The Road to McCarthy (24 page)

By 1848 Mitchel was predicting imminent revolution. He wrote an open letter to his fellow Ulster Protestants saying that it was not “popery and papists” that were the problem, but “tenure of the land.” He made increasingly fiery attacks on the British government, in a deliberate attempt to provoke them into retaliation. Troops were sent to Dublin, and Mitchel, Meagher and O’Brien were arrested on charges of seditious libel. O’Brien and Meagher were tried in Dublin and acquitted; at which point the British government came up with Plan B. A new law, the Treason-Felony Act, was rushed through parliament, making it an offense even to express the opinion that the British Crown might one day relinquish power in Ireland. Mitchel was convicted and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. On May 28 he was taken to Cobh, where he spent four days on Spike Island and signed autographs for the locals. On June 1 he embarked for Bermuda, en route to Van Diemen’s Land.

Britain suspended the Act of Habeas Corpus in Ireland. With warrants out for their arrest, Meagher and O’Brien went on the run. O’Brien, however, was not temperamentally suited to armed struggle. Arriving at a country police station one night with a few supporters, he demanded that the five officers inside give up their arms. “But if we surrender to so small a force,” pleaded the officer in charge, “we will surely be dismissed and our families will starve.” Unwilling to condemn fellow Irishmen to such a fate, O’Brien agreed to go away and come back later with thirty men. “That wouldn’t look so bad for us,” said the constable. O’Brien returned to an empty police station.

Matters came to a head in the village of Ballingarry, near Clonmel in South Tipperary, on July 29. O’Brien was behind a barricade with a crowd of about 200 people when a column of police approached, then disappeared into the back lanes. Word came back that they had commandeered a cottage belonging to the Widow McCormack and had barricaded themselves in. The Young Irelanders surrounded the cottage, with the five children
who lived there still inside. When the widow returned from an ill-timed errand to find guns pointing out through her cottage windows, O’Brien escorted her through the cabbage patch to a window so she could ask after the kids. “Give up your arms,” he told the police, “we will not hurt you.” Policemen shook his hands through the window; but then stones were thrown from the rebels’ side, shots were fired in response and two rebels lay dead.

O’Brien was ridiculed in the London press for “creeping away among the cabbages.” Disguised, though not very convincingly, in an old cloak, he was arrested at Thurles station by a railway guard. When police tried to take him to Dublin the train driver refused to start up the engine, and had to be persuaded to do so by an officer holding a gun to his head. Meagher, who had not been present at Widow McCormack’s, was arrested a week later.

The men were charged with high treason. Along with a number of their colleagues they were tried in Clonmel. Senior parliamentarians and a British army officer appeared for O’Brien as character witnesses, but to no avail. He, Meagher and two others were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered.

The sentences were greeted with uproar and widespread outrage. In June 1849 they were commuted to transportation for life. The men arrived in Hobart at the end of October. “The outline of this coast resembles much some parts of the Highlands of Scotland and the mountain regions of Ireland,” O’Brien wrote of his arrival.

It’s the beginning
of the southern winter, gray and cool with a spray of drizzle in the early morning air as I leave Hobart. Australians have been very skillful in projecting an image of a lucky country of perpetual sunshine where winter never happens, because they know it makes us unhappy, and it’s important for them to know that the Poms are miserable. Winter in Melbourne, however, can be a bleak experience, and here in Tasmania, with nothing but 2,000 miles of southern ocean to separate it from Antarctica, they say it can get quite draughty.

The trick, of course, is to leave Britain in midwinter and arrive down
here at the height of summer, which always feels like a miracle however many times you do it. This time I’ve opted for the miracle in reverse. After an apocalyptic winter of floods, foot and mouth and other disasters, followed by a complete absence of spring, hot summer days appeared without warning just as I was about to leave. No matter. That was always the plan. Like every other half-decent place in the world, Tasmania is experiencing a significant rise in the number of tourists, drawn here, it is believed, by promises of clean air, unspoiled beaches and wilderness hiking, rather than the allure of its deep, dark underbelly and hostility to all human life. I understand what Maureen was getting at, and metaphysical tourism is an interesting idea, but I can’t honestly see they’d generate the same kind of income by gearing their image to the Charles Manson niche market. I’ve chosen my month deliberately. I’ve come out of season, the visitors long gone, in the hope of getting closer to the great empty heart and the dark secret soul of the island; and if I can’t manage that, at least it’ll be easier to get a drink in the evenings.

It’s early-morning rush hour, and the radio’s on as I drive out of town.

“You know what it’s like, you’re at the footie on a Saturday afternoon and someone steals your lawn mower from your shed ….”

I’m in no rush and no one else seems to be either. Traffic is light, though for all I know this may qualify as gridlock in Hobart. It feels quite unlike the center of a capital city. Water keeps appearing in unexpected places, which is one of the best things about being in a harbor town, and goes some way to making up for the presence of all those yachties. I find myself looking at the other drivers and envying their lives in such an unpressured environment. “Australia’s Natural State,” proclaim the license plates, a reference to the wilderness which covers half of the landmass. The state also lays claim to the freshest air in the world. Everywhere in my hotel was nonsmoking, even the balconies. One day Tasmania could become the world’s first nonsmoking island, and smokers will have to get the ferry to Melbourne if they want to stand in a doorway and have a cigarette.

The old weatherboard houses are giving way to new exclusive developments of Executive Homes—do they refuse to sell you one if you work in a factory or a shop?—as I reach the outer fringes of the city. I’m by the water
again, and beyond it there are gum trees and empty hillsides as the road splits and I take the left fork to Strahan and the west. The drizzle has stopped but ahead of me I can see a wall of mist. Seconds later I’m enveloped in it. The mist, or cloud—or alien life form disguised as mist or cloud—is an opaque and eerie yellow in the muted sun. It rises in swirls from the surface of the lake or swamp, or alien life form’s mother disguised as lake or swamp. Gnarled branches reach out of the water like drowned men’s arms. It’s as if I’ve been transported into an episode of
The Twilight Zone
.

Half an hour from Hobart it’s dark as nightfall under a low, low sky. Annie Lennox is on the radio singing “Here Comes the Rain Again,” and you have the feeling it probably gets a lot of radio play. I saw her once on a deserted beach near Perth in Western Australia, sunbathing in a gold bikini surrounded by half a dozen minders. Annie, not me. I fell asleep in the sun and burned because when you’re traveling on your own there’s no one to put sunblock on your back. It peeled like cellophane. They’ve changed the record now.

Catchy.

A sign says I’m in the Central Highlands, and the town of Gretna. I pass the Gretna Green Hotel on my left. A sign outside a shop says mrs. mack’s famous beef pies. A couple of hundred yards up the road a woman appears out of the science-fiction mist, walking along the side of the road towards me. She’s wearing a light blue tracksuit top, a long black pleated skirt and trainers, and is carrying a pie on a silver tray. What can it mean? Is it Mrs. Mack herself, in training for the Central Highlands pie marathon? The atmosphere is getting denser, as if the director has turned the smoke machine on again, and by the time I reach Hamilton the place is completely shrouded in B-movie fog. Through the gloom I can see beautiful old sandstone buildings with roofs of corrugated iron, a discordantly un-European detail that makes me feel as if I’m dreaming them. The mist rises for a moment,
and I catch sight of the Highland Pie Shop. What’s going on with all these pies? I remember
Titus Andronicus
and
Sweeney Todd
, and remember they have always been a traditional method of disposing of bodies.

This is the only road from east to west of the island but there are hardly any vehicles, apart from the occasional logging truck. As the nonexistent traffic becomes even more sparse, so the roadkill grows increasingly abundant. Furry casualties litter the road in oozing piles. Enormous orange-eyed birds stand defiantly astride the corpses, pecking out the tasty bits. I pass no other vehicle for ten minutes, yet count more than a dozen dead animals. That’s a hell of a strike rate. It seems statistically impossible. How can there be more roadkill than cars? Do people take detours to chase them and drive them down deliberately? Or are the beasts depressed and prone to suicide? Neither seems likely. It’s more probable that an evil genius is holed up in a big house in the forest conducting unspeakable experiments on wildlife, then ordering his minions to dump the bodies on the roads before the blood congeals. I read a magazine article in the hotel that reckoned Tasmanian hippies—ferals they call them out here—
make their shoes from the skin of roadkill
. How messy would that be? I turn a bend, negotiate the brow of a hill and disappear from view, knowing that as soon as I’m gone a bare-footed crustie will emerge from the bush and try a dead marsupial on for size.

There are few of the Aboriginal place names you find in the other states of Australia. Instead there are plenty of direct transpositions from Britain and Ireland: Bracknell, Lewisham, Glenelg, Kilorran. Other names are original and wonderfully subjective: Cape Grim, Snug, Mistaken Cape, Creepy Crawly Walk. I cross Black Bob’s Rivulet, named after that clever dog in the
Dandy
. By the time I reach Derwent Forest there’s no traffic, people or signs of habitation. Tall straight trees and ferns bigger than a big man line the roadside. Thick mists shroud the tops of the trees, and it’s pouring with rain. That’ll be why it’s called the rainforest then. People don’t always make the connection. They say they’re going on holiday to the rainforest in Costa Rica or Queensland or Brazil, which seems epic and glamorous, but then grumble when you ask what it was like.

“We didn’t get much of a tan. It rained all the time. It was horrible actually.”

That’s the time to tell them it’s been sunny at home, even if it hasn’t.

Radio reception is getting fainter but I can still pick up the lunchtime news. There’s a good alcohol-deterrent item, straight from the Australian College of Surgeons’ breast-growing school of reporting: “A Korean woman who cut off her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife while he was in a drunken stupor has admitted flushing it down the toilet so he couldn’t rush to hospital and have it sewn back on.”

Under the circumstances it’s hard to imagine him rushing anywhere. The report doesn’t explain why the woman might have done it. Perhaps it was a Saturday, he’d been to the footie, went for a few beers, got home late, someone had stolen the lawn mower from the shed while he was out and she decided
she’d just had enough!

I now seem to have been transported from
The Twilight Zone
into an episode of
The X Files
. The mist has partially lifted and I can see two huge silver tubes running up a hillside to two tall towers at the top. All that’s missing is the Smoking Man leaning against a tree, watching as government agents in protective suits run out, drug me and take me off to a bunker for interrogation. The road continues to rise and I can see five more of the sinister silver pipes running away across the increasingly bizarre landscape into infinity. Down in a gorge there’s a lot of electrical-generational pluggy gadgety-type stuff that, as you can see from this description, is a mystery to me. Then without warning the cloud lifts completely to reveal a blue sky and I’m alongside a crystal-clear deep blue high mountain lake. You certainly get your money’s worth in this place.

surveyor’s monument—500 metres, says a sign. It sounds ominous, at least for the surveyor. A little farther on there’s an arrow pointing off the road. power station museum, it says. I haven’t seen a tour bus or even another tourist all day, so it’s unlikely to be crowded, but I think I’ll give it a miss all the same. Here’s another one. bronte park, it claims. morning and afternoon teas. God knows where. It’s just wide-open wilderness in every direction. Perhaps you’re meant to sit by the sign and the emergency services
will helicopter in the scones and cream and jam. Maybe there are flares for you to set off to place your order, color-coded according to the kind of jam you’d prefer. You probably wouldn’t want to be too fussy.

The Laughing Jack Lagoon is behind me and Fourteen Mile Road is also history as I reach Derwent Bridge, which appears to be a small settlement of chalets, but no people. Ah, no, hang on. Two bemused-looking hitchhikers in quilted jackets and hats with comedy earflaps are standing outside the Wilderness Hotel holding a sign that says hobart. I don’t know if such a condition is recognized by the medical profession, but they appear to be suffering from Traffic Deprivation. They look as if they’ve been there so long they might have made the sign after Christmas dinner. I’d say their chances of being picked up by a vehicle before they’re picked clean by the wildlife are less than even.

The clouds are back and it’s raining again as I pass a sign that says welcome to the west coast, which seems a peculiar claim to make in a forest on top of a mountain with no imminent prospect of beach, pier or catch of the day. Bill’s Creek, Cardigan River, Raglan Creek, Snake Creek and the landscape is getting more and more unsettling the farther west we get. There are hundreds of dead trees on either side of the road. It looks like the scene of an epic battle, where some of the more vulnerable and sensitive trees have been picked on by the others. According to the map we’re not far from Queenstown.