and party take over and John is left feeling cheated. Thanks to advice from Palidin, however, by the end of the novel John Kaston understands that the residents of Brennen Siding are his friends. Furthermore, he says, “I will look after them as they looked after me. I will never again talk to them negatively ... I will make them aware of the Coming, but I will also make them aware of the future.” John’s willingness to address the realities of the situation at hand and the necessity to deal with it from the perspective of the collective reflect the novel’s broader themes.

Shad’s relationship with Hilda Porter also reflects the necessity to deal productively with the future. Hilda, a seventy-five year old spinster who lives outside of Blackville, has spent most of her life preparing to pass on a story she was told about the last member of the Tasmanian race. Hilda’s lone mission in life was to tell this story, passed down through her family, to someone else. Hired to help out around the house, Shad soon takes a liking to Hilda, who treats him much as a surrogate son and tells him the story. At the end of the novel, however, Hilda suggests that by focusing only on the story she “was dwelling on the past” and she tells Shad to not waste his life like she did.

Even more apparent than in The Americans are Coming, Dryfly’s relationship with Lillian in The Last Tasmanian highlights the troublesome class dynamics between tourists and permanent residents. After hearing from Lillian that she thinks he should go back to school, Dryfly realizes “that Lillian was seeing his poverty, that their relationship needed a second ingredient: money.” At the same time, however, “[t]elling him that he could never have Lillian Wallace for his own would be like telling a Miramichier that he should go to Venice, even though the salmon are running; would be like telling genitalia that sex is not important.” Because Lillian is only in Brennen Siding for two weeks of the year, her and Dryfly’s relationship takes place primarily at a distance. In a brief moment of doubt Dryfly begins seeing Charley and thinks to himself that “[i]t’s good to have a girlfriend. It keeps your mind off the one you love.” In a comic turn of events that reveals the drawbacks of rural intimacy, Dryfly discovers from his mother that he and Charley are first cousins. Despite all of these problems they face, Lillian and Dryfly maintain a meaningful relationship.

Like The Americans are Coming, The Last Tasmanian is highly comic, though Curtis’s portrait of the Miramichi does have some of the darker touches more evident in the work of his counterpart David Adams Richards. As the narrator points out, “[d]ances in Blackville on Saturday night were mating rituals, a game. The name of the game could have been ‘Average’ or ‘Mediocrity.’ The wallflowers waited for the right man to quit circling the room long enough to ask for a dance. The men circled until they saw the right girl, the girl that best complemented their level of mediocrity. ... A girl might spend the whole evening waiting for someone as average as herself to ask her to dance.” Furthermore the narrator explains how in March “bored, idle people, frustrated and out of patience, blew their heads off with .303 rifles.” In line with the novel’s more hopeful outlook, the text also contains a slew of more light-hearted comic situations, such as Nutbeam’s decision to make pornographic lawn ornaments. Through its overlapping of the comic and the desperate Curtis’s novel addresses a number of poignant issues facing Brennen Siding in specific and small towns in general. Furthermore, Curtis’s novel suggests that these towns need to come together and collectively address the issues they face if they want to avoid going the way of the last Tasmanian.