I had first seen Frenchman’s Cap – so called after its resemblance to Kemp’s republican cockade – on a trek with my wife-to-be. Early in 1999 we had flown from London to Sydney and then, on Valentine’s Day, to Tasmania. Our idea was to walk for a week through the Central Highlands before returning to Sydney, but the landscape cast such a spell on us that we delayed our departure.
The Cradle Mountain National Park, where we camped for eight days, was founded by an Austrian, Gustav Weindorfer. In 1910, he climbed Cradle Mountain, about 40 miles to the north of Frenchman’s Cap, and the view from the summit – the layered ranges, the glass-clear lakes, the haze raised by the blue gums – prompted him to fling out his arms. He turned to his wife: ‘Kate, this is magnificent. People must know about it and enjoy it. This must be a National Park for the people for all time.’ He named his hut Waldheim from his native Tyrol, and welcomed visitors with a garlic-based wombat stew and the energetic greeting: ‘This is Waldheim, where there is no time and nothing matters.’
We trod out across fragile alpine heath between poa tussocks and something that smelled of lemon thyme. The landscape was virgin and kept this way by strict rules governing our passage. Simon, our guide, was a modern disciple of Weindorfer. He made sure that we buried our toilet paper, did not wash our dishes or teeth in the creeks, and that we kept in rigid file on duckboard tracks lest our footsteps damage the plants. There must be no evidence of our passing through. We were weightless, freightless creatures and with each step the twentieth century receded behind us.
Simon’s sermons on environmental friendliness irritated at first, but once he explained the reasons – it takes 40 years, for example, for an indented cushion-plant to grow back – I stuck to the path, until early one dawn I looked up at a berry pink sky and thought that this was how the world must have appeared before Homo sapiens put it to his filthy purposes. The perfect trekker, Simon said, decomposes en route. In this landscape I recomposed myself.
Where once were sent the most hardened recidivists was now marketed as a paradise of unpolluted skies, turquoise seas and glacier-made landscapes that can induce a sensation of pure well-being in those lucky enough to behold them. ‘If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this!’ So exclaimed the explorer T. B. Moore, the first European to climb Frenchman’s Cap from the west, in 1887, as he gazed down at the receding mountain ranges and valleys. But not every traveller was so minded. It was, wrote the historian James Bonwick, ‘a country forsaken even by birds’.
In the same year that I hiked through those mountains, a grandmother from Queensland made a pilgrimage to Sarah Island to find out about her convict ancestor. She was upset to discover that he had been eaten.
‘What am I going to tell my grandchildren?’ she asked.
‘Lady,’ Richard Davey consoled her, ‘they’re going to love it. It’s their story too.’
Davey is a 64-year-old playwright whose vocation is to resurrect and dramatise a history of Tasmania that his father and forefathers suppressed. On Sarah Island, he points out the ruined penitentiary, home to a population of 170 convicts when Greenhill and Travers arrived. ‘In 1926, an engineer from Queenstown came down here with dynamite and blew it up because of the shame that it carried.’ Davey’s approach is to restore the past, not to destroy it. ‘The stories can’t escape from here. We have to face up to them in the end.’
He stands on a wall above the brick jail and bewitches a group of Melbourne tourists, converting them for the duration of an hour into felons of ‘bad character and incorrigible conduct’ – they might be Greenhill and Travers. ‘The cell is the exact size of your grave. Escape is impossible. You’ll be worked incessantly, no rum, no tobacco, no tea – plus you’re out of mobile phone range. Contemplate your mortality in silence and darkness.’
Before going on, he pauses to indicate a sign beside the path, Sorell’s instructions to his first commandant: ‘You must find work and labour, even if it consists in opening cavities and filling them up again.’ Many bloodcurdling tales survive to describe the impact that such work could have on the convicts, including the gagging and drowning of a penal station constable who had the misfortune on the one hand to have been valet to the Duke of Devonshire and on the other to be called George Rex.
Davey’s performance lasts until a hoot from the Lady Franklin summons the group reluctantly to the jetty. It is a drama that he has recited for ten years, an incantation against forgetting.
A former Dominican priest and a descendant of Lieutenant Governor ‘Mad Tom’ Davey, he believes that Macquarie Harbour is ‘an heroic landscape, a battleground for good and evil, demanding Herculean labours, Homeric challenges’. He points to the mountains that surround it. They ring, he says, with the names of the epic debates of the nineteenth century. Owen, Huxley, Jukes, Darwin … ‘The raw material for epic narratives.’
The convicts dressed in yellow flaxen sailcloth dipped in celery-pine tan that discoloured their uniform to a dusky pink. Against the rain they wore kangaroo-skin boots and jackets, and their tunics were stencilled with arrowheads.
The most troublesome were sent in felling gangs to saw Huon pine logs for what Davey calls ‘the largest boat-building industry in the Empire’. At Sarah Island, he says, 130 ships were launched in twelve years. Greenhill and Travers worked for one of these gangs. Five months after their arrival, Greenhill was sawing pine on Kelly’s Basin when he led Travers off in a second attempt at escape. On September 22, 1822, they turned on their overseer, bound him to a tree and with six others rowed across the harbour. After smashing holes in the hull of their stolen boat, they vanished into the forest.
Greenhill plunged ahead, hacking a path with an axe. He was a skilled navigator. He had no compass, but he had the stars, the sun and Frenchman’s Cap, and for the next 40 days – until his death – succeeded in maintaining an easterly course.
Travers stumbled close behind. Their hope lay in movement, but they were ill-equipped and progress was excruciatingly slow, 500 yards an hour through a tangled labyrinth of southern beech and Huon pine. The undergrowth formed a barrier compared to which, one later traveller wrote, ‘the famous Gordian knot was simplicity itself.’ Every breath was snatched with difficulty. Every step stirred up clouds of new insects. The surveyor Henry Hellyer came through this way five years after Greenhill. ‘The air in these dense forests is putrid and oppressive and swarms with mosquitoes and large stinging flies, the size of English bees.’
On the second night they stopped to bake damper on rocks, but the guards at Sarah Island had spiked the dough with ergot to prevent food-hoarding. The poisoned bread induced hallucinations.
Within a week, they had finished their rations. A constant rain drenched their clothes and tinder, and the nights were ‘excessively cold’. They had walked less than twelve miles, crawling and stumbling over rotten, moss-covered trunks. The cutting-grass tore at their shirts and faces, draining their energy and patience. Nor could they see where they were going. Above them spread a horizontal scrub in a canopy so thick and strong that a century later it could support a bulldozer. There was little chance of catching animals to eat. Eyes stared at them between the leaves, flicking away at the least movement.
In the hissing flames, Greenhill and Travers boiled the bark from peppermint gums and roasted their kangaroo-skin jackets.
On the sixth night one of the men, William Kennelly, lit a fire and, according to a pockmarked Irish shoe-thief, Alexander Pearce, he cracked a tired joke. ‘He was so hungry that he could eat a piece of man.’
The remark lay on the damp earth between them. Fresh in their minds were Franklin’s passage through the Canadian tundra and rumours of cannibalism. There was also the story of a Nantucket whaleboat rescued off the Chilean coast. In the boat, two emaciated men sucked marrow from the bones of their dead comrades – survivors who had drawn lots to determine which one was to be killed.
Kennelly’s remark set Greenhill, a sailor, thinking. Next morning he brought up the subject of eating one of the
ir companions. ‘He had seen the like done before and that it eat much like a little pork.’ It was the ‘custom of the sea’.
Someone started to object. Greenhill stifled his protest by saying that he was happy to eat the first mouthful himself, ‘but you must all lend a hand that we all may be guilty of the crime.’ In a whisper, he nominated Dalton, an Irish ex-soldier, who, he claimed, had volunteered as a flogger.
At three in the morning, Greenhill crept over to the snoring Dalton and crashed down the axe on his neck. He signalled for Travers to apply the skills that he had learned as a shepherd in New Norfolk. ‘Travers took a knife, cut his throat with it and bled him,’ according to Pearce in his testimony. ‘We then dragged the body to a distance, cut off his clothes, tore his insides out and cut off his head. Then Matthew Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire to broil, but took them off and cut them before they were right hot. They asked the rest would they have any, but we would not eat any that night. Next morning the body was cut up and divided into equal parts, which we took and proceeded on our journey a little after sun rise.’
Revolted by the violence that his remark had triggered, Kennelly and another convict offered to carry the tin-pots and go ahead. They had walked 300 yards when they melted into the bush. Greenhill stopped and ‘coo-eed’, but no answer. The two men made it back to Sarah Island, and died in the prison hospital without revealing that the dry pieces of meat in their pockets were human.
Dalton’s flesh had given Mather, a baker from Dumfries, an upset stomach. (More so than its female counterpart, male flesh is deficient in carbohydrates.) Constantly having to stop to drop his trousers, Mather was appalled to discover that he had lost the tinder that Greenhill had given him with orders to keep it dry, and which he had stuck inside his shirt. Travers raised the axe and said he would kill him if he did not find it. Mather discovered it down his trouser leg, and a fire was made.
Lots were cast. This time it was the turn of an English labourer, Thomas Bodenham. He requested a few minutes to pray for his ‘past offences’ and was left alone, looking into the fire, when Greenhill attacked him. He split Bodenham’s skull and after removing his shoes – they were more comfortable than Greenhill’s – he rolled the body over for Travers to butcher.
Eighteen years later, James Erskine Calder was trekking through Wombat Glen when he discovered several articles ‘in the last stages of decay’ in the hollow of an old gum tree: an old yellow pea-jacket, boots, a broken pot and a large gimlet. Possibly they had belonged to Mather, next to die.
Refusing to eat more of Bodenham, Mather boiled up a tea of fern roots in the hope of quelling his stomach, but the brew made him vomit, and as he retched, Greenhill, ‘still showing his spontaneous habit of bloodshed’, struck him on the head. The blow was not strong enough. Mather leaped up, shouting ‘You won’t see me killed!’ and grabbed his axe. They walked on in an uneasy file, Mather nursing his bruised skull, his bowels rumbling and his ergot-fed paranoia fanned by the close relationship of Travers and Greenhill. ‘They had a respect for each other,’ Pearce said, ‘which they often showed to each other.’ As Mather sat warming himself by the fire, the pair came forward to throw more wood on it, and jumped on him.
After wolfing down Mather, the three survivors – Greenhill, Travers and Pearce – stretched out beside the fire and slept off the ‘sumptuous feast’.
On they went, crawling and tottering across the dolerite mountains of the Central Highlands and scattering kangaroos and wombats that looked back at them from between the snow gums. Then Travers was bitten by a tiger-snake. His foot swelled up and he lolled in and out of consciousness, bleeding from the ears. In lucid moments he begged Greenhill to leave him behind. His pleas took on a hysterical tone after he overheard Greenhill mutter that it would be ridiculous to abandon him, ‘for his flesh would answer as well for Subsistance as the others’. Greenhill refused, and with Pearce’s help dragged the man – who had become, in effect, their larder – to the Nive River. A non-swimmer, like many convicts, Travers clung to a log and was pulled across. But his foot had turned black. Unable to walk another step, he was killed by his mentor who ‘was much affected by this horrid scene and stood quite motionless to see one who had been his companion’. His contemplation over, Greenhill dissected and ate him. He advised Pearce that the thick part of the arms tasted best.
Two men remained. His stomach filled with his lover, Greenhill did not dare let go his axe or fall asleep. He watched Pearce over the fire and Pearce through hazel-blue eyes watched him, ‘never trusting myself near him, particularly at night’. In the end, Greenhill’s eyes drooped first. Pearce inched closer, slid the axe from under his head, ‘and struck him with it’.
The consumption of Greenhill’s thigh and arm induced in Pearce a nightmare worthy of inclusion in Michael Howe’s ‘dream journal’. He felt Greenhill staring at him and screamed: ‘Come out, you bastard, and face me.’ Staggering into a pasture of sheep, he grabbed a lamb by its throat and was devouring it raw when he felt a ring of cold steel pressing into his head. The musket belonged to a convict stockman. Pearce had been walking for 49 days.
Brought up again before Knopwood, Pearce damned Greenhill and Travers for having introduced him to an appetite that had grown with the eating. Knopwood didn’t believe a word: Pearce’s ‘depraved’ confession was manifestly a cover story to protect his mates – presumably still at large. Accusing him of ‘being in possession of stolen sheep’, Knopwood ordered Pearce back to Sarah Island, where he escaped a year later, and in a fit of rage at a companion who could not swim, ate another convict. His sixth.
Pearce was hanged in Hobart in July 1824, one month after Sorell departed on the Guildford. But the story of his cannibalism haunted the island, and embedded itself into the Tasmanian psyche. No name-change could erase the power of it, any more than changing its name to Carnarvon would exorcise Port Arthur, or drowning a lake would obliterate the memory of Lake Pedder. In the image of Pearce and Greenhill eyeing each other over the coals was hatched a sense of Van Diemen’s Land stalking Tasmania, ready to gobble it up. Until well into the twentieth century, down even the most innocent-looking country lane, there was the feeling that a dark shadow was ready to step out from the hedge and wrap its arm around you.
XVII
JUST WHEN I HAD DECIDED THAT I WOULD HAVE TO FIND ANOTHER builder, Peter turned up. He was a broad, handsome man with blue, twinkling eyes, thick wavy grey hair, and the trace of a Scottish accent. He reckoned the animals pissing over my head were possums, and was confident that their smell would disappear once he had fitted wire over the gutters and cleared Helen’s paintings from the roof.
I left him to his work and drove to Hobart. I was still threading my way through Kemp’s life.
Arriving at dusk, I parked on the waterfront and went and had a fish and chips in The Drunken Admiral, where Kemp’s warehouse had once stood. The trevalla was fresh off the boats, and eating it I could not help feeling a twinge on Potter’s behalf to think how, a decade after his return to the island as a bankrupt, Kemp was riding about this wharf on a small pony and being greeted as ‘the principal merchant of Hobart’. All because of Potter’s loan – which he never repaid – Kemp owned not only a schooner and this stone warehouse on the wharf, but a country estate of 2,000 acres, a house on Collins Street (built of ‘valuable stone and brick walls’), and a store in Macquarie Street that provided the colony with a range of English and European goods, as well as most of the wine and spirits consumed in Van Diemen’s Land.
By the mid-1820s Kemp had reached the apogee of his power. His advertisements in the Hobart Town Gazette signalled his return to prosperity. He sold gentlemen’s superfine hats, ladies’ gloves, boxes of eau de cologne, chintz bed laces, mottled soap, butter in jars, Westphalia hams, Berlin chairs, cut wine glasses, cream jugs, ‘ornamental china of all descriptions’ and ‘Jamaica rum of the strongest proof and finest quality’. He arranged tickets and freight on boats to England,
and packed the holds with his sealskins, whale oil and wool. Kemp and his partner enriched themselves, but ‘they were none the less invaluable to the colonists,’ wrote a local historian. ‘Through them came the ploughs and axletrees, window glass and tools, among the thousand and one articles needed in a new country.’
Who were Kemp’s clients? The population had quadrupled since his arrival. In 1824, there were 12,556 Europeans, of whom 6,261 were convicts (5,790 male and 471 female). It continued to grow under Sorell’s successor, the Evangelical bureaucrat George Arthur. His project was to organise Van Diemen’s Land into a penal settlement so strict and efficient that it would function as a deterrent to criminals in Britain; at the same time, he worked tirelessly – using the bait of free land and free convict labour – to bring in a ‘more respectable class of Settlers than the early emigrants to Van Diemen’s Land’ – i.e. than Kemp. For twelve years, Arthur strived to maintain what the historian Peter Chapman calls this ‘dynamic balance’. Kemp did not take to him at all. On Arthur’s recall, he would write a memorial to the Secretary of State thanking him for freeing the colony from the ‘tyrannical Lieutenant Governor Arthur’.
Among those whom Arthur tempted into settling were several respectable Protestant families from Northern Ireland, a group of retired army officers from India, a shipload of 150 mechanics and, rather less useful, 76 paupers sent by the Bristol Guardians of the Poor. Convict families were given a free passage as were a number of single young women, who were lured by the opportunities of becoming farm servants, milliners and wives. Early Van Diemen’s Land was a colonial society so top-heavy with men that at a ball in Hobart in 1821, 150 bachelors were compelled to dance the polka – with each other. Selected by Mrs Elizabeth Fry and a committee of ladies working for the London Female Penitentiary and Refuge for the Destitute, 1,280 women arrived over three years to balance the ratio, although contemporary moralists declared that the free-immigrant women were often more depraved than the convicts. Practically all of these people beat a path to Kemp’s shop.
In Tasmania Page 9