A class of ten-year-olds finished playing hopscotch over his bones and filed out beneath a large sign that Potter might have nailed above the courtyard for Kemp to contemplate:
Think … is it fair?
Is it safe?
Does it show respect?
Despite his 18 children, he has now no descendants called Kemp in Tasmania. Today, his first house in Hobart is occupied by Madame Korner’s beauty college and a hearing-aid retailer. His gravestone has disappeared. Almost all that is left of him are some letters in a yellow plastic bag.
In the early 1930s, about the time that Merle Oberon was shedding her Indian skin and becoming a pure white Tasmanian, Kemp’s great-great-grandson – Aldous Huxley’s brother – was seeking to demonstrate that ‘there was no such thing as a “pure race” anywhere in the world’.
Julian Sorell Huxley planned We Europeans as a scientific spoke in Hitler’s wheel and to expose the German leader’s nonsensical rantings about ‘the dangers of contaminating the purity of the so-called Aryan race’. Hitler’s concepts of race were based on self-interest and wish-fulfilment, and they were dangerously wrong. (The word ‘Arya’ was Sanskrit anyway, and used to distinguish the speakers of certain Indian languages.) In his counterblast to Mein Kampf, Huxley attacked the Nazis for their ‘vast pseudo-science of “racial biology”’, which had turned the Jews into a colonial people within Europe.
All humans were of mixed descent, Huxley wrote, and all great nations ‘melting pots of race’, the results of the amalgamations of many tribes and of many waves of immigration. ‘Man’s incurable and increasing propensity to wander over the face of the globe had effected a thorough mixing between the hypothetical primary sub-species long before the dawn of the historic period.’ Not even the Tasmanian Aborigines could be said to have been pure. ‘Even in its state of maximum isolation, such a group will certainly have contained many genes derived from other similar groups.’
Huxley was particularly scathing about family trees cherished by genealogists like Ivy, in which a family was traced back to a single founder and their spouse. These trees had little to do with biological heredity: ‘They are social not genetic documents.’ The whole point was that ‘our ancestry will diverge as well as converge as we trace it back.’
I do not doubt that if I had come to another place – shall we say Idaho? – I would have found exciting cousin upon cousin. The clearances that devastated Scotland, the famines and unemployment that devastated Ireland and Wales, gave life to New Zealand and Patagonia. Icelanders made their way to Brazil and Lake Winnipeg. New York and Buenos Aires and Sydney were ceaselessly reinvigorated by new arrivals from across the ocean, by Lebanese, Italians, Germans, Greeks, escaping potato blight, volcanic eruptions, the English. Or yielding to the mutton-bird instinct that Chatwin had understood – in his case it was an arctic tern – and that Huxley had characterised as: ‘Man’s incurable and increasing propensity to wander over the face of the globe.’
By coming to Tasmania, I had repeated the pattern of two hitherto undreamed-of relatives and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way. However tenuous, they linked me to this place. They reminded me that life was not a string of arbitrary events. That there were, if you like, no accidents.
3
I drove up a cul-de-sac and parked outside a red brick bungalow next to a church. I could tell by the front garden which was their house. Maud’s White Ladies bloomed in pots along one wall, and the beds were bursting with tall phlox, tulips and daffodils. I was looking at Wishing-Well Lane.
I rang the two-tone organ bell and watched Ivy’s shape grow towards me through a frosted glass door that had a stork engraved on it. I had missed by only a few moments a visit from one of her neighbours. The woman had popped in to say that Ivy’s garden put them all to shame. ‘She had a husband she had to get back to. I told her, “We don’t have that problem.”’
Ivy unfastened the chain. As soon as I stepped inside, I recognised the ceramic plates, the dolls, the photographs of Petre Hordern and Boode.
She showed me over the house. It was spacious, with rooms leading off one another and three doors into the garden.
‘What do you like most about it?’
‘The chains,’ she smiled. ‘They make us feel secure.’
The move from North Motton to Ulverstone had been painless. Eleven cousins had welcomed them with doughnuts and cakes, and Heather, her twin, had lent the sisters a mattress so that they would not have to sleep on the floor.
We went into the kitchen where Heather was talking to Maud, and Ivy introduced us.
A train went by, shaking the windows. Ivy pulled a face. She had been here six months, but after living in the country nearly 80 years she was still adjusting to town noises. She noticed that an ambulance nearly always drove by when she was having her tea in the afternoon. ‘So that must be a stressful time.’
‘Car doors banging, that’s the worst thing,’ Maud said.
‘What else is different?’ I asked.
‘You got a few more people looking at you,’ Ivy said. ‘Maudy won’t go out in front to do the garden. She keeps to the back with her vegetables. You should see them. They’re that big, her pumpkins.’
In their first fortnight, Ivy and Maud had left their property only twice – to buy groceries. Since neither sister drove, Ivy had telephoned Mr Jones and he had taken them in his taxi to the supermarket two streets away. ‘We wouldn’t get far without taxis! You meet a lot of people and you hear things.’
‘Really?’
‘Mr Jones said to us: “You ought to go somewhere.” We said, “We don’t dare – in case we like it.”’
They had been back twice to Boode. Ivy evidently disapproved of certain changes that her nephew was making, being especially taken aback by the gnomes. ‘It’s not a gnome garden!’
But a surprise awaited her in Ulverstone. Ivy had employed Greg Lehman’s first cousin Dean to landscape their new garden. One afternoon Dean was clearing the front patio when his excavator unearthed a small brightly coloured figure. ‘He’s only a little bloke,’ Ivy said. ‘I sat him up on the cement. I’ve heard that if you take a gnome from where he’s living, it’s no good.’
‘Do you miss North Motton?’
‘No, there’s too much going on. That is the past, isn’t it? You’ve got to look forward. This is our home now and that’s what we’re trying to do, getting it to suit us.’
There was a roar outside and then two chimes. Ivy pulled a face.
‘That’ll be Nevin,’ I said.
He had brought spare leathers and a helmet, and I changed into them while Ivy, excited, got out her chart and magnifying glass.
‘They’re our cousins!’ she said.
‘Who are?’
‘His brother’s wife and us.’
‘Of course, they are,’ I said, and tried on the helmet.
Heather had a gift for me: a jar with a purple jelly inside.
‘Bet you’ve never eaten this before.’
‘What is it?’
‘Laurel jam.’ Their mother had taught her how to make it out of the berries, a recipe handed down from grandmother Hordern. ‘Some people don’t like it and some people love it.’
The jar reminded me of what I had forgotten, and I went to collect it from the car. For the journey here, I had wrapped it in damp newspaper, as I had seen Ivy do.
‘What do you think?’ I asked. ‘Could you strike a cutting?’
Ivy studied the stem that I had snapped from the laurel tree at Stoke Rivers. I thought – from her expression – that she was going to say it was impossible or that I had damaged it beyond hope. She said: ‘I’ll grow it for you if you like, but we don’t want that big thing here.’
‘Ready?’ asked Nevin.
Minutes later, from behind a rampart of phlox, the three sisters watched Nevin start up his motorbike. Ivy’s face was a mixture of fascination alternating with terror, and I knew that she was thinking of her un
fortunate schoolfriend Margaret Viney.
‘Ever been on a motorbike?’ I asked.
‘No, don’t think I have.’
‘Me neither,’ I said, kissing her goodbye. ‘But you should listen to Mr Jones. You should come to the east coast and see us.’
‘Too far for us, I reckon.’
‘Anyway, I think you’re very lucky to live in Tasmania.’
She grinned. ‘Supposed to be special isn’t it? We won’t tell them what it is, what it’s like, because too many will want to come.’
‘Just lean into the corners,’ said Nevin.
4
I had spent the night before in a bed and breakfast outside Wynyard where there was a locally published history of Tasmania which began: ‘For Europeans, it represents the literal end of the world: if you travel any further you are on your way home again.’ On his arrival in 1849, Thomas Arnold had written to his mother: ‘I look upon Hobart Town as one step on the road to England.’ So far, my journey in Tasmania resembled the trajectory of the flat, crescent-shaped hardwood that my grandmother had given me as a boy in Oxford, which if hurled as far as possible into the air actually comes back and lands in your hand.
The three sisters waved.
Nervous at first, I held on to the grab bars as Nevin thundered out of the cul-de-sac and up Ulverstone main street, onto the Devonport highway. I felt every bump on the road, but was also a part of the road. My attention was fixed with greatest concentration on the two wing-mirrors. On a motorbike, I swiftly realised, you live by the mirror, in which the white roadmarks appear to be ripping into the sky like a trail of artillery flak, chasing you. I was conscious of the road in other ways. Gravel hitting the visor; butterflies; the smells of paddocks and cows and damp earth. And the cameraderie of other bikers. Whenever we passed one, they raised a gloved hand or nodded. It did not matter where you came from, who you were, where you were going. On your ‘hoon’.
As soon as we reached the highway, Nevin opened up. The whoosh of the air rushing over my helmet mimicked the sound of a wind tunnel. It was exhilarating, as if Nevin was giving me a passage back into the present and I was hurtling forward 200 years.
So we roared past Squeaking Point over the Rubicon, past Glengarry Protestant church to Exeter and Beaconsfield. The reflections of the sky and trees converged into the back of his blue helmet, and I was as far away from meandering around with old documents as I could possibly be. And as we passed Kemp’s Parade at the Port Dalrymple Yacht Club on Beauty Point and headed towards York Town, I looked forward to abdicating my role as keeper of the ledger. What this other N. Shakespeare did with what I was about to tell him was out of my hands.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the following for reading the work in progress and giving suggestions and corrections: Paul Edwards, Damon Hawker, Michael Roe, Dan Sprod. I would like to thank the staff of the Tasmaniana Library and the Archives Office of Tasmania, Hobart, and in particular Gillian Winter and Tony Marshall.
For permission to quote from the Thomas Arnold papers, I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College, Oxford and to Mrs Janet Davies. The poem ‘Off the Map’ is quoted by kind permission of the Shoestring Press. The verse from ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ recorded by Willie Nelson, words and music by Fred Rose is quoted by permission of Campbell Connelly & Company Ltd., © Copyright 1945 Milene Music Incorporated, USA. All rights reserved. International Copyright Secured. I am grateful to David Higham Associates for permission to quote from both Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, Jonathan Cape, 1982; and The Comedians, Jonathan Cape, 1976. To The Random House Group Ltd. and to Barbara Mobbs Literary Agency for permission to quote from Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves, Jonathan Cape, 1976. To the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov to quote from Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. All rights reserved. To The Random House Group for permission to quote from Günther Grass’ The Tin Drum, Martin Secker & Warburg, 1975. To the Carmen Balcells Agency for permission to quote from Gabriel García Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale, Jonathan Cape, 2003. I have made every effort to trace copyright holders. I greatly regret any omissions, but these will be rectified in any future edition.
I would also like to thank Judy Anderson, Murray Bail, Rebecca Chambers, Pat Cleveland, James Cox, John and Jo Fenn-Smith, Bill Howroyd, Gillian Johnson, Gillian Kemp, Tom Keneally, Matthew Kneale, Christopher MacLehose, Caroline Michel, Delia Nicholls, Margaret-Ann Oldmeadow, Chris Pearce, Cassandra Pybus, Anne and Trevor Rood, Rachael Rose, Michael Stutchbury and Becky Toyne.
Part of the Kemp material has already appeared in different form in Granta 74, 2001.
Sources
Abbreviations used in Sources section:
J.R.A.H.S.
Journal of the Royal Australia Historical Society
T.H.R.A
Tasmanian Historical Research Association
T.L.S.
Times Literary Supplement
Part I: Father of Tasmania
Based on conversations with Anna Agnarsdottir, Murray Bail, Peter Chapman, Kaia Davey, Richard Davey, John Dent, Zelda Dick, Peter Donaldson, Tim Dwyer, Paul Edwards, John and Jo Fenn-Smith, Patricia Greenhill, Damon Hawker, Pete Hay, Judy Humphries, Murray Kemp, Tom Keneally, George Masterman, Margaret-Ann Oldmeadow, Barrie Paterson, Ian Pearce, Bill Penfold, Pat Quilty, Henry Reynolds, Andrew Sant, Dan Sprod, Robert Tiley.
Unpublished sources: John Shakespeare, Adrian Potter, Penelope Eaton-Hart, Murray Kemp, Herbert de Hamel, Balliol College, Guildhall, Tasmaniana Library.
Newspapers: Bent’s News, Britannia, Colonial Times, The Historian: Journal of the West Tamar Historical Society, Hobart Mercury, Hobart Town Courier, Hobart Town Gazette, Launceston Examiner, Sydney Gazette, Tasmanian Times, True Colonist.
Books and articles: The Historical Records of New South Wales, ed. F.M. Bladen, Sydney, Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1921; the Australian Dictionary of Biography; the records of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association; The History of Tasmania, by John West, Launceston, 1852; A History of Tasmania, by Lloyd Robson, Vol. I, Oxford, 1983, Vol. II, 1990; A Short History of Tasmania, by Lloyd Robson, updated by Michael Roe, Oxford, 1997; The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes, Harvill, 1987; Step Across this Line, by Salman Rushdie, Vintage, 2003; In Sunshine or in Shadow, by Martin Flanagan, Picador, 2002; Australia and New Zealand, by Anthony Trollope, Chapman & Hall, 1873; More Tramps Abroad, by Mark Twain, Chatto & Windus, 1897; On the Beach, by Nevil Shute, William Heinemann, 1957; ‘Darwin in Hobart, 1836’, by Michael Roe, Island 16; ‘Garden of Antarctic Delights’, by Pat Quilty, Australian Garden History, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1999; ‘Tasmania and Antarctic: a Long Association’, by Pat Quilty, Australian Gemmologist, 19, 1996; An Autobiography, by Agatha Christie, Berkley, 1991; The Journal of Mrs. Fenton: A Narrative of Her Life in India, the Isle of France & Tasmania During the Years 1826–1830, by Bessie Fenton, Edward Arnold, 1901; The Diaries and Letters of G.T.W.B. Boyes, Volume 1, 1820–1832, ed. Peter Chapman, Oxford, 1985; Down Home: Revisiting Tasmania, by Peter Conrad, Chatto & Windus, 1988; Vandiemonian Essays, by Pete Hay, Walleah Press, 2002; The Islanders, by Andrew Sant, Shoestring Press, 2002; Beer, Blood and Water, by Bernard Lloyd, Hobart, 1998; Journal of A Voyage from New South Wales to England, by Elizabeth Kent, Athenaeum, July 1808; A Voyage to Terra Australis, by Matthew Flinders, ed. Tim Flannery, Text, Melbourne, 2001; George Bass, by Keith Macrae Bowden, Oxford, 1952; Geographic and Descriptive Delineations of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land, by Charles Jeffreys, London, J.M. Richardson, 1820; Godwin’s Emigrant Guide to Van Diemen’s Land, more properly called Tasmania, London, 1823; An account of the colony of Van Diemen’s Land, principally designed for the use of emigrants, by Edward Curr, London, 1824; Medical Hints for Emigrants, R. Druitt, London, 1850; Bennelong, First Notable Aborigine, by John Kenny, J.R.A.H.S, 1973; The journal of a voyage from Calcutta to Van Diemen’s Land: comprising a description of that colony during a six months’ residence, by A. Prinsep, London
, 1833; Sydney Cove 1789–90, by John Cobley, Angus & Robertson, 1963; A colonial regiment: new sources relating to the New South Wales Corps, 1789–1810, by P. Statham, Canberra, 1992; Memoirs of Joseph Holt, London, 1838; John Macarthur, by M.H. Ellis, Sydney, 1955; Rum Rebellion, by H.V. Evatt, Sydney, Angus & Robertson, 1937; Terre Napoléon, by Ernest Scott, Methuen, 1910; The French Reconnaissance: Baudin in Australia 1801–1803, by Frank Horner, Melbourne, 1987; Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes, Historique, Vol. 1, by François Péron, Paris, 1807; Australian Navigators: Picking up shells and catching butterflies in an age of revolution, by Robert Tiley, Kangaroo Press, 2002; The Explorers, ed. Tim Flannery, Text, 1998; The New South Wales Freemason, July 1956; Europeans in Australia, by Alan Atkinson, Oxford, 1997; ‘Remarks on Settlement of Port Dalrymple’, by John Oxley, in Historical Records of Australia, Series III, Vol. I; The Story of Port Dalrymple, by L.S. Bethell, Hobart, 1957; The Life of Vice-Admiral William Bligh, by George Mackaness, Angus & Robertson, 1951; Report of the Commissioner of Enquiry on the Judicial Establishments of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, by J.T. Bigge, London, 1823; Obliged to Submit: Wives & Mistresses of colonial governors, by Alison Alexander, Montpelier, 1999; Knopwood: A Biography, by Geoffrey Stephens, Hobart, 1990; The diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood 1803–1838, ed. Mary Nicholls, T.H.R.A., 1977; The Hermit in Van Diemen’s Land, by Henry Savery, ed. Cecil Hadgraft and Margriet Roe, Queensland, 1964; Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp, by Murray C. Kemp and Thérèse B. Kemp, J.R.A.H.S., 51, March 1965; Of Yesteryear and Nowadays, by P.B. Edwards, Edwards, 1994; Van Diemen’s Land; or Settlers and Natives, by William Thomas Moncrieff, John Dicks, 1830; Michael Howe, the Last and Worst Bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land, by T.E. Wells, Platypus, Hobart, 1966; The First; the Worst? Michael Howe and associated bushrangers, by R.F. Minchin, Hobart, 2001; A Blood-thirsty banditti of wretches: informations on oath relating to Michael Howe and others between 1814 and 1818, Adelaide, Sullivan’s Cove, 1985; Mike Howe, the bushranger of Van Diemen’s Land, by James Bonwick, London, 1873; Observations upon secondary punishments, by Sir George Arthur, Hobart, 1833; The Sarah Island Conspiracies: being an account of twelve voyages to Macquarie Harbour & Sarah Island, 1822–1838, by Richard Innes Davey, Strahan, 2002; Gould’s Book of Fish, by Richard Flanagan, Picador, 2003; English Passengers, by Matthew Kneale, Hamish Hamilton, 2002; The Great Shame, by Thomas Keneally, Chatto & Windus, 1998; Representing Convicts, edited by I. Duffield & J. Bradley, London, 1997; Convicts and Colonies, by A.G.L. Shaw, Melbourne, 1973; Nine Years in Van Diemen’s Land, by James Syme, Dundee, 1848; Alexander Pearce of Macquarie Harbour: Convict-Bushranger-Cannibal, by Dan Sprod, Cat and Fiddle, 1977; Hell’s Gates, by Paul Collins, South Yarra, 2002; The Usurper: Jorgen Jorgenson and his turbulent life in Iceland and Van Diemen’s Land, 1780–1841, by Dan Sprod, Blubber Head, 2001; Jorgen Jorgenson and the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land, by N.J.B. Plomley, Blubber Head, 1991; The Convict King, being the life and adventures of Jorgen Jorgenson, retold by James Francis Hogan, Hobart, 1891; Loitering in a tent: Jorgenson in the High Country, by John Mitchell, Hobart, 1995; Journal of a Tour in Iceland in the Summer of 1809, by William Jackson Hooker, John Murray, 1813; Great Britain and Iceland 1800–1820, by Anna Agnarsdottir, PHD thesis, LSE, 1989; A shred of autobiography, by Jorgen Jorgenson, Adelaide, Sullivan’s Cove, 1981; The convict probation system in Van Diemen’s Land, 1839–1954, by Ian Brand, Blubber Head, 1990; Highway in Van Diemen’s Land, by G. Hawley Stancombe, Sydney, National Trust of Australia, 1968; Edward Markham’s voyage to Van Diemen’s Land 1833, by Edward Markham, Launceston, 1952; A Fringe of Leaves, by Patrick White, Viking, 1976; Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley, Chatto & Windus, 1928; Wainewright, the Poisoner, by Andrew Motion, Faber, 2000; New Zealand Letters of Thomas Arnold the Younger, ed. James Bertram, Oxford, 1966; A Victorian Wanderer: The Life of Thomas Arnold the Younger, by Bernard Bergonzi, Oxford, 2003; Thomas Arnold the Younger in Van Diemen’s Land, by P.A. Howell, Hobart, 1964; Passages in a Wandering Life, by Thomas Arnold, London, 1900; The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, Janet Trevelyan, London, 1923; A Writer’s Recollections, by Mrs Humphry Ward, London 1918; Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, by John Sutherland, Oxford, 1990.
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