In Tasmania (7 page)

KEMP WAS ONLY TOO DELIGHTED TO BE SEPARATED FROM ALDGATE
‘by the circumference of the globe'. On January 12, 1816, he was rowed ashore in Hobart. The town consisted of 1,000 people living in wattle and daub huts, and resembled more a campsite than a capital. That night, he dined in Government House (actually a barn) as a guest of the volatile Lieutenant Governor, Thomas Davey. He brought the ‘great news' of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo and informed Davey of his ‘valuable cargo' and of his wish to become a free settler. He was now 43.

Davey, who liked to entertain in shirtsleeves, was a jovial incompetent known as ‘Mad Tom'. He had the habit of screwing up his forehead if anyone put him on the spot, and yelling out ‘Pondicherry!' An ex-Marine who received his letter of appointment in a debtor's prison, he was also the most alcoholic of Kemp's superiors.

Davey's favourite tipple was ‘Blow my skull', a cocktail he served in half-pint glasses consisting of rum, brandy, gin, port, Madeira, sherry and claret.

He and Kemp had plenty to discuss over dinner.

 

Kemp's first discovery was that the island was no longer divided in two. The reason was an improbable episode involving Major George Alexander Gordon, the third northern commandant at Port Dalrymple, as the area around York Town was known. Kemp was fascinated to learn the details: Gordon, besides being his successor at Port Dalrymple, was ‘an old school friend of mine' and a fellow regular at the Old Slaughterer's Coffee House in London. Furthermore, Kemp recently had used Gordon's name as a reference in his appeal to have his confiscated land grants returned. When Davey explained that Gordon had been relieved of his duties after suffering sunstroke, Kemp understood why the authorities in London had remained unimpressed.

Sunstroke was not all that unusual – one of Matthew Flinders's sailors died of it ‘in a state of frenzy' – but its effects on two men at Port Dalrymple in February 1812 were possibly exceptional. In the week that Gordon was carried off to recover in the barracks in George Street, an Irish entrepreneur, Jonathan Burke McHugo, was passing through Bass Strait from Calcutta to Sydney where he hoped to sell a cargo of rum, tea and trousers. Davey told Kemp that McHugo's illness demented him into believing that he was a member of the British Royal Family.

It was a story that Kemp would remember as an old man in his wheelchair. The harbourmaster who boarded the 100-ton brig
Active
was led into the presence of a man seated on a sumptuous settee who introduced himself as General Count McHugo. He was, he said, travelling under cover on behalf of the Government of India. He had heard that the population of Port Dalrymple were living in a deplorable state, and had come to investigate any grievances and to punish those responsible. On landing, General McHugo went to meet the sick Gordon and revealed to the commandant that McHugo was an assumed name. McHugo told Gordon what he later wrote to the Colonial Office: ‘Every intelligent man who knows me must be aware that although the Son of an Irish snuff and Tobacco seller, I am the lineal descendant of Earl Bothwell and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scotland … Consequently the rightful Heir to the Crown of England.' In his fever, Gordon believed this nonsense and surrendered his command. He explained that he fully thought that McHugo was ‘one of the Royal Family Incognito and possessed of Authority at pleasure to supersede All Governors'.

The mad Irishman sentenced Gordon to hang. Gordon was only saved by the reappearance of a subaltern on leave in the highlands, who arrested McHugo and sent him under guard to Sydney, where, examined by the Governor's doctor, he was pronounced to be in ‘a state of Outrageous Insanity'. Davey's latest information was that he had discharged himself from an asylum in Calcutta and was now in London seeking compensation from ‘those time serving satellites of that unfeeling illustrious usurper the Prince of Wales'.

Meanwhile, Gordon had been recalled and the whole island was now under Davey's precarious control in Hobart.

 

Dinner wore on and the neurotic Davey explained his difficulties.

He was engaged in a desperate struggle with bushrangers, convicts who remained out in the bush as kangaroo hunters and terrorised the island – to the extent that Davey had had to declare martial law, ordering a curfew after 8 p.m. and putting a price on their heads. Kemp was familiar with the problem. The bushrangers were, after all, a direct legacy of his administration eight years before.

The bushranger who posed the biggest threat was Michael Howe, a sailor from Yorkshire transported to Van Diemen's Land for highway robbery. In 1813, Howe absconded and set himself up as a counter authority to Davey, styling himself the Governor of the Rangers and warning Davey that any soldiers he sent after him ‘he would hang them up by the heels to a tree, let out their entrails, and leave them hanging as he would a kangaroo'. Howe saw himself as a ‘shepherd' in the tradition of Robin Hood, but a line from a contemporary play described him better: ‘He carries off bullocks as if they were kids, and values life as little as a turnip.'

One midnight on the Coal River, where Davey owned a property, Howe had kicked awake a detachment of soldiers with the words: ‘Lay still, you buggers.' He stole their muskets and said that he wished Davey had been there because he would have sent some buckshot ‘through his old paunch'. Armed with these muskets and with their faces blackened with charcoal and water, Howe's group then burst into a house in New Norfolk, terrifying the owner's wife, Mrs McCarthy, who scuttled under the table after one of them swore that they had not come to hurt anyone ‘except that damned whore Mrs M and she they would f—'. She was coaxed out of her hiding place to make tea.

The band answered to a thickset, black-bearded man dressed in kangaroo skins with a cap pulled tight over his eyes whom they called ‘Captain'. This was Howe. He had an Aboriginal girl with him, ‘Black Mary', and spoke of escaping to India.

Howe later returned to the same farm and this time soldiers from the 46th Regiment were waiting. They opened fire in the dark, fatally injuring one of Howe's men who staggered towards him crying ‘Take my watch!' – a prearranged code for Howe to cut off his head so that no one would claim the reward. (Howe carried the head around for a time in a bloodied handkerchief, the decapitation taking place, according to one account, ‘before life was extinct'. It was found in the bush two years later.)

Because of Howe, the island was now in a ‘Most Wretched State of Disorganisation, Anarchy and Confusion'. A letter written to Davey in what appeared to be blood claimed that Howe had an informer in Davey's camp who told him everything. Howe taunted that he ‘could set the whole country on fire with one stick', and Davey's fear was that convicts could be tempted to join the bushrangers and create a challenge to his rule, forcing the settlers to give in.

It could not have been a more opportune time for Kemp to arrive in Hobart. Anxious to encourage the right sort of settler who would bring security to the interior and make it ‘more safe and commodious for travellers', Davey greeted the earlier northern commandant with open arms. Tucked inside a letter to Potter, I find a faded copy of the grant which gives the bankrupt Kemp 800 acres and four convict workers and appoints him a magistrate.

 

Kemp acted swiftly to exercise the authority that, as a bankrupt, he had fraudulently received. He agreed with Davey: lenity towards villains like Howe was ‘ill-applied', and he urged the Lieutenant Governor to increase the bounty on their heads. A sum of 520 guineas was raised from ‘prominent citizens', but this only provoked the bushrangers to further attacks. In July, Davey was alarmed enough to show Kemp another letter, written on a page torn from a stock-book and signed by the ‘Lieutenant Governor of the Woods', warning that if Davey's ‘Blood Hunters' came into his territory, Howe would force ‘meatballs' down their throats. To make his point, Howe led two raids on Davey's farm on the Coal River. In the first he ‘borrowed' the Lieutenant Governor's dictionary, as well as filling a knapsack with wine, sugar and green tea (he was sick, he said, of drinking black tea); in the second, Davey's convict servants were ordered to join in a Yuletide drink ‘or they would be shot for Christmas'. These threats were not idle: Howe once shot a man for speaking Irish.

In the summer of 1817 there was a breakthrough when soldiers disguised in civilian clothing surprised Howe and Black Mary in the bush north of Kemp's grant. Howe ran off and Mary tried to keep up, but fell back – rumour had it she was pregnant. When Howe turned round, he saw the soldiers closing in and fired, wounding Mary in the arm. He afterwards claimed to Kemp that he was aiming at her pursuers. Mary, however, was persuaded that Howe had tried to kill her, and agreed to help the soldiers track down her lover. A month later, Howe gave himself up and for the next few days Kemp interrogated him.

Howe's story, published in 1818 in a limited edition of 100 copies, is considered the first work of literature to be printed in Australia. Sadly, records of Kemp's interrogation of Howe and Black Mary were lost when Davey sent his papers to England. All I could learn was that Howe's depositions were ‘voluminous and tedious'. Also lost was the ‘dream journal' – a small notebook with a crude wrapping of kangaroo hide that was discovered in Howe's knapsack, and which Kemp may have read. The entries were written in kangaroo and possum blood with the assistance of Davey's dictionary, and recorded Howe's nightmares: of being murdered by Aborigines, of meeting the man whose head he had cut off, of his sister in England. The diary also contained lists of flowers, seeds and plants, copied down from a gardening book he had stolen. They persuaded the playwright William Moncrieff that Howe had intended to turn his mountain retreat into a rustic Yorkshire garden. ‘Aye, I like flowers,' dreams an unlikely Howe in Moncrieff's
Van Diemen's Land
. ‘I'll set some round our cave … give me those roses, those violets too, they smell so sweet and fresh; they mind me of my home, when our cottage had a jessamine.'

Howe's most startling revelations concerned Kemp's fellow magistrate, the Reverend Robert Knopwood, a conspicuous figure who rode about town on a white horse. Howe insinuated that the clergyman, one of the first settlers in Hobart, had been a prominent member of his gang, and that Knopwood had often received Howe at his house in Hobart – and had even tried to seduce the wife of one of Howe's confederates.

The allegations were so serious that Davey ordered Kemp to investigate. Kemp summarised his ruling principle of justice as ‘decide first and try afterwards'. He recognised a kindred spirit in the priest, a zealous flogger and a man fond of drink and swearing, who had squandered his £90,000 inheritance at the gambling table. Unable to reach any other verdict owing to the fact that vital papers relating to the case had mysteriously disappeared, Kemp concluded that Howe's allegations were ‘wholly unfounded'. Knopwood, on his part, understood that he owed Kemp a favour.

In the same week, Kemp had the ‘high satisfaction' of announcing ‘the nearly total destruction' of the bushrangers – convincing evidence that ‘the displeasure of a Supreme Being' had been at work, and an outcome, he added, that afforded ‘a striking instance of retributive justice'.

HOBART TOWN, WHERE KEMP DECIDED TO MAKE HIS HOME, WAS
then the southernmost settlement in the world and yet it resembled in the opinion of practically every early visitor ‘a country village in England'. In the aftermath of the decades-long French wars there were plenty of English looking to emigrate and to take advantage of the government's offer of free land. Would-be settlers could apply for land in proportion to their ‘means to bring the same into cultivation'. A free man who brought with him £500 received a grant of 640 acres. Settlers – many of them, like Kemp, claiming fictitious capital – soon outnumbered bushrangers. When Kemp had left Port Dalrymple in 1807, the population of Europeans on the island was 3,240. The figure had doubled by the time of his return eight years later.

Within 18 months of Kemp's arrival, the town had grown one mile long and half a mile wide with a population of 1,200. It contained 300 houses, most of them single-storeyed and situated at some distance apart. The land between them was planted with briar hedges, rose bushes, geraniums and vines. Hobart's vegetables were ‘remarkably fine', observed Lieutenant Jeffreys, ‘comprising all those reared in an English kitchen garden'. The air was fragrant with local wattle and eucalyptus, and a stream of fresh water ran down through the centre, right past Kemp's red brick cottage on Collins Street. For all the tranquil village life veneer, Kemp's wife and four youngest children looked out over their garden fence at a fairly violent frontier society. The policemen went about barefoot and public hangings took place in full view of the wharf – on one occasion in a single morning 10 men were executed. The gibbeted bodies, according to the
Hobart Town Gazette
, ‘became Objects of Disgust especially to the Female sex', and in June 1816 the place of execution was moved two miles away to Queenborough (now the site of the Wrest Point Casino in Sandy Bay).

Kemp's grant lay 30 miles north of Hobart. Despite his bravado, bushrangers made it ‘too dangerous' for him to inhabit his property, and so he decided to use Potter's wealth to create, in effect, a parody of Potter's world. He mortgaged the land against a building in Macquarie Street where, three months after stepping ashore, he opened a ramshackle store in collaboration with a former convict transported for stealing an eyeglass. In a letter he assured Potter: ‘I have given a person a share in the concern who is a complete man of business.' In July 1817, the
Gazette
carried adverts for Potter's hogsheads of tobacco, Potter's brandy, Potter's Souchong teas – ‘to be sold on a liberal Credit'. Potter never saw a penny.

Kemp's store in Macquarie Street was not quite Aldgate but he endeavoured to make it so. By 1820, Kemp controlled 80% of the spirits landed in Hobart and, according to one pained official, ‘nearly all the Rum in the colony'. There was an unflagging appetite for his merchandise. Van Diemen's Land had been linked with alcohol from the moment the First Fleet came in sight of its south coast: ‘As soon as we saw the land we drank each 2 bumpers of claret,' wrote a sailor on January 7, 1788. The first European to be buried near our future home at Swansea was Thomas Hooley, a convict servant who drank the best part of a gallon of rum and then fell to the ground quite dead, having suffered, according to the inquest, ‘a visitation of God'. A tradition of unusually heavy drinking entrenched itself under Lieutenant Governor Davey. ‘He did not mind who the Devil governed,' a contemporary said, ‘so long as he got his Bottle & Glass.' Davey's formidable consumption left a bequest. It was the ‘greatest regret' of Lieutenant Governor George Arthur that duty on Kemp's spirits accounted for more than half the state's income, and remained the main source of revenue until well into the nineteenth century. ‘The place is quite unsuited to sober people,' believed Edward Braddon, a settler from India. Hobart was a town of pubs. Minutes after coming ashore in 1847, the evolutionist Thomas Huxley found himself ‘stuck' at the Ship Inn, ‘imbibing considerable quantities of toddy'. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he married the daughter of a local brewer.
⁴

As he had in Sydney, Kemp kept the colony supplied with: ‘Port wine in pipes', ‘Jamaica rum in puncheons', ‘cognac brandy in hogsheads', ‘French liqueurs in cases', ‘sweet wine in quartercasks'. He guarded his monopoly with a mixture of greed and flammability. He overcharged customers and lent money at 42% interest. He boarded ships without permission, saying he would do so ‘when and where he pleased'. He demanded that the Governor put an immediate end to the very practice that he himself pioneered in Sydney – paying for labour with spirits. The only magistrate to own a pub, he invoked the law to protect his interests. When a rival merchant accused him of acting ‘like a peddlar', he sent him to prison.

Truculent, intolerant, inconsistent, Kemp exemplified the transition from rollicking empire-founding to the humbug of empire-ruling. In August 1817, sitting as magistrate, he rounded on his creditors with the same spleen that he had gone after bushrangers. While in Aldgate, Potter wrote yet another despairing letter (referring his brother-in-law ‘to my letters No 1, 2 & 3'), Kemp placed announcements in the
Hobart Town Gazette
warning he would sue his debtors unless they settled instantly. Astonishingly, Kemp brought one action to recover twelve crowns. He would not have noticed the symmetry: it was the same sum for which he had fled England as an 18-year-old.

His father had died while Kemp was sailing to Hobart, but Kemp's antagonism to anyone who reminded him of his upright parent never diminished. He treated all in authority with ‘Wicked and Foul abuse', beginning with Davey who had to evict him from Government House because of his ‘extreme rudeness'. When the next Governor rode past him in the street, Kemp refused to take off his hat and laughed at him. His attitude to successive Governors was that they were all ‘equally bad'.

On December 4, 1819, Potter wrote his last letter to Kemp. ‘In every letter I have requested to know if you receiv'd a Copy of your Father's will, mourning ring, etc etc … to these repeated questions I have not as yet got an answer.'

He directed his son up a ladder to remove all evidence of Kemp. Up went: ‘William Potter & Son'.

I can see him hesitate as he begins to clear Kemp's papers from his desk. Endings are always difficult. The end of a failed business is like the end of a failed love affair, charged with the same nostalgia and sadness. Perhaps unrequited love is not so far from the unrequited loan.

He stores the letters away.

Potter without Kemp eventually peters out. As Potter muses to his son: ‘An Englishman fails because he fears he shall and is continually stumbling over the shadow his fancy raises.' Potter's son lives faithfully by his maxims and rises to become Master of the Vintners Company, where I find an entry in the minutes book commending him for ‘his able and zealous discharge of the duties of his office and for his kindness and courtesy on all occasions'. But these qualities, on their own, are not enough to save the business and the family moves to Birmingham, where my grandmother – the last of the Potters – was born.

And Kemp without Potter?