he turned to farming, assisted by Governor Arthur’s land grants and convict labour; the larger the land, the more convicts to work it. Henry had chosen his property in the fertile north-east wisely. In just three years, he had enough to build an elegant and entirely functional three-storey warehouse from quarried sandstone in Launceston, and began importing and exporting direct from Launceston to London. Accessing the larger agricultural areas, the port of Launceston soon outgrew Hobart’s.
Having made a great fortune so soon, Henry Sr was saved by God from drowning in the Tamar River. He renounced his sinful ways, drinking and gambling on his thoroughbred horses, and returned to England as an Evangelist with his first family in 1847. He and William Booth became close friends, united by their shared radical religious beliefs and social concerns. Both were capable of attracting thousands to their fervent open-air services.
He built another mansion for his family home in Tunbridge Wells, sustaining his income from his Tasmanian properties and castigating himself for the sins of his youth in wild Van Diemen’s Land. The great wealth he enjoyed sat oddly with his soul’s torment. He confided in a late letter:
My heart aches as I look upon the fashion and worldliness and spiritual death I see before me and my words are burning words and I appear as a strange being.1
God called Henry Sr back to the island in 1875, when Cynthia’s father was just five years old. He was concerned for his tenant farmers in the grip of a depression after wool prices plummeted. Having made a triumphant entry on his own ship up the Tamar, he provided for his tenants and busied himself building a mansion on his picturesque property near Deloraine, calling it Wesley Dale. Eager to extend his religious ambitions, he moved to Launceston and bought the Mount Pleasant estate, crowned by a mansion on top of Prospect Hill, and set about renovating it.
The two-storey home was flanked by a single-storey skirt verandah supported by tall Corinthian columns, with a conservatory added on the northern end. A balcony extended above the verandah outside the main bedroom, offering extensive views over the front terrace, flower gardens, oaks and elms, with a winding avenue of trees leading down the long driveway. Parkland and pleasure gardens extended around the mansion. Behind the house the land sloped away to acres of pasturage. At the bottom of the hill Henry had a dam built, with an elaborate iron pump to reticulate water up to the orchard, vegetable and flower gardens. Flanked by woodland, it too formed a picturesque and practical playground. Mount Pleasant became the premier family home, and Henry parcelled his other estates out to his children. His devout daughter Mary and her family lived at Wesley Dale, and when Henry Jr came of age he was placed at Logan.
The patriarch had penned a memoir, Incidents in an Eventful Life, which Margaret had published after his death in 1880 by a religious press in London, dedicating it to their children and grandchildren. How much she censored is unknown, except for the drinking and gambling. There are stories about his reputation as a good master to his convicts, which protected him from attacks by bushrangers who terrorised the first settlers in the rich northeast frontier of the island. He stayed with convicts overnight in their locked cells to win their souls before they were hanged outside the prison walls. He once rode a hard journey at night to clear a convict’s name and spare his life.
While Henry wrote that ‘there was a fearful war of extermination against the natives’, nothing remains to indicate what he witnessed or what role he might have played during the twenty years he spent on the island before 1847.2 The dispossession and destruction of Aboriginal lives and country was an ongoing subject of international scandal. Louisa Meredith in My Home in Tasmania (1852) fancied there was something in the surrounding air that transmitted home the idea of the settlers being lawless.3
There is only one other acknowledgement of racial violence in Henry Sr’s memoir. He had been a partner in John Batman’s venture across the straits to find more grazing land for flocks of sheep. Henry expressed the pious hope that they might claim 600,000 acres without the violence that had dominated on the island. Their friendship dated from Henry’s arrival in Launceston. John Batman was farming under Ben Lomond, and Henry selected his first land grants in this fertile country in Evandale and Deloraine. He stood witness to Batman’s wedding to an escaped convict Eliza, having been given permission to do so by Governor Arthur in return for rounding up ‘troublesome natives’. Their neighbour, painter John Glover whose paintings testify to the fertile, temperate and panoramic locale, was unequivocal in judging Batman a ‘murderer of blacks’.4
The troublesome subject of the colony’s racial strife was consigned to the grave with Truganini’s much publicised death in 1876. Memorialising of the ‘last of the tribes’ in verse, photographs and sculptures became common practice over the generations and across the country. Benjamin Law sculpted Truganini young and strong, her nakedness covered with a loose possum rug around her shoulders and a white shell necklace around her throat. In 1878, dignitaries in Hobart exhumed her grave, and exhibited her skeleton in the museum until 1947, to symbolise a lost ‘primitive’ past.
The Edwardians as a generation distinguished between their own modernity, with electric light, motorcars, home telephones and international cables, and the lifestyle embodied in the late queen’s example of bucolic domesticity. Like the new king, they styled themselves as urbane and delighted in society. Their vernacular was whimsical, teasing and ironical rather than serious and sentimental. Cynthia’s father, with his impeccable clothes and English accent, enjoyed the fiction of Anglo-Indian Rudyard Kipling, and nicknamed all his children. In fashion, Lila turned to the new haute couture from Paris, favouring comfort, simplicity and elegance. Her taste in art was influenced by the current arts and crafts movement in Tasmania, which celebrated the use of local materials, especially timbers and images of native fauna and flora. She chose Percy Whitelaw’s politely bohemian studio to have her children photographed in their perfect clothes. That she was artistically inclined is underlined by her patronage of the Tasmanian Art Society.
Cynthia’s parents made a handsome, fashionable couple in Launceston. Their names began appearing in the papers when they settled at Logan in 1896, Lila for her charitable activities and Henry for his prizes at agricultural shows, or when he hosted hunting parties for the gentry. In Launceston, the civil-minded town had emerged from the depression with the beginning of industrial mining in Tasmania. It was led by the Mount Bischoff tin mine in the northwest — the biggest tin mine in the world — and the gold mine at nearby Beaconsfield. Declared a city in 1888, Launceston was transformed by stately public buildings and picturesque parks. Albert Hall was erected on the boundary of the Town Park to house a major international colonial exhibition in 1891, featuring the riches of the new mines. It boasted the eleventh largest hall in the world, and was used for balls, concerts and exhibitions. Henry and Lila would have welcomed the opportunity to hear music and see theatre, a staple in their family entertainments.
Lila bore their first child, Lila Coralie, in 1896, and their first son, Dick, two years later. Margaret, named for her formidable grandmother, followed in 1900, John, the year colonial government gave way to federated Australia, and Barbara in 1905. Cynthia was born in the spring of 1908, on 18 September, and christened Violet Cynthia. Flowers were an important feature both outside, where gardeners worked to produce a rich abundance, and inside, where they were displayed. Their selection and ordering was one of too few methods of self-expression for Lila — for her flowers did have a language.
Violet seemed a frail child, and her naming marked out the difference between her and her robust sisters. That she was born closest to the collapse of the Edwardian era also made for difference.
Edwardian children of wealthy families were raised in comfort and privilege, but for the most part separated from their parents and often under a strict regime. Their first years were spent sequestered in the nursery, tended to by a nurse whose costume identified her role in the house. Having reached the age of reason, they joined the family downstairs, spending some hours a day being schooled by a governess. At the age of ten, the older children were sent home to be properly educated at boarding schools. Only the Great War would change this Reed tradition.
While Cynthia was still a baby, the Reeds moved from Logan to the premier family estate, Mount Pleasant, high on a hill above Launceston. Her cousin Hudson Fysh remembered it well:
In the early days of [last] century, Mt