In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  He opened the door, letting in a bolt of cold air. ‘They shot her through it.’

  XXV

  IN SPIKY, RIGID HANDWRITING LIKE BARBED WIRE, JULIA HAD replied to her fiancé: ‘I almost wish that you had called at Mount Vernon on your day off. I should like you to have seen the place.’

  Since his marriage to Kemp’s granddaughter, Arnold had had plenty of opportunities to stay at Mount Vernon. ‘Here, on the score of relationship, my wife and I were of course welcome,’ he wrote with diplomatic restraint in his autobiography. His dreamy poet’s face and his stammer, not to mention his famous father – Kemp had read Stanley’s Life of Thomas Arnold – contributed to make Arnold the most satisfying audience that Kemp had enjoyed in several years. And yet on Arnold’s part there was a definite sense that ‘poor old Kemp’, as he had come to call him, was beginning to represent all that his delicate nature was beginning to resist. Six months earlier, on June 26, 1855, Arnold had written to Julia from Tunbridge: ‘I went to Mount Vernon on Saturday morning and stayed there over Sunday. The old gentleman tried hard to make me stop another day, but it would not do.’ Though Arnold was reluctant to accept the latest invitation, a refusal was out of the question. Kemp had ordered his vast brood to Mount Vernon to celebrate the new colony, and with one or two glaring exceptions, like Julia’s mother, all twelve of his surviving children were expected. Startling comparisons to the Last Supper must have floated into Arnold’s mind.

  Also in the phaeton was Arnold’s four-year-old daughter Mary, ‘a child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across. It is very painful to punish her (which I usually do by locking her up) for the resistance of her will.’ Mary had very possibly been conceived in Mount Vernon, possibly in the four-poster bed that Kemp had swapped for 30 of Potter’s ewes. Fifty years later she tried to understand ‘the extraordinary transformation’ that was going on in her father’s head as the phaeton turned up the long drive to Kemp’s house. By then she was arguably the most famous living author in the world, ranked by Tolstoy as England’s greatest, and her name known to tribesmen in India for novels like Helbeck of Bannisdale (in which she had drawn on her mother’s anguish for the portrait of Laura Fountain). And yet not even Mrs Humphry Ward was satisfied that she had the answer. ‘He was never able to explain it afterwards, even to me, who knew him best of all his children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself.’

  Arnold was vague about his abrupt defection: ‘Moved by various influences I resolved to be a Catholic.’ His daughter’s explanation was that his mind for ten years had been in a ‘welter of uncertainty’ on the subject of religious truth, and then, when staying in a pub while inspecting a school, maybe in Swansea, he had read the Life of St Brigid in Alban Butler’s Lives of the Saints, and had heard a mysterious ‘voice’ as he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian bush.

  But I found a less anodyne clue among his papers at Balliol: the fragment of a novel that he started at this time, and abandoned. The hero – plainly Arnold – arrives in Van Diemen’s Land, where he meets and marries ‘the fairest of Australia’s damsels’. However, there is a fly in the ointment. For some unspecified reason, he became ‘ashamed of his rabid democracy after witnessing the absurd failure of all its most ardent votaries.’ Strong stuff – but who did Arnold have in mind? Since coming to live in Hobart five years before, Arnold could not have met any democrat more ardent than Anthony Fenn Kemp. He had lost count of the occasions when he had had to sit and listen to Kemp drone on; of the evenings when Kemp had, as Arnold wrote, ‘glorified himself on account of his democratic experiences’. Rereading that line in his autobiography, I began to suspect that the ‘absurd failure’ of Arnold’s democratic ideals had something to do with Kemp, and that Arnold’s exposure to his cranky, bigoted and irascible father-in-law had led him to doubt that Kemp could be the representative of any political or religious truth whatsoever. The hero of Arnold’s unfinished novel ‘needed but some slight impulse from without to turn the balance irrevocably in favour of belief. In some way or other an impulse was given.’ Had his host at Mount Vernon provided it? As I walked through the house, I found myself succumbing to the Tasmanian habit, when unable to explain or locate a fact, of permitting a latitude and longitude as exaggerated as the geographic location that I was in.

  I stood in the drawing room and pictured the scene.

  Dinner is over, but midnight still some way off. Kemp turns from the black marble fireplace: bespectacled, silver hair curling in waves over a high forehead, an expression of fierce joy in his small proud eyes.

  He raises his glass. Sic crescat liberata Tasmania!

  The toast is echoed round the room.

  In his other hand, Kemp clutches a copy of the Mercury. All day he has marched up to each of his twelve children in turn and pestered them to look at the editorial. Arnold, too, has read it. He agrees: the settler does rather resemble his host.

  The editorial hails the New Year and also the new colony from the perspective of an early settler: ‘One who had come into this land ere it was yet peopled and in his first rude attempts was obliged to content himself with a rough log hut which his own hands helped to rear and sowed his first seed on land from which the stumps and blackened logs were only half removed … Now he can look abroad from his elegant portico, glance his eye over hundred of acres of corn and grass land and count his flocks by the thousand.’

  Kemp has always linked the character of the colony with his own. His contemplation of its new name moves him to do what he loves best: make a speech. He asks his family to recall the previous occasion when he summoned them – to St David’s Cathedral, three years ago. Then it was to celebrate the island’s jubilee and the arrival of the last convict ship. At the New Wharf they had eaten slices from a massive cake – 14 feet in diameter and carried by eight men – and sung the national anthem to new words:

  Sing! For the hour is come!

  Sing! For your happy home,

  Our land, is free!

  Broken Tasmania’s chain;

  Wash’d out the hated stain

  Ended the strife and pain

  Blest jubilee.

  But the end of transportation is insignificant compared to the event that brings them here tonight.

  During the next two hours he takes his family back over his life. His exploits in the French Revolution; his part in overthrowing the tyrant Bligh; and, most imperishable, his life-altering conversation with George Washington, when he was his guest at the original Mount Vernon. As they all know, Washington’s example has governed Kemp’s almost every action in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. From the moment when he landed on the beach at Port Dalrymple, he has battled to secure the liberty of the individual and the independence of the new colony. His veneration of Washington has inspired the name of the house in which they are sitting. Also – his eyes grow smaller, graver – the sobriquet by which he is known throughout Van Diemen’s Land.

  A number of possibilities flash through Arnold’s head. He clears his throat. He will be leaving in six months, taking his family to England, and will never return. I hear him stammer: ‘And … and what is that?’

  XXVI

  I CLOSED THE DOOR AND WALKED OUT INTO THE COLD AFTERNOON air, until I no longer heard the scratching of paws on wood, and climbed into the car.

  I felt strangely dissatisfied as I drove back to Swansea. I had made my dotty pilgrimage to Mount Vernon, but what had I to show for it? A handful of picaresque images: a spry old lady shooting possums from her veranda; a maid blasted to death through a cedar door; a dump-truck filled with sandstone blocks to build a casino. And, elusive as ever, the Father of the People. He sat in my mind in the same ludicrous position that he once occupied when chairing an anti-transportation meeting at a hotel in Kempton: on an elevated seat ‘festooned with a canopy of laurels and evergreens’.

  The road home was deserted, just every now and then the flattened pelt of a road-kill. I d
rove through Sorell, Runnymede, Buckland, Orford, and was passing through Triabunna when the Aboriginal name dislodged something, and the obscenity struck me. The Tasmanians over whom Kemp assumed his paternal role were European colonists like himself. He was no father to the original inhabitants. In fact, Kemp’s life in Van Diemen’s Land from his arrival to his death pretty well coincided with their extinction.

  Part II: Black Lines

  ‘The read and write mob the one bin doing all the killing. They never write down what they did. We don’t read and write but we hear about what bin happen before from our mother and father and we still got it in our mind.’

  Statement of Peggy Patrick, March 27, 2003

  I

  THE FIRST EUROPEANS WHO CAME TO TASMANIA NEVER SAW ANY Aborigines.

  One Easter Sunday, I drove south to the Forestier Peninsula to find the monument that marked where they landed in 1642. A sign by the road warned of wombats crossing and over the backs of grazing merinos a black swan chased its hard and distinct shadow. This was pastoral country, and I had to open and close eight gates before reaching the inlet of grey shingle. Across the bay a line of breakers marked a rocky bar. The waves changed from blue to green as they rose over it, and the air had the iodine smell of seaweed.

  The monument stood in the shade of a stringy gum, an ugly concrete obelisque ten feet high. Cut into a block of Maria Island granite was a stilted inscription to Abel Tasman that concealed a mountain of controversy.

  The new colony took its name from the man who had named the old one, a laconic, pious Dutchman who learned his sailing on a mackerel sloop in the North Sea and died in a lingering cloud of disgrace, in Indonesia, suspected of drunkenly trying to hang two impudent sailors with a halter.

  Tasman was 39, a captain in the Dutch East India Company, when he sailed out of a hailstorm on the west coast of Tasmania and saw a row of sharp peaks above the slop. ‘This land being the first land we have met with in the South Sea, and not known to any European nation, we have conferred on it the name of Anthony van Diemen, our illustrious master who sent us to make this discovery.’ He had been at sea for 72 days since sailing from Batavia, and as he understood it the peaks marked the tip of a continent.

  Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Eratosthenes, Hipparchus – a lot of people believed in Australia for a thousand years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight – somewhere Down Under – to counter the northern land mass. In the second century AD, Claudius Ptolemy, a mathematical geographer from Alexandria, was the latest to write of an ‘unknown Southland’ that was crucial, he believed, to maintaining the balance of the world. The Geographia’s republication in 1478 incited European navigators to look for this Terra Australis incognita.6 To further confuse matters, the continent was dubbed for a while Austrialia del Espiritu Santo – in honour of the House of Austria – and Temperata Antipodum Nobis Incognita.

  The French, especially, believed in Australia’s existence. In 1504, an expedition under Gonneville was blown off course and spent six months on a land mass east of the Cape of Good Hope, where the only sailor to survive reported that he had been kindly received by the natives. Another Ptolemy was Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who had been present at the fall of Quebec and sought to restore in the south what France had lost in the north. Galvanised by a desire for alternative trade routes, France sent off seven expeditions in the late 1700s to seek Gonneville Land, of which Nicolas Baudin’s ‘voyage of discovery to the Southern Lands’ was the last. None of these expeditions had marvellous outcomes for their commanders. Marion Dufresne was eaten by Maoris, Kerguelen convicted of fraud, D’Entrecasteaux died of scurvy, while the most famous, La Pérouse, vanished without trace. A fleet sent to find him found only rumours of Aborigines who had waved at a passing rescue ship and, when the telescope was trained on them, appeared to be dressed in the tattered remains of French naval uniforms and ‘making shaving gestures’.

  Tasman’s discovery of Van Diemen’s Land had given a shot of hope to all these navigators. They studied his log closely.

  The gales continued. Unable to land he was forced south, around what is now Tasman Peninsula, to North Bay. An hour after sunset on December 1, 1642 he dropped anchor into a bed of light grey sand and fell to his knees thanking God.

  His patron, Van Diemen, had been eager for him to find ‘precious metals’ of the kind that the Spanish were mining in Peru. Next day, Tasman lowered two small boats to explore. As they rowed through the narrows and across a calm bay to Boomer Creek, it alarmed the crew to see columns of smoke rising above the trees. The fires were weeks old, left by the Oyster Bay tribe. If the weather was fine, the smoke might smoulder on in stumps for two months. The tribe had migrated after the duck season and were now in the highlands west of Swansea.

  Even though Tasman’s men saw no one, they had the impression that they were being watched. On landing, they heard what sounded like human voices and the noise of ‘a small trumpet or gong’ – probably a native hen or clinking currawong, a bird that makes a harsh, resounding note on the in-breath as well as the out. And on the trunks of two large blue-gums they noticed freshly carved notches ‘fully five feet apart’, leading them to speculate whether the natives in these parts were exceptionally big.

  The secrecy of the Dutch East India Company ensured that little was known about Tasman’s voyage until the eighteenth century when details of the tall mysterious inhabitants sparked the imagination of Jonathan Swift, who, in the fifth paragraph of Gulliver’s Travels (1726), shipwrecked his hero on an island ‘to the north-west of Van Diemen’s Land’. Four years later, Gulliver was marooned again – driven by a violent storm to ‘a great Island or Continent … on the South-side whereof was a small Neck of Land jutting out into the Sea, and a Creek too shallow to hold a Ship of above one hundred Tuns’. Like Tasman, the captain dispatched a longboat to look for water. At first the crew found no sign of any inhabitants, but above the tree-tops there suddenly appeared a huge creature, as tall as a church spire and calling out in a voice ‘many degrees louder than a speaking Trumpet’. Running away, Gulliver came up against a stile impossible to climb. ‘Every Step,’ wrote Swift, ‘was six Foot high.’

  Van Diemen had been overly ambitious in his expectations for the voyage. Tasman told his patron that in the absence of any natives to act as guides, his party of 18 men had spent the rest of that day – December 2 – inspecting the shoreline for signs of silver and gold. They had returned to their boats disappointed, carrying bunches of herbs, some gum from the split bark of a black wattle and ‘the voided excrement of a quadruped’. Presented with specimens of dried herbs and the cube-shaped droppings of a wombat, Van Diemen castigated Tasman for not being inquisitive enough.

  Tasman, it turned out, had not even set foot in the place. The closest he came was on the following afternoon. In deteriorating weather, he boarded the ship’s boat and rowed for the nearest bay, where he intended to plant a flag ‘that those who shall come after us may become aware that we have been here, and have taken possession of the said land as our lawful property’. A strong northeasterly was blowing, splashing water over the gunwales. Gingerly, Tasman approached the inlet, but the waves threatened to dash his hull against the reef and he fingered the ship’s carpenter to swim ashore with the flagpole.

  The pole that Pieter Jacobaz clung to may have helped him over the reef. From his pitching boat, Tasman directed Jacobaz to the centre of the bay where four tall eucalypts stood in a crescent, and gestured Jacobaz to plant the pole before the tallest. The trunk had been burned and Tasman was unable to decide whether the topmost branches reminded him of a stag’s antlers or a rolling pin. The carpenter unravelled the blue, white and red flag of the Dutch East India Company, and swam back through the surf.

  ‘After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman,’ wrote Melville in Moby Dick, ‘all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous …’ But three centuries later, a group of academics decided to work ou
t where, exactly, the carpenter had landed, and to erect a cairn on the spot. In October 1923, an expedition sponsored by the Royal Society of Tasmania, the oldest scientific body in Australia, left Hobart on the SS Toorah. Within an hour the party of 17 had divided into two rancorous camps who stood in the mess room yelling at each other. The director of the Tasmania Museum objected to having been brought on a wild-goose chase, while the leader of the expedition railed against ‘bloody mutineers’. If they had been on his ship, he shouted, he would have known what to do with them.

  Unknown to some on board, a maverick member of the Royal Society had nine months previously mounted his own expedition and positioned the landing-place a few hundred yards from the chosen site: not at the head of the inner bay, but on the north side of the reef. He claimed even to have found the stump of the tree described in Tasman’s log.

  On landing, the party divided. The Opposition pitched their tents at a distance from the Official party and refused to have anything to do with the building of the obelisk. The argument raged long after the memorial was unveiled. At a crowded special meeting, the Chairman, a government botanist, said that tree stumps were of no value to mark the position: blue gums only lived 150–200 years. A former hydrographer, who suffered from heavy stuttering, conveyed to a frustrated audience his opinion that the carpenter had not landed in this bay at all, but in another one entirely. A motion was then carried to alter the inscription on the monument from ‘At this spot’ to ‘Near this spot’.

  I walked up to the granite plaque to see if anything had been done about it. The obelisk with its little corrugated iron roof had the air of something hastily erected and abandoned. Its builders had not even tidied up the spot where they had mixed the concrete. Nor had they changed the words on the monument: ‘At this spot the expedition under Abel Janszoon Tasman, being the first white people to set foot on Tasmanian soil, planted the Dutch flag on December 3, 1642.’