In Tasmania (4 page)

Fitzroy was swift to advise Heckscher that it was seriously important for ships to be made aware of this fact ‘as the consequences may be most fatal'. Captains setting their clocks for longitude as they left harbour risked being out by four nautical miles – and so adding to the thousand or more shipwrecks along Tasmania's coast, the positions of the huge majority of which remain unknown.

In the months ahead, I came to believe that George Fitzroy had discovered a unique local phenomenon, a crack in time and space that accounted for so many things that I observed about Tasmania. Into it disappeared ships, novelists, cities, UFOs, archives, promises. ‘Yes, I'll be there tomorrow. To service your car, build your house, clean the possums out of your roof …' Returning 40 years on to his childhood home at the foot of Mount Wellington, Viscount Montgomery of Alamein grumbled that the railway station ‘looked just the same … in spite of repeated representations for it to be modernised'. Fitzroy's missing 105 seconds was a paradigm of Tasmania's idiosyncratic relationship to the clock, and reflected the findings of a Tourism Tasmania survey which reported an overwhelming impression among visitors that Tasmania was ‘caught up in a bit of a time warp'. The mindset was understandable, given that the state for most of its history was a rural economy. At the trial for the murder of a North Motton girl in 1921, Chief Justice Sir Herbert Nicholls explained to the jury the attitude of the Tasmanian farmer towards time: ‘Without saying it in a derogatory sense or attempting to be humorous, it is a plain, sensible fact that a farmer often takes his time from his stomach. In the course of his work he gets no signal as to his meals, but goes home to his dinner, goes back to his work until dark, and then goes to bed. He has no occasion to look at his watch, no occasion to think about the time. It is no slander, possibly, to say that when he looks at the family clock and his watch they don't agree, and probably they are both likely to be wrong.'

Tasmania's rural economy and its geographic position ensured that it was a blip that could disappear from the rest of Australia's radar. Tasmanians were long accustomed to being patronised by Sydneysiders for living in ‘a sometimes forgotten teardrop at the bottom of Australia' or to being ignored completely, as happened in 1982 when Tasmania was left out of the Australian reckoning for the Commonwealth Games. Andrew Sant captured something of the local fury in his poem ‘Off the Map':

About its profile on the map, the Tasmanian-born writer Peter Conrad was taught at school that Tasmania looked like a human heart, or an apple with a bite taken out of it. I prefer to think that it resembled the pawmark that Tasman's sailors came across in the sand at Marion Bay, left there by a wombat or a thylacine. But mainlanders were not so indulgent. Their jokes about the island's shape had entered the
Cassell Dictionary of Slang
: ‘mapatasi – from ‘map of Tasmania', supposed shape of female pubic region. Came into use in 1990s'.

To an outsider, these jokes disguised an unease, as if Tasmania was a dumping ground for a nation's bad conscience about itself. Bernard Lloyd put it bluntly in
Beer, Blood and Water
: ‘Australians project all the things they despise and loathe about themselves – their racism, their homophobia, their parochialism – onto their “other” Tasmania, the “Albania of the Antipodes”. They think “we're not like that – Tasmania is.”' Certainly, in Sydney and Melbourne they appeared to know all about ‘the Apple Isle', even if they had never set foot there. In Tasmania were committed the worst atrocities against Aborigines; in Tasmania there ended up ‘the most felonious of felons' in Tasmania the population – sometimes referred to as Tasmaniacs – was so backward and inbred that visitors were advised, as I was, ‘to grow an extra head' (in Salamanca Place I could even buy a T-shirt with a spare hole). No-one was terribly interested to hear about the findings of the Menzies Institute, which showed that Tasmaniacs have a lower rate of congenital malformation than the Australian average.

But Tasmania's very remoteness had also protected it. After living here for three years, I could not help noticing that the absence of ‘progress', which had made Tasmania the butt of so many jokes, was turning into its strongest attraction. Bypassed and undeveloped, this arrestingly beautiful island was enjoying a rediscovery as an Arcadia rather than an Alcatraz. The ‘hated stain' was being cleaned up on several levels, and, encouraged by terrorism, SARS, and improved transport and communications, not to mention cheap property, visitors were crossing Bass Strait in record numbers.

 

‘Fitzroy's crack' could also suck you down into the human equivalent of Mount Wellington's dolerite core.

In a place as obsessed with history as Tasmania the present quickly leads back to the past. Talking to Bill Penfold, a telephone engineer who had written a book on Hobart's New Town district, I had to ask him to repeat himself when he mentioned that his grandfather had been a convict at Port Arthur, a prison of secondary punishment on the tip of the Tasman peninsula.

‘Your great-grandfather, surely?' I said.

But no. His grandfather William Pinfold was a convict from Northamptonshire who had stolen jewellery from a post office – ‘and probably a thousand other things'. He was sent to Norfolk Island in 1847 and then to Port Arthur, where he was one of 12,000 male convicts who reoffended between 1832 and 1853. ‘He was released and wound up hop-picking, and was listed as a butcher in New Norfolk, a place called Plenty where he stole a sheep and was sent back to Port Arthur for four years.' In 1850 he married an Irish milkmaid. William's father was born in 1872, and in 1930 the family changed their name to Penfold. ‘It was because of the winery,' he said, ‘but also something to do with convicts. People were very reluctant to admit they were descended from convicts, and then in the last 20 years convicts have become the in thing.'

When he was incarcerated at Port Arthur, Penfold's grandfather would have known the commandant of the ‘Silent Prison' [or Model Prison]. A friend of my mother's sent me from Wiltshire this bleak paragraph that she had transcribed from her grandmother's diary: ‘At Hobarton [Hobart] among other duties my father had military control of the Silent Prison on the convict station, a terrible institution which has long since been given up on account of the number of convicts who went out of their minds. My mother often described to us how sad a sight it was to see the convicts taking exercise in perfect silence and knowing that except to their jailers some of them had not been allowed to speak to anyone for years. Once as she passed she stuck a piece of sweet scented verbena into the hands of one of these silent prisoners & heard that afterwards the poor fellow was on his knees weeping over it in his cell.'

As the state prepared to mark the 200th anniversary of its settlement by Europeans, there were signs that Tasmania itself was beginning to emerge from a long, traumatic period of silence in which certain topics could not be discussed.

Until very recently the past was regarded as discreditable, to be put ‘out of sight and out of mind' according to Lloyd Robson in the first part of his two-volume history of Tasmania. Many growing up here in the 1950s felt, like Conrad, that ‘Tasmania possesses too much history'. Pete Hay is another writer who believes that Tasmania has never made an authentic accommodation with its past: ‘That past has the stature of a dark family secret.'

The name-change to Tasmania a century before had been a deliberate attempt to wipe clean that slate. Van Diemen's Land, wrote Trollope in 1873, had ‘a sound which had become connected all over the world with rascaldom' it seemed ‘to carry a taunt in men's ears' and was ‘harsh with the crack of the jailer's whip'. And yet pages scissored from records in the Hobart archives suggested that shame about the past had endured. The state archivist Ian Pearce says that his relatives glossed over a convict ancestor who was spoken of many times as ‘a sea-captain'. ‘I discovered when I was working here that he was a fairly boring London convict who had pinched lead from church roofs.' Pearce considers that up until the 1970s people were unable to talk about their history, and became quite distressed to learn in the Public Search Room that they were descended from convict stock. He credits the television drama series
Roots
for planting the genealogy bug, a process that has continued with a younger generation of Tasmanian writers, among them the novelist Richard Flanagan, whose
Gould's Book of Fish
takes for its subject a convict artist sentenced to Sarah Island. Pearce says: ‘There's been a massive sea change in people's attitude to their convict past that's moved into an obsession, a pride almost – from “don't talk about it” into “this is our heritage”.'

WAITING FOR GILLIAN TO BE FINISHED WITH THE DENTIST, I FOUND
myself thinking about Anthony Fenn Kemp. Had he come here as a convict, and was that why my grandmother referred to him as ‘a black sheep'? Passing Kemp Street, I wondered if the name was connected in some way with this cousin. I dismissed the thought as ridiculous, but then, in Murray Street, realising that my route was taking me past the Hobart archives, I went in. Habit, I suppose: a writer's reflex action. I told myself, as I climbed the stairs, that I was being led less by an investigating spirit than an extinguishing one. I'll just quickly check him out and then I can be done with him, I thought.

The archivist was a friendly woman. I told her what I knew about Kemp and asked her whether she had heard of him, and where she thought I should start my researches. At this she smiled and told me that Anthony Fenn Kemp was known as ‘the Father of Tasmania'.

The Father of Tasmania.
The man who up till now I had been thinking of as some low-life in the rum and tobacco trade. Nothing in the letters I had read so far had prefigured this distinction.

‘He also wished to be known as the George Washington of Van Diemen's Land and the Father of the People,' she told me, adding, however, that there was some debate over whether this last sobriquet recognised Kemp's role in Tasmania's history, his sublime egoism or his 18 children.

Kemp had in fact been one of the first colonists to set foot in the territory. He had helped to establish the first permanent settlement in the north and for seven months was in command of half the island. Nor was his influence limited to Van Diemen's Land. He was witness to many crises in the early history of Australia itself and personally responsible for several more. He fomented one mutiny, saw off two Governors of New South Wales and three Lieutenant Governors of Tasmania and risked armed conflict with the French. He was also the great-grandfather of the Victorian novelist Mrs Humphrey Ward and the great-great-grandfather of Aldous and Julian Huxley.

I felt rather pleased. I told the archivist with unconcealed pride that he was a distant relative.

‘If I was you, I would not go round divulging that information.' She pressed her yellow pencil to her chin. ‘He's a man of whom I've heard not one word of good.'

SO I BEGAN TO SIFT IN EARNEST THROUGH THE VAST, MESSY JUNK
drawer of Anthony Fenn Kemp's life.

I hoped to fill the gaps quickly. The so-called Father of Tasmania would surely have inspired a biography. But no. Despite his credentials, it seemed that little had been published about Kemp; and although he began to pop up everywhere, he resisted any move to fix him.

I might have stopped there, left Kemp alone, but I had trained a muscle too well – and I felt singled out, as if the bag had chosen me. Stories, like small children, as I was shortly to discover, have a life which demands to be expressed: ‘I want to be told and you're going to be the person to do it.' Just when my doubts were strongest, the Tasmanian historian Henry Reynolds sent me back to my shed. Kemp, he told me, was indeed a true pioneer of Tasmania who had lived through its most formative years to become a crucial political figure. ‘Kemp was important because he lived for a long time; he was in both colonies; he was present at important moments. There wouldn't be many figures who are as interesting.'

I began to seek out his tracks: in libraries in Sydney, London and Hobart; in leather-backed books and bow-tied files that the archivist brought to my desk; in interviews with his descendants. The person who emerged was not the indigent remittance man I had expected, but a significant and extraordinary figure – one of the founding sires of Australia, who led like a lightning rod back to the island's past, giving me a portrait of the whole bizarre and brutal early history of Tasmania and New South Wales.

And as I followed Kemp to Australia, I felt myself to be Potter's accidental auditor, crossing the world, as Potter never did, to bring Kemp to account. It was the opposite of everything I intended. I had come here, as had Kemp, to begin afresh. But you cannot just shed yourself like that, not even if you go and live on the rim of the world. Too often the Potter and rarely the Kemp, I was back at my desk, a clerk once more.

SATED IN DUE COURSE WITH FISHWIVES AND BURGUNDY, ANTHONY
Fenn Kemp headed south from Calais on foot. He walked through a country in turmoil, a penniless outcast driven by a need to escape his family's censure.

In Aldgate concern about his safety had confined his mother to her bed. Susannah Kemp was a highly strung woman who rode for her health and was addicted to a tincture of valerian and castor known as ‘Bevan's nervous drops'. When she died, six months after her son left, the young man was in Liège, dancing the ‘Marseillaise' around the cap of Liberty.

His resentment of his father had worked itself up into contempt for all authority. He sympathised with the revolutionaries, who egged him on – he was able to communicate his feelings expansively in their language. He had learned his French at Dr Knox's school in Greenwich (where, according to an obituary which I looked up in the
Tasmanian Times
, he also acquired a fondness for quoting Latin ‘which afforded frequent amusement to his intimate friends'). He was never happy ‘unless talking'.

In fact, he talked himself out of most friendships, being prone when piqued to address his listeners in rather an abrupt manner. One of very few to take him at face value was James Erskine Calder, retired surveyor-general and author of Kemp's obituary in the
Tasmanian Times
. Perhaps Calder's profession made him receptive to the island's ‘time warp' into which, he observed, men like Kemp tended to vanish. ‘I have often thought there must be something either very Lethean in the atmosphere of Tasmania or defective in the mental power of her people which causes such rapid obliviousness of those which having deserved well out of the country ought not to pass out of recollection.' Calder considered it his duty to rescue Kemp from this oblivion.

In his late eighties, Kemp spoke at length to Calder from his wheelchair in his manorial estate outside Hobart, Mount Vernon. He talked about his anarchic experiences in Liège, the wild excesses he had witnessed, and revealed how, after gaining a taste for republicanism, he spent the next year in America ‘as a pleasure-seeking traveller'. It was there, at a farm in South Carolina, that he had a brief, if unlikely meeting with the only man he ever professed to admire. He loved George Washington, he told Calder – with a power for self-deception that remained undimmed at 95 – for strengthening his ‘inherent aversion to despotism'.

But not even America was far enough from Aldgate.

Why else did Kemp go to Australia? From the books in Hobart library, I got the impression that people who went to Australia were either felons who did not want to go; those sent to guard them, who also did not want to go; and a handful of free settlers who were making a huge gamble, comparable, at that time, to settling on the moon. No-one came with the high ideals of the Founding Fathers. It was, in fact, a very odd place for someone like Kemp to choose. It must have suited him to be some 14,000 miles away from home. Distance is a great aid to a rascal. And Kemp was a rascal: on his return from America in May 1793 he was immediately arrested for debt.

He cannot have known it, but he was pioneering a tradition. ‘An odd person, absolutely English,' Tolstoy later wrote in his diaries of a character like Kemp. ‘He has
evasive
jokes and words ready for every occasion: “I love to squander money, and afterwards
I will rough it
in Australia.”'

At 20, and possibly with the assistance of his father, Kemp bought a commission in the 102nd Regiment of Foot (later called the New South Wales Corps), raised to manage convicts in a new penal colony at Port Jackson, a wild, empty, desperate place at the other end of the world. He was one of only 18 officers, but his red and white sash was never a coveted uniform. Kemp himself calculated that 200 of the 460 soldiers under him were former convicts, recruited from the ranks of those they had to garrison. In the opinion of John Hunter, second Governor of New South Wales, the behaviour of Kemp's Corps was ‘the most violent and outrageous that was ever heard of by any British regiment whatever'. In 1795, two years after joining the Corps, Kemp and the newly appointed Hunter sailed together to Australia, along with the town clock, a windmill and a returning Aborigine suffering from flu.

 

The decrepit
Reliance
left Plymouth on February 15, travelling at an average speed of five knots and calling at Tenerife and Rio. The long journey had few distractions. George Boyes followed in Kemp's wake 30 years later: ‘I just begin to perceive that the voyage is more in the imagination than anywhere else. The time slips on almost insensibly.' From the poop deck, Kemp watched sperm whales and green turtles and hundreds of gulls and petrels – known as ‘Mother Carey's chickens' – that flew around the ship with piercing screams. There were also albatrosses that criss-crossed the sky with a slow, infuriating wingflap. Some men killed time fishing for these birds and reeling them in through the water on hooks baited with red cloth. Then there were strange sails that appeared on the horizon. England was at war with France and the
Reliance
had only ten guns.

The French were not the only danger. Kemp had to guard against scurvy, seasickness and drunkenness. In Hobart's Tasmaniana Library I found a tiny book,
Medical Hints for Emigrants
, that was full of the kind of advice that Potter might have offered.

Scurvy was to be defeated by a diet to prevent the gums from becoming spongy – raw potatoes in vinegar. The best cure for seasickness was to lie down, wrap up warmly, ‘and tempt the stomach with a bit of toasted fat bacon'.

Kemp, as an ensign, shared responsibility for the convicts on the
Reliance
. They slept in a reeking hold in 18 inches of space, four to a berth, in bedding drenched with water that cascaded continually through the hatches. Kemp took them up on deck for two hours a day to fill their lungs and to exercise. But the deck was treacherous: the tar melted in the sun and the swell made walking on it slippery. The
Reliance
was slow and leaky so that if a man fell overboard she was unable to tack in order to lower a boat without danger of keeling over. ‘I never sailed in so compleat a tub,' wrote her captain after the voyage.

The ugliest on board were chosen to play the part of Neptune and his family when the
Reliance
crossed the Equator. Their faces painted and glued with false hair, they were hauled on an old cask along the quarterdeck to a tub of water. There Neptune shaved Kemp, who had not previously made the crossing. Kemp was ordered onto a plank. His eyes were bandaged and his chin smeared with a lather compounded of ‘all sorts of filth' which was scraped off with a foot-long razor. Neptune then hoiked out the plank from under him.

Cooped up for so long in close quarters, Kemp could not hide his character from his fellow passengers – a situation, one traveller wrote, that ‘may produce contempt, aversion, hatred, jealousy or scandal, to the great annoyance for the time of the parties concerned'.

Who were Kemp's passengers? The most conspicuous was the sick Aborigine Bennelong, one of two Eora tribesmen kidnapped from Port Jackson and presented to George III as the ‘Cannibal King'. (The King was not very curious to meet him at the levée at St James's: ‘Being thin of company it was closed in an hour.') Days later, a reporter observed Bennelong with his young companion Yemmerrawanyee staring through a shop window in St James's Street. ‘What their ideas were, we will not attempt to guess.' During his two years in London, the stout Bennelong – he was named, he claimed, after a large fish – listened to debates in Parliament, and learned to box, to skate and to dress in ruffled lace shirts. He was an accomplished flirt and mimic, but the English weather broke him. His companion died of a lung complaint and lay buried in a Baptist cemetery in Eltham, and now Bennelong was shivering with influenza and homesickness. ‘I do all I can to keep him up,' wrote Hunter, who had forked out £159 for Bennelong's expenses in London, ‘but still am doubtful of his living.'

The man who restored Bennelong to health was the
Reliance
's surgeon, a six-foot Lincolnshire man named George Bass. Bennelong reciprocated by teaching the young surgeon his language – so that Bass was able to communicate with the Aborigines near Sydney. From remarks that he made about Tasmania's Aborigines, it is possible that Kemp, never willingly excluded from a conversation, also may have gossiped on the poop with Bennelong.

 

Kaia is a young woman who worked for six months as a sailor on a ship the same size as the
Reliance
. Her journey on the brigantine
Windeward Bound
celebrated the bicentenary of Matthew Flinders's circumnavigation of Australia. She says: ‘Alliances are formed. You find the people you connect with and you stick with them through thick and thin.'

 

Kemp had met negroes in South Carolina, and his republican sympathies naturally allied him to an underdog. Crammed together for 206 days, Kemp may have felt drawn to play bridge or cards with Bennelong, or to sit beside him carving buttons from a shark's skeleton. It is not inconceivable that in conversations with the Aborigine he learned details of his tribal customs; of the previous Governor's French cook – whose walk and voice Bennelong could imitate to perfection; of the Englishwoman he once had kissed.

He is also likely to have learned of Bass's project to explore the southeast coast of New South Wales. To this end, Bass had lashed to the
Reliance
's deck a small rowing boat that he named the
Tom Thumb
. Bass discussed his plans with Governor Hunter and another determined Lincolnshireman, the 21-year-old master's mate Matthew Flinders. Hunter knew the coast well, and confessed his doubts about Cook's chart that showed an unbroken coastline between the mainland and Van Diemen's Land.

Kemp's fellow passengers, in other words, are counted among the most significant figures in Australia's early colonial history. Bennelong would give his name to the point where the Sydney Opera House now stands; Bass to the strait that he discovered with Flinders three years later, and which proved that Van Diemen's Land was an island; and Flinders to the island off Van Diemen's Land that became home to the last Tasmanian Aborigines.
¹

On the evening of September 7, 1795, Kemp sailed between the Sydney Heads into slack water. For seven months and one week, he had ricocheted between the walls of a cabin with no headspace and poor ventilation, breathing in the stench of sanitary buckets and subsisting on a diet of powdered beef soup and ‘insipissated juice of wort'. It was late spring, the air hot and scented. A crew of bluejackets rowed him ashore. He saw a town settled on spurs of sandstone that were covered with immense grey trees. Flights of strange birds jabbered at him and the sinking sun gave to everything a ghost-like quality. It was a mesmerising setting, though not altogether foreign. One settler called it, in a magnificently dotty description, ‘a Wapping or St Giles in the beauties of a Richmond'. It was also a microcosm of all that was riotous in Georgian society.

The town was seven years old and spread back from the harbour in a shabby crescent. The population of 3,000 lived in tents and bush-timber huts plastered with rammed earth. Rationing was in force and there was not much to eat ‘except rats'. Few people knew about agriculture or how to grow food. In this strange, banished society they took their relief in alcohol. On his way to Barrack Square, Kemp passed men and women slumped beside buckets of pure spirit which they drank from quart mugs until they passed out. Historians unite in describing colonial Sydney as a drunken society from top to bottom. Thanks to Kemp, it soon became even drunker.

In Port Jackson, the 22-year-old Kemp proved adept at swindling his way to the top. It was his good fortune to find himself at large in a society that thrived on the commodities he knew about: tobacco, which the convicts prized above food and sex, and rum (a term used to describe any spirit), which they prized even more. Kemp exploited their craving with an unexpected ace up his sleeve: the good name and credit of ‘Kemp & Potter'.

Born into the trade, Kemp knew the shippers and agents in Mauritius, the Caribbean, India. (By far the most profitable liquor, he told a government commission, was Bengal rum: ‘There is a particular flavour in it which the lower orders prefer.') His contacts and his education quickly secured him the post of the Corps's acting paymaster. He knew Latin, and his father, he assured everyone in one of his rare honest statements, was ‘one of the most respectable men in the City of London'. First up the ropes when a ship entered harbour, he purchased the cargo using a combination of promissory notes to ‘Kemp & Potter' and the treasury bills with which he was supposed to pay the regiment. He then sold the cargo to his captive clientele, through his store the ‘Golden Corner', at grossly inflated prices.

In November 1799, Kemp paid half a crown to lease a plot opposite the George Street barracks. Here, surrounded by paddocks and bush and tree stumps, he erected an antipodean version of 87 Aldgate. But his business methods were not learned from Potter. An Irish rebel, Joseph Holt, described how Kemp threatened to flog those men who came to request their monthly wages. Kemp, instead of paying the soldiers, would point to his shelves of striped shirts, muskets, snuff. ‘I have very good tobacco, ten shillings the pound, and good tea at 20 shillings the pound …'