Forgotten Hack lacked killer colonial instinct

18 November 2009

John Barton Hack was one of the pioneers of Adelaide and, at first, one of its rising stars, a dynamic figure around the small, bustling settlement from the moment he arrived from his native Cheshire in February 1837. One of his several civic honours was membership of the Nomenclature Committee – a group of prominent Adelaide men with the task of assigning names to the main streets of the new city. But while his colleagues on this committee, such as Judge Jeffcott (Jeffcott Street) and Robert Gouger (Gouger Street), managed to imprint themselves on the map forever, Hack, despite his advantageous position on the committee, did not. Perhaps this apparent failure to win the full respect of his no doubt rampantly ambitious peers was the first sign of the weakness, the lack of a colonial killer instinct, which would bring Hack down and turn his early and sensational successes into terrible failure. In the end, he gave his name to an insignificant laneway in North Adelaide and a range of hills and a track near the township of Echunga, a place he singlehandedly established and where he prospered until setbacks, unwise investment, and the ruthless treachery of his ‘friend’ Jacob Hagen set him on a downward path from which he never recovered. For fifteen years I lived on Hack Range Road, Hack’s meandering, unsealed and nondescript memorial just outside Echunga. That was how Hack and I ‘met’ and how I came to know his story. One spring morning about a year before I left, I came across a baby kookaburra in the middle of the track. He was sturdy, more than a handful, but couldn’t fly. So, stabbed repeatedly by that ungrateful and needle-sharp beak as I scooped him up, I took him home. I installed him in a spacious, aviary-style cage, gave him watery milk to drink laced with a drop or two of post traumatic brandy, and christened him J B Hack. At last, the original and betrayed Hack had some sort of memorial. And in Echunga, where he should have been honoured. Inside the cage I made JB a shelter and installed rough branches at various levels for perches. Settling in to a diet of worms and raw meat, he flourished. Hack had, so to speak, come home! Each morning I would call: ‘Hack, come on, you fearful Jesuit!’ This somehow seemed appropriate because kookaburras have a beady, religious eye. We may,

ARTS AND CULTURE

Forgotten Hack lacked killer colonial instinct

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