In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  One evening Julia Sorell was overheard to say that if she were a man she would have as many women as she liked without marrying.

  Eardley-Wilmot answered: ‘Why, you are a perfect devil.’

  ‘And if I am, Sir John, you are another.’

  What on earth had passed between them to justify this exchange became the subject of hot debate, especially among a group of local clergy opposed to the Lieutenant Governor, who, in the kind of language used by Kemp against Sorell 30 years before, put it about that Eardley-Wilmot was living ‘in scarcely concealed concubinage’ with Kemp’s granddaughter – a very young woman whose mother’s conduct had been ‘only too notorious’.

  By April 1845, the story circulated to the ears even of Julia’s dimwitted father, who called on the Lieutenant Governor and told him that he had heard that Eardley-Wilmot had taken Julia up to New Norfolk, where they had spent the night. Eardley-Wilmot denied the rumours – they were ‘the grossest falsehoods that ever oppressed an English gentleman’ and had been ‘invented and circulated by my opponents’ – but he could not prevent their spreading to the Melbourne correspondent of the Naval and Military Gazette, who commented: ‘No people of any standing will now enter Government House except on business; no ladies can.’

  This was too much for William Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies. In a letter marked ‘secret’, he wrote to the Lieutenant Governor, suspending him without recommendation for another government post until these rumours about his private life were disposed of. The letter broke Eardley-Wilmot. He collapsed and died in the house of his private secretary in Hobart.

  The discovery of Julia’s ‘undisciplined’ past did nothing to dampen the ardour of Thomas Arnold, whose favourite Sand novel was Jacques – about a man of democratic ideals who embarks on a fantastically ill-advised marriage with a vain, vituperative and air-headed young woman not unlike Julia. He wrote to her of the only rumour in Hobart that mattered to him – which was that ‘I neither look at, nor speak to, or think of, any other person than Julia Sorell.’

  From that night she was continually in his thoughts. ‘I schemed to get invited to the same houses to which she was asked; and she put no obstacles in my way.’ Among his papers at Balliol College, I read letter after letter that he wrote to Julia from Launceston and Swansea and Campbell Town – wherever he had to ride on his bay Harry to inspect a school. ‘Dearest darling love I wish I could give you this very minute as many kisses as there are days in the year and 365 times that.’ One night in March 1850, he slept on the edge of Kemp’s property at Green Ponds. There was a problem at the school – the local clergyman had driven away all Roman Catholic children, and he wrote to Julia: ‘The parson’s foot has been in the broth and spoiled it.’ She read nothing extraordinary in the observation. Dazzled by his father’s reputation, she perceived Arnold as her ticket-of-leave from the military and settler society, ‘which was all the colonies could give her’. But buried in Arnold’s innocent line about Catholicism was a sympathy that would grow to give her untold ‘grief and indignation’. One man who nurtured it was Kemp.

  Arnold’s host at Green Ponds was a pious friend of Kemp’s who talked about how Kemp ribbed him unmercifully. Arnold flirted with the idea of introducing himself to Julia’s grandfather: ‘This morning I felt strongly tempted to call at Mount Vernon as I passed, but I remembered that if I did so it would probably cause a day’s delay in my return to you, so I refrained.’ He wrote: ‘Oh Julia, you may believe how I thought of you as I passed the house, but indeed I do little else at present, sleeping or waking. You told me, I think, that you used often to stay there when you were a child. I wondered which of the windows was that of the room which used to be the little Julia’s? The little creature with her tempers and perversities, how well I can fancy her.’

  He had been reading ‘the scene of the night interview in Romeo and Juliet and never felt its beauty so much as now. Oh, that I could speak to thee with the tongue of Shakespeare and the imagination of Milton, yet all would come short of what I feel for thou.’

  In fact, a poem does survive, written after he had married her:

  Sometimes after days of hard riding

  On my rounds to the schools of the land

  As I paused on some hilltop dividing

  Two glens sloping down to the strand

  Sublime without rivalling brother

  The mountain far off I could see

  And I thought how the beautiful mother

  At its foot there sat waiting for me.

  Thoughts of Julia crammed his mind as he rode south from Perth through the bush. ‘The fresh bracing air and the sweet smells of the forest were most exhilarating. Smooth lawny glades chequered with light and shade spread themselves between the trees in all directions, and the clumps of the silver wattle relieved sometimes by the darker green of the native cherry were most beautiful. I have felt a growing affection for the land that gave you birth; its hills and plains have been invested to my eyes with a colouring only love can give. The beauty which we think is in nature comes generally from our own hearts; we do not see it when we are unhappy.’ He was shortly to be so.

  In the same month, Arnold asked Julia to marry him. ‘Seeing how completely in love I was she resolved to accept me, chiefly because I was my father’s son.’

  A ‘dear military friend’ passing through Hobart took one look at his fiancée and tried to persuade Arnold to break off the engagement forthwith, candidly arguing – amongst other things – that she was not ‘well-adapted’ to be the wife of a poor man like Arnold. But it was no good: Arnold loved her, he said, ‘better than life’.

  They were married on Dr Arnold’s birthday at St David’s Cathedral, Hobart, in June 1850. Arnold wrote: ‘I know that in my eyes a thing so beautiful has rarely been seen.’ He swiftly discovered that his wife was not simply beautiful, but financially extravagant, prone to passionate outbursts of temper and liked to ‘nag, nag, nag him till he almost lost his senses’. She burst into tears at their wedding reception, and when five years later Arnold converted to Catholicism at St Joseph’s, the pioneer Catholic church in Hobart, she arrived with a basket of stones and hurled them one by one through the stained-glass window, saying that ‘the earth had crumbled under her’. She was without any religious convictions, she told her husband. She was one of those unhappy people whom God had abandoned. She had one belief only, and she clung to it with an ‘imperial will’ right to her death: very few families had been ‘cursed’ with an upbringing such as hers.

  Arnold well understood what she meant when, on the eve of his unexpected conversion, he and his wife were invited by the head of her family to a New Year’s Eve party at Mount Vernon. Anthony Fenn Kemp was ringing in not merely another year, but a momentous moment in the island’s history: the granting by Queen Victoria of his long-fought-for new constitution, including a bicameral Parliament comprising a Legislative Council and House of Assembly. The Queen had also agreed to legalise the colony’s new name. From January 1, 1856, Van Diemen’s Land was set to manage its own affairs under a ‘more euphonious’ title: Tasmania.

  XXIII

  I DROVE TO MOUNT VERNON ALONG THE SAME ROAD THAT THE Arnolds and their two children rode in their phaeton. The signposts were punishingly familiar – Glenorchy, Chigwell, Brighton – but a reminder, too, of how few Aboriginal place names I had come across since living here. In their project to annihilate distance with sameness, colonists like Kemp ignored native words and replaced them with domesticating ones like Egg and Bacon Bay and Blinking Billy Point. In the north-west I had come across the hamlets of Paradise and Nowhere Else – after the comment of an early settler who, whenever he saw people cross his property, would tell them they had proceeded far enough. ‘The track,’ said Charles Ivory gruffly, ‘leads nowhere else.’ And yet the landscape had fought back. I found myself making a list of those who had presumed to rename it:

  Tasman – d. in disgrace; Baudin – d. in Mauritius of dysentery; Flin
ders – d. on the day his Terra Australis was printed; Schouten – allegedly stoned to death; Hellyer – committed suicide; Lorymer – drowned when surveying the north-west coast with Jorgenson; Jorgenson – d. in ditch.

  I could not discover the fate of the Royal Marine private who passed this way in 1804, to hunt kangaroos to feed a starving population in Hobart. Hugh Germain had reportedly packed two books in his knapsack, the Bible and The Arabian Nights, and with the insouciance of a seed-sower he flung names at the hills and rivers, some of which I could see through the windscreen: Jerusalem, Jericho, Abyssinia, Jordan, Lake Tiberias, Bagdad.

  Bagdad lay a few miles north of Brighton. On the car radio the news from Iraq was that American troops from the 3rd Infantry were sweeping through the eastern suburbs. Crowds were throwing flowers at them and 20 American tanks had taken up position in the centre of Baghdad. The day was Wednesday April 9, 2003.

  In Bagdad, Tasmania, the morning was overcast. Signs beside the Heritage Highway advertised ‘canaries for sale’ and ‘clean dirt’ and ‘chook-poo – $3 a bag’. Leaving the Hobart Gun Club on my right, I stopped for petrol at the post office, where there was another sign. ‘WHEN YOU BECOME QUIET IT JUST DAWNS ON YOU’.

  ‘I change the message every day,’ Roland Berry explained, a compact, ex-army man in a Caltex bomber-jacket. ‘Saturday I was going to put on “GEORGE W OUR POST CODE IS 7030” – in other words “Don’t mistake us for the other side”, but then a bloke came in and wanted something for his wife’s birthday.’

  Berry’s wife was the postmistress. She said it was all nonsense.

  ‘What’s nonsense?’

  ‘The stories about hate mail and stuff being sent to Saddam Hussein here and we can’t cope with it. Not one iota. You’d think people have better things to do,’ she told a woman who had come in to buy barley sugar.

  Roland had just returned from Victoria where he had grown sick of showing people his car licence. Even so, you could not have a madman running around the world. ‘They should have learned from history. In 1936, they should have stopped Hitler. Compared to the First World War, this is a skirmish.’

  ‘What if they don’t find Weapons of Mass Destruction?’

  ‘Plant some.’

  He was descended from an English poacher, and his grandfather was a rabbit-trapper who sired eight children. ‘Grandad on mum’s side won a Military Medal at Gallipoli and was gassed in France. He wouldn’t talk about it at all, but the man could drink, I’ll give him that.’

  I ordered a ‘cappacino’ from the chalked menu and sipped it while leafing through the latest issue of the Bagdad News: the Bagdad singers were seeking a pianist and a number of items had ‘gone walking’ from the kitchen in the Community Club. ‘Please check your cupboards and see if they mistakenly made their way into them.’ And an advertisement for a voluntary position for six months, starting immediately. ‘Have you got what it takes to be a Vice-President? If so, the Bagdad community needs you.’

  Further up the road, Neville Gangell, the ex-butcher of Bagdad, shut his door on me, but I spoke to a farmer who remembered Bagdad when every inch of its soil was planted with apples, and you could see blossom all the way to Kempton. Geoff Chalmers was not interested in the goings-on in Iraq. ‘I’ve lived in Bagdad all my life. We know there’s another one on the other side of the world. But this is Bagdad. It’s always been Bagdad.’

  I left Bagdad and drove up Constitution Hill – so called, the locals joked, because you needed a very strong constitution to climb it. Kempton lay in a shallow valley on the far side.

  XXIV

  KEMP WAS 57 WHEN HE DECIDED TO WITHDRAW TO HIS ESTATE. HIS 800 acres were situated close to Kemp’s Lakes, in countryside named after him during Laycock’s crossing of the island. Daring attacks by bushrangers, and later by Aborigines, had meant that he had so far only grazed the land – with merinos purchased out of Potter’s loan. Their wool brought him sizeable profits, but he complained frequently of sheep-stealing – ‘a hundred at a time, being driven off their pasture ground and never heard of again’. He was afraid of bushrangers, who had long memories of his brutality as a magistrate.

  His enthusiasm to develop his grant coincided with the return of his eldest son from Aldgate. With no concern for his safety, Kemp dispatched the 19-year-old George into the interior – where immediately he came up against one of Tasmania’s most dangerous outlaws, Matthew Brady.

  In March 1825, Brady stole a valuable horse belonging to Kemp. A month later, George found a message nailed to the door of the local inn, the Royal Oak. It was addressed to the Lieutenant Governor, but might as well have been directed at George’s father. ‘It has caused Matthew Brady much concern that such a person as Colonel Arthur is at large. Twenty gallons of rum will be given to any person who will deliver this person to me.’ Three months later, George was shaken awake in his brick cottage – Brady, holding a pistol to his temple. Brady demanded tobacco, tea and sugar, as well as a copy of the Hobart Town Gazette. He stole George’s guns, and two weeks later let it be known that his gang would shoot Kemp’s horse – ‘as they would him, if they fell in with him’. Back in Hobart, Kemp gathered 48 signatories and sent a petition to Arthur, writing that he had witnessed ‘with inexpressible alarm the manner in which the banditti now at large have continued to evade apprehensions and to contrive to carry their Depredations upon the peaceable Inhabitants of the Interior, keeping even the Metropolis in a State of continued agitation & alarm.’ The bushrangers’ threats were not empty. In 1830, George discovered two charred corpses on the farm: one poisoned after corrosive sublimate of lime had been added to the man’s rum; another, ‘Pretty Jack’, sewn into a raw hide and burned to death.

  But by the early 1830s, Brady was dead, the Black War had driven the Aborigines from the Midlands, and Kemp felt that it was safe to retire here. He commissioned a government architect to add a grand façade to the cottage and to convert the whole into a full-blown Regency building, and in the grounds he planted his signature pear trees and oaks in rows that traced out a Masonic sign, the only known instance of his ever doing anything as a Mason.5 Mrs Prinsep described the effect in a letter: ‘At the back of his estate rise hills, like downs, naturally bare of trees and clothed with excellent pasture for sheep, with which their sides were covered. The Jordan meanders below, on the banks of which the farm houses are situated, and between us and them rich fields of corn and grain stood ready for the reaper.’

  Soon Kemp had expanded his estate to 3,400 acres. He introduced drought-resistant dwarf American corn, and bred horses for his racecourse and Sambhur deer for his pleasure garden. He even had his own football team, Kemp’s Tigers, and in 1838 the local township – which used to be called Green Ponds – was named Kempton after him, a punning parody of the royal resort.

  It was through Kempton that the Arnolds drove their phaeton on New Year’s Eve, 1855.

  The house is still there, at the end of a half-mile drive: tall, two-storeyed, with a façade the colour of dried orange peel. And guarded by a pair of Rhodesian ridgebacks. They bounded out as I climbed from the car. One had something bloody in its mouth. Close to, I saw that it was growling through teeth clamped to a fleece.

  In the 1930s Mount Vernon was owned by a butcher-cum-builder who razed the handsome sandstone outbuildings and carted off the rubble to create the foundations of Hobart’s Wrest Point Hotel and Casino. The house was then occupied for 27 years by Zelda Dick, a Kemp descendant.

  I had met Zelda the afternoon before. She sat in her tidy apartment overlooking the Wrest Point Hotel and spoke of the day she moved in to Mount Vernon, and how she stood dumbfounded at the foot of the staircase. ‘The windows were so filthy you couldn’t see through them.’ On the arms of her chair, her knuckles whitened at the memory. ‘The last owners had taken the handles off the doors. They’d kept cheeses in the upstairs bedroom and there were circles of grease on the Huon pine floor. They’d skinned rabbits in the sun room. They’d ripped the lead from th
e bathroom roof and the iron railings from the veranda – and buried them under the Casino.’ The stairwell to the ceiling was the length of one roll of wallpaper. Zelda had spent her first months stitching 20-foot curtains for the drawing room, and in the evenings she shot possums from the veranda. ‘The brutes were eating my mulberry trees and roses. I was known as Dead-Eye Dick. It was either them or my roses.’

  An archivist today owns Mount Vernon. ‘God, you’re a beauty,’ was Barrie Paterson’s response when he saw the advertisement and the ‘unbelievable’ small amount of money attached. He arrived on a sunny morning, ‘place shining like a jewel’. But he had not reckoned on the wildcat frosts that in winter pounced from the hills behind and gripped the house for two or three windless days until the pipes froze.

  He walked me through a hallway littered with modern novels and rocking-horses to the two tall front rooms. They were fitted with floor to ceiling windows and red cedar shutters that folded across the old glass to keep away the frost. I looked out, the ridgebacks barging against my legs, and it was an odd feeling to think that this grand crumbling house would not be here today if Kemp had not embezzled my family’s money almost 200 years ago.

  The shutters were also to black out Mount Vernon against bushrangers. One night there was a hammering at the back door. A maid raced across the flagstones to see who it was.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ said Paterson.

  I followed him into the kitchen, and he showed me a door made of cedar – save for one panel, which, he said, had been replaced by the coffin-maker.