Hans Erikson's Death - and his Mysterious Daughter!

Pialba, Hervey Bay: where sailor Erikson came ashore to die.

Hans Erikson had a daughter. Of the all the mysterious nameless women in the Grebst clan, she is the most mysterious of all. I have searched for her, high and low, for many years, tracking her like a dingo. But she never took the bait and disappeared into the huge expanse of northern Australia. Had I found her, who knows how this biography could have been fleshed out and made respectable instead of being the miserable hotchpotch that it is. What tales she could have told me! What things she could have shown me!

I first learned of her existence in The Rhythm of the Shoe. She was not born of any of Erikson’s four wives. Instead, he sired her as a favour to a friend: “the richest woman I have ever met.” This attractive, wealthy South Australian temptress was in Sydney and wanted a child without any continuing input from the father. Erikson was happy to oblige. They enjoyed a week of sex after which the woman returned to South Australia. Erikson expected to hear nothing more from her. But eight months later, she was back in Sydney at his doorstep. Her father in England was seriously ill. She wanted to give birth in Sydney and leave the baby with Erikson while she went back to England to see him. Erikson, who was living in a small flat in King’s Cross at the time, was not keen. But in the end, he had no choice. The baby arrived a week early. The mother left for England. Erikson cared for his daughter for the first eleven months of her life. At first, he had no feelings for the child. But she soon grew into his affection such that, when her mother finally returned from England, he did not want to hand her back. Legal action was threatened and Erikson succumbed. Three years later, he received a letter from the mother in South Australia advising of her marriage to another man and their intention to have children. They had decided not to tell Erikson’s daughter anything about him so that she would grow up believing that her step-father was actually her father. They would not allow Erikson any contact with his daughter and “it would be best for everybody concerned if I tried to forget my daughter altogether.” The Rhythm of the Shoe ends with Erikson on a visit to Adelaide fourteen years later. He is sitting in a car watching schoolgirls walk by. Any one of them could be his daughter. As he looks hopefully at them, he hears one schoolgirl say to her friend: “He smiled at me, the dirty old man.”

Nowhere in Erikson’s account of his daughter does he give any clues as to names or dates. There was not a single “lead” I could follow up in order to identify the daughter or locate her. She wasn’t even going to be told about him, for heaven’s sake! It was a complete dead-end. So instead, I focussed upon finding out what happened to Erikson himself. The last I knew, he was 60 years old and living on his boat moored at Burrum Heads. If he were still alive, he would be in his nineties! I realised that he was probably dead and, as a result, I would never get to interview him. As old age overtook him, he would have been forced ashore to die somewhere. Where would he choose? Gothenburg? Too far and besides, he said he would never return there. Back to the smog and bustle of Sydney? That was highly unlikely. My feeling was that he had died in Queensland.

Maryborough Base Hospital, Queensland

And so he did. His military records displayed a DECEASED stamp along with a handwritten date “17.6.85”. There was a funeral notice by Leslie G Ross Funerals in the Maryborough Hervey Bay Chronicle: Erikson, Hans of the Esplanade, Pialba passed away at Maryborough Base Hospital on June 17, 1985 aged 79 years. He was to be cremated.

I obtained a copy of the Death Certificate. It described him as a “retired yacht broker” born in “Gottenburg, Sweden.” The cause of death was “1(a) Pulmonary oedema (b) Heart failure 2 Transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder.” He had been ill with the pulmonary oedema and heart condition for one year prior to death. He was cremated at Maryborough Crematorium on 21 June 1985 overseen by an Anglican minister. For me, the saddest part of the Death Certificate was the fact that the boxes for details of his parents, marriages and children were all left totally blank. It was as if he had no past, no one cared and he was completely alone.

In May 2011, just prior to my trip to Gothenburg, I drove to Hervey Bay and camped at Pialba, Erikson’s final home address. As every Swedish backpacker knows, Hervey Bay is famous for whale watching. Every year from mid-July to early November, whales calf in the warm sheltered waters of the bay before making the long journey back to Antarctica. There is an influx of tourists and the region has also become a favourite of retiring ‘grey nomads.’ There is no harbour or mooring facility at Pialba but the waters are shallow and protected from Pacific Ocean weather by the towering sands of Fraser Island. It is a picturesque spot, ancestral home of the Badtjala people. It also has some surprising Scandinavian history. Danish and Swedish immigrants settled at a place they named Aalborg and built the first Christian church in the area in 1875: “Dansk Kirke I Udlandet.” I drove out to Aalborg cemetery; it is well back from the coast through canelands and country with poor, sandy soils dominated by banksias, gums and silky oaks. The immigrants would have struggled to make a living there. The old church itself has been moved in to Hervey Bay and is used as the entry building to the museum. It is a poor, plain wooden box that would have been stifling in the summer heat while the parishioners prayed and sang dressed in their Sunday best. Would Erikson have visited Aalborg, I wondered. Most likely not. Although a proud Swede, he wasn’t the “ethnic” type wanting to dance around a maypole in mid-winter or sit through a Lucia procession in the summer heat. I did ask around in the Queensland Swedish community to see if anybody knew him. I didn’t get a single affirmative response. Then, of course, he did write to the editor of Göteborgs Posten, Harry Hjörne, in 1935 complaining that overseas Swedes can become a pain in the neck: they become more royal than the King himself in Stockholm. No, Hans Erikson would not have fitted in to a Swedish expatriate community.

I went to the library at Hervey Bay wondering if Erikson had involved himself in some local writers’ group. There is such a group in Hervey Bay and I flicked through their magazine, Moonaboola Quill. But there was no mention of Erikson or any Swedish references at all. One of the local poets wrote under the name “Ded Swoope” but I doubt that it was Erikson. At dusk on the beach at Pialba, I watched the flying foxes depart from their roost at Tooan Tooan Creek for a night of feeding on blossom and fruit. It is quite likely that Erikson watched the same spectacle himself every evening from his home.

In the library, I also learned something about the history of Hervey Bay that, by coincidence, tied it to the Grebst family. It was named after Augustus John Hervey, 3^rd Earl of Bristol, born 19 May 1724, who had a distinguished naval career and was present at the capture of Havana, Cuba in 1761. Erikson’s father and grandfather, of course, had been the Consul for Cuba in Sweden.

Making my way back to Brisbane to prepare for my departure to Sweden, I stopped at Maryborough and the hospital where Erikson died in Walker Street. Walker’s were a shipbuilding firm that closed down in 1973 and they occupied the low river end of the street. The hospital is on the high side. Part of it is a brown brick monstrosity that dates from 1977 and was opened by the Health Minister, Dr. Llew Edwards, for whom one of my sisters acted as secretary for many years. I remember very little about him except that he was a thoroughly decent chap who had bother keeping his false teeth inside his mouth. The other part of the hospital is an elegant wooden building with wide verandahs that probably dates from World War 2. Try as I might, I could not catch a glimpse of the sea from any vantage point at the hospital.

From the hospital, I drove downtown and walked through Queens Park admiring its collection of exotic plants. It is, in fact, one of Queensland’s first botanical collections including gems like a spreading banyan tree (Ficus benghalensis), the sacred tree of India, an Indian coral tree and African sausage trees. The impressive Customs House sits there and yachts were moored in the brown, tidal river. I felt certain that Erikson would have sailed these reaches many times. Just then, a man cycled past me wearing a black t-shirt that read “Jesus loves a good beer.” I couldn’t help but wonder if Hans Erikson had sired any children whilst in Maryborough.

The churches in Maryborough are an elegant treat and I had read that there was a Scandinavian church in Mary Street. So I drove to Mary Street only to find that it was in the poor, rough end of town, full of workers’ cottages and no churches to be seen. So I did a u-turn in Norway Street and headed back. By and large, the Scandinavians who migrated to Australia were not the rich, educated, privileged Grebsts but poor, tough, superstitious peasants.

The informant on Erikson’s Death Certificate was Gordon William Penny and I managed to track him down in July 2008, 23 years after Erikson’s death. This was of enormous significance to me because Penny was the only person I ever spoke to who actually knew Erikson as a living, breathing person. He was the Manager of Maryborough Base Hospital from 1984 to the time of the Goss Labor Government (whose political views he clearly did not share). Yes, he immediately remembered Hans Erikson who was a patient at the hospital, a loner who was living by himself in a rented unit at Pialba. He had an agreement with some neighbours to moor his boat for him. Erikson asked Gordon to help him write a will and also to be executor of it. Under the will, he gave all his estate to the hospital to buy a defibrillator. He did not give anything to relatives or anyone else. In his personal effects, there was nothing of value at all and his clothes were given to charity. He also had some books from the local library that were returned. Gordon mentioned that Erikson had been writing a book called The Tapping of the Shoes. “Ah,” I said, “you mean The Rhythm of the Shoe?” No, he was adamant it was The Tapping of the Shoes. The draft of the book was in Erikson’s unit. I was stunned. Had Erikson been working on a sequel to The Rhythm of the Shoe? It made sense … I mean, all authors believe their book is going to be a huge hit and so start working on a sequel. That sort of optimism is in the DNA of all writers, good and bad. I began to salivate uncontrollably at the thought of getting hold of the manuscript. Penny arranged for Erikson’s ashes to be scattered at sea in accordance with his wishes. The gentle waves of Hervey Bay are his last resting place, the songs of the humpback whale his dirge.

Then Penny hit me with a poleaxe right between the eyes. One or two months after Erikson’s death, his daughter and her husband turned up at the hospital looking for him. They were from the Northern Territory. He told them the sad news and gave them the last of Erikson’s personal effects, including the manuscript for The Tapping of the Shoes. No matter how hard and desperately I pressed him, Penny could not remember the daughter’s name and nobody had made any note of it. It was 23 years ago, after all. What did I expect? Indeed, what did I expect?

Erikson’s daughter from the Northern Territory: who was she? Was she the baby he nursed for eleven months in King’s Cross? Or did he “go combo” and have other children during his time in central Australia, children he wouldn’t admit to in print for political reasons? And what did this daughter do with his manuscript? Did she keep it and cherish it as a family heirloom? Or did she throw it in a bin somewhere? The very thought of The Tapping of the Shoes rotting in a rubbish dump somewhere in the tropics made my stomach churn. Biographers, huh? How we suffer. How we’re meant to suffer.