In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Another text was My Home in Tasmania, during a residence of nine years. Its author Louisa Meredith had stayed with friends of Petre Hordern in Devon ten years before. She may have planted in his mind the notion of Tasmania as a destination.

  Meredith was a Birmingham poet and the niece of Kemp’s friend George Meredith. She had married Meredith’s son – her first cousin Charles – and in 1840 settled near Swansea in a house on her uncle’s estate. He also owned the land on which our house stood. While living on the East Coast, Louisa Meredith had gathered material for her book, in which she observed the transforming effect that moving to the opposite end of the world had had on some emigrants she had met there, particularly those in abruptly reduced circumstances: ‘Here, removed from the first crushing grief of disgrace, and seeing before them the prospect of rising again, and of building for themselves a new character above the ruins of the old, all the latent good in them springs into action.’

  Did Hordern remember these words as his creditors swarmed? The role of bankrupt squire cannot have been easy to conduct with élan. And it is possible that Meredith had further pricked his curiosity by mentioning the Castra settlement: a scheme in which her husband Charles Meredith had been involved, to create a utopia in Tasmania’s north-west for retired Indian Army officers.

  VIII

  IN ITS SECOND HALF-CENTURY AS A COLONY, TASMANIA WAS A reliably fatal destination for those who no longer saw it as a ‘hell on earth’ but as a Valhalla. Often the same site that had provoked frissons of horror was held up as an example of the abundance of God’s earth. From the time of Kemp’s death, Hades was the new Paradise.

  Opposite our house, on Maria Island, an egotistical Italian silk-merchant gave his own name to the convict settlement at Darlington. In 1884, Diego Bernacchi converted the 208 cells into a Coffee Palace and advertised San Diego as ‘the Sanatorium of the Sunny South’ with a climate ‘comparable only to the famous Riviera in Europe’. On the site of the old penitentiary, whose inmates had stirred Judge Montagu to tell a jury in Hobart that ‘a worse community … never existed on the face of the globe than on this island’, was erected a 30-room temperance hotel with French cooks and Swiss and Italian maids ‘attired in the costumes of their native lands’.

  In 1888, under the pseudonyn ‘Dio’, a friend of Bernacchi, the journalist Caroline Morton, set out her vision in a pamphlet. Maria Island: its past, present and probable future catalogued the attractions of this ‘Summer Isle of Eden lying in the dark purple spheres of the sea’. The millions of fish swimming past the island would afford employment to numerous boats; sportsmen would find an abundance of game in the forests; and the perfect Italian weather would make life enjoyable for everyone, even those who had to toil. ‘From 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. the musically monotonous sounds of the workman’s picks will make the quarries cheerful with the noise of labour.’ ‘Dio’ envisaged a town numbering tens of thousands in the summer months, all flocking ‘to the most charming health resort to be found within reach of the Australian continent’, where visitors would be able to obtain ‘luxuries and conveniences such as now are only available in the fashionable resorts of Europe’. She looked forward to ‘the city that is to be’ in the conviction that it was ‘fast becoming a certainty’.

  The collapse of Bernacchi’s enterprise within a few years did little apparently to dim the spirits of other visionaries. At the far end of Maria Island, I made a pilgrimage to the deserted shed of the farmer John Vivian Robey, a member of the New World Reconstruction Movement that was founded, as he put it, ‘to eliminate the necessity for fear, depression and wars, etc, from life’. In August 1965, Robey, a tall and fastidious South African who quarrelled with everyone, was carried off the island suffering from severe malnutrition and taken to the Royal Hobart Hospital where he was fitted with new dentures (he had pulled out all his top teeth, maintaining that they ached). Discovered in his shed was a table laid for dinner: ivory-handled cutlery, white linen cloth, and in the cast-iron oven a rice pudding. Robey’s neat, modest home reminded me of the small deserted farmhouse that Garibaldi had visited in Bass Strait en route from Canton to Lima in 1852: a one-storey dwelling, rough but comfortable, carefully built and furnished with tables, beds and chairs. ‘How often has that lonely island in Bass’s Strait deliciously excited my imagination,’ wrote Garibaldi, ‘when, sick of this civilised society so well supplied with priests and police-agents, I returned in thought to that pleasant bay, where my first landing startled a fine covey of partridges, and where, amid lofty trees of a century’s growth, murmured the forest, the most poetical of brooks, where we quenched our thirst with delight and found an abundant supply of water for the voyage.’

  In 1942, round about the time that Robey joined the NWRM, in order, as he hoped, to give ‘economic security and social justice to everyone’, another tragedy was unfolding on the south-west coast in Bathurst Harbour.

  In September 1942, a fisherman who had gone ashore to shoot kangaroo stumbled on a sleeping bag at the foot of Mount Mackenzie. Inside was the three-months-dead corpse of a 31-year-old Melbourne man, Critchley Parker. Unable to persuade anyone to accompany him on his ambitious trek, Parker, the son of a wealthy mining engineer, had died of starvation and exposure while surveying alone the site of a ‘Promised Land’ on behalf of the British Zionist League.

  His tent had blown away, but in the button-grass was found a diary in which Parker expressed his hope that ‘the little Settlement of Poynduk will be the leaven which will completely change the economic and financial system of Australia’.

  A year or two earlier, Parker had written in enthusiastic terms to Isaac Steinberg of the Freeland League, then looking for a site for a possible Jewish settlement in the Kimberleys. Parker wrote that Steinberg was wasting his time on the mainland. He urged him to look further south: ‘You must come to this country and see the mountains of Port Davey as I have seen them, now clear and shining in the summer sun, now enshrouded with mist and snow. You must see, too, the inlets and bays, the five rivers that flow into it, and climb Mount Mackenzie, at whose foot I camped. You will soon realise what a magnificent centre this will be for a settlement, one of the finest harbours in Australia, a country rich in mineral wealth and water power …’

  Trooper Arthur Fleming recovered Parker’s body and diary. ‘He had written in his diary how [the Jews] were going to grow timber there, and start a fur industry and tin mining, and there were all sorts of other things he had set out for them to do.’ Among several more fantastic schemes, Parker envisaged an annual Jewish/Tasmanian trade fair – ‘the equivalent of the Leipzig Fair’ – to be called the ‘Pacific Fair’. One of the dying Kafka’s three wishes was to go ‘to a foreign land in the south’. Parker’s final entry read: ‘It is at Port Davey that I hope the Jewish settlement will start, not far from where I sever all connections with it … to die in the service of so noble a cause is to me a great satisfaction and if, as I hope, the settlement brings happiness to many refugees and in doing so serves the state of Tasmania, I die happy.’

  His plan had been to walk for ten days, but bad weather and sickness forced him back. No-one knows how long he waited for help. He had arranged to light a fire on Mount Mackenzie when he was ready to be collected. But either his six boxes of matches had got damp or he had burned them in an accident.

  One man scanning the horizon for a smoke signal was Ernie Bond, who had put Parker up the year before in the Vale of Rasselas. Bond wrote in his diary: ‘26 May, 1942. No sign other than a biscuit carton near the Arthur Range has been found of CP.’ Eventually, Parker became so hungry that he ate his aspirins. He had told Steinberg: ‘I have said to Mother that I hope my name will live in this project.’ It does so in two sites named after him: Critchley Creek and Parker Bay.

  But one project did get off the ground, the brainchild of a friend of Louisa Meredith, a splendid optimist from the 3rd Bombay European Regiment called Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Crawford.

  IX

  THE H
AMLET OF SPRENT LIES FIVE MILES SOUTH OF IVY AND MAUD’S farm and was once called Eden. In the cemetery, a lopsided tomb hedged in by rusted ironwork commemorates the author of the pamphlet that may have tilted their grandfather towards Tasmania.

  ‘I could not have selected a Colony wherein I could hope to prosper better than this one.’ Crawford’s Letter to the Officers of H.M. Indian Services went into three editions between 1856 and 1874, and was addressed to those who felt themselves ‘unable to mix in society and to reciprocate hospitalities as has been wont, to travel, or in short to do anything but vegetate’. After retiring from the Indian Army, Crawford had lived in England, where the expense of everything appalled him. ‘The very greatest difficulty exists in all classes to provide for their families without descending in the social scale.’ His Letter advertised itself to Gentlemen who were debating the wisdom of ‘throwing themselves among strangers and exposing not only themselves but their wives and children also.’ It would have been perfectly adapted to Hordern’s case.

  Like many of his colleagues in the Indian Army, Crawford had first come to Tasmania on leave. The island was less than one month by steamship from India, and following the Mutiny in 1858 Tasmania’s popularity had grown as a destination for wounded troops who were attracted there by the ‘extraordinary equability’ of the weather. As early as 1810, John Oxley, a dull naval officer who became Australia’s surveyor-general, marvelled at the climate, ‘as fine and equable as can possibly be imagined … in truth, few places in the Southern Hemisphere can boast of being more congenial to the human frame.’ In 1823, Godwin’s Emigrant Guide to Van Diemen’s Land described it as ‘perhaps, the most salubrious and congenial climate of any in the known world for an European constitution. It has been ascertained by the thermometer to be similar to that of the south of France.’ Captain Roe, on sick leave from the Bombay Army, was an early beneficiary of the effect that being in Tasmania could have on the spirit. In 1831, according to the Hobart Town Courier, Roe ‘recruited his health and completely restored his constitution by a few months among us’. The air was so healthy that Col Andrew Crawford medical officers, noting the swift recovery of invalids like Roe, reported to London that ‘mortality amongst the men stationed in this colony has been considerably less than in England’.

  Col Andrew Crawford

  By the 1850s, its health-restoring air was Tasmania’s principal attraction. ‘A more salubrious climate than ours it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find,’ declared the Mercury. ‘The air of Hobart Town is perfect air,’ was Trollope’s opinion. ‘The air of Tasmania was to that of England as cream to skimmed milk,’ echoed Edward Braddon, a civil servant and former indigo farmer from Oudh who read Crawford’s brochure and promptly packed his bags for Launceston.

  Nor, as it turned out, were Crawford, Trollope and Braddon mere propagandists.

  X

  I GO TO THE NORTH-WEST TOP OF THE ISLAND TO FILL MY LUNGS with what, officially, is the purest air in the world.

  Cape Grim falls 308 feet of basalt cliff to a beach speckled with black domes – Aboriginal middens composed of charcoal and seashells. Lumps of brown kelp rise on waves that explode against lichen-covered rocks and leave behind rags of hissing foam. Cape Grim lives up to its name. It was christened on December 10, 1798, by Matthew Flinders, who, sailing with his friend, the surgeon George Bass, in what was hitherto supposed to be a huge bay, perceived a long swell to come from the south-west. ‘Although it was likely to prove troublesome and perhaps dangerous, Mr Bass and myself hailed it with joy and mutual congratulations.’ The swell proved once and for all that Tasmania was not part of the Australian continent, as Abel Tasman had speculated in 1642, but an island.

  I breathe in. The stiff southerly has blown across the ocean from Patagonia, 10,330 miles away. (In July 1998 it recorded a gust of 177km/h). That I cannot smell anything this morning is no surprise. In 1970, the Cape Grim Baseline Air Pollution Station judged the air here the ‘cleanest ever measured on earth’. On the rocks below, the orange lichen, known as caloplaca and the colour of freshly cooked crayfish, is a barometer of the healthy atmosphere.

  The scientist in charge, Jill Cainey, does not exaggerate when she calls the view from her desk, five yards away from the top of the cliff, ‘one of the most stunning office views you can possibly imagine’. The station began in 1976 in a NASA caravan and is now one of 22 set up to assess the changes in our atmosphere. It is funded by the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne and operates jointly with CSIRO (Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation). Cape Grim may feel like the edge of the world, but the information sifted on this clifftop has implications for our planet.

  Cainey’s team of seven trap the wind in flasks ‘like fat glass sausages’ and analyse samples taken from the top of a 230-feet tower that enable her to monitor global levels of pollution. From her desk, Cainey is in a prime position to observe the effects on the earth’s atmosphere of a volcanic eruption or a nuclear detonation: ‘The signatures are all there; they can be detected.’ More significantly, she has a ringside view on the vanishing ozone layer, an Africa-sized hole that hovers every springtime above Antarctica.

  When she first came to Cape Grim in 1993, ozone layer recovery and the greenhouse effect were considered to be separate issues because they occurred in different layers of the atmosphere. There appears, however, to be a connection. ‘Things are far more complex,’ says Cainey, showing me the graphs, ‘than we naive little scientists believed.’

  The good news: since the Montreal Protocol of 1987 banned the use of ozone-depleting substances there has been a 30% reduction in the concentration of chemicals like methyl chloroform (used, for example, as a solvent for dry-cleaning). What worries Cainey is that greenhouse gases like methane and CO2 are showing little sign of abating, with concentrations of CO2 rising 10% (from 330 parts per million in 1983 to 372 per million). ‘They’re not dangerous in the sense they’re going to kill us, but the changes that CO2 has wrought are reflected in temperature change.’ It is no coincidence to her that as we speak Australia is emerging from its worst drought in a century.

  Australia not having signed the Kyoto Protocol, Cainey is not at liberty to make a statement on climate change, but she does say this: ‘If they look at the scientific evidence, a large majority of scientists would agree there is human-induced climate change.’

  On bad days, when a northerly carries Melbourne’s plume of pollution across Bass Strait, the number of particles in the air measures 10,000–50,000 per cubic centimetre, a cocktail of vehicle fumes and carbon-based solids.

  On these days it alarms Cainey that Homo sapiens is going to continue to modify the atmosphere to a point where the natural systems cannot cope and we will render ourselves extinct.

  On good days, such as today, the winter air blowing off the Southern Ocean has had no recent contact with man and contains only 20 particles per cubic centimetre, most of these being ammonium sulphates or sea salt. This is what gives Tasmania’s rainwater its exceptional cleanliness, its oysters and wine their freshness and the air its spectacular clarity.

  ‘There is a real, different intensity in the light,’ Cainey confirms. ‘It is filtered through fewer particles, and those are predominantly from tree and marine-generated gases. Plus being near to Antarctica we come under the thinning ozone.’

  Cainey endorses Colonel Crawford’s claims for Tasmania’s climate. She grew up in England’s industrial north, where the nitrogen oxides in the air caused her to develop a theory that she raises at conferences. ‘When you go back to England, your nose becomes chunky and coloured, doing its best to filter out gases. But when you’re somewhere clean, your nose is clean. As an atmospheric chemist, I have to wonder: does air quality have anything to do with the dramatic increase or vice versa of asthma and certain cancers?’

  Set back in pines down the road from Cape Grim lives a man who has no doubt about the answer. Bernard Eisele is a builder from Michigan who was attracted to Tasmania
because of its air. ‘I had lung problems pretty bad after working in concrete and the various dirt that goes into building. I felt like someone was sitting on my chest and I figured I wouldn’t live too long if I stayed in Michigan.’ One day his metallurgist son brought home a copy of Scientific American. ‘I read that Tasmania had the cleanest air and I thought, boy, it sounds like the place I’m looking for. The other place was Tierra del Fuego. I spoke pretty good English and didn’t speak Spanish and so I came here.’ On September 26, 1982, two weeks before his 50th birthday, Eisele bought 87 acres as close to Cape Grim as he could get. He put in a blueberry plantation and then 80 apple trees. ‘When I arrived, I could work maybe an hour and then I’d sit down and huff a little. I’m 70 now and I’m working six hours and trimming trees pretty well every day. I eat 50 kilos of blueberries a year,’ he says, ‘and am probably in better shape than most 70-year-olds.’