In Tasmania Read online

  Until 9,000 years ago, Tasmania was connected to the Australian mainland, but at the end of the last Ice Age melt from the glaciers swamped the land bridge, on the other side halting species such as the dingo and koala at the water’s edge. Tasmania became an ark, and with one or two exceptions a very extraordinary animal and plant life was left to develop. The world’s oldest living organism, King’s Holly or Lamatia tasmanica, has grown on the south coast without interruption for 40,000 years.

  Van Diemen’s Land’s most notable historian, the Victorian clergyman John West, would by and large still recognise ‘the parklike lands, the brilliant skies, the pure river and the untainted breath of morning’. The roads are superbly deserted, but at night they teem with strange nocturnal creatures: wombats, wallabies, quolls, Tasmanian devils and the ubiquitous possum – plus three varieties of snake that are all lethal. In the fierce light of the Tasmanian day, the emptiness of the landscape can sting with a melancholy that is unbearable. You never forget that the enchanted isle is also a haunted one, the last habitat of the Tasmanian tiger as well as of the Tasmanian Aborigines who knew it as Trowenna. Innumerable lakes throw back the doubles of huge eucalypts with a brilliance that can make their reflections appear more solid even than the trees themselves. The upheld arms of dead white ghost-gums stand in for a vanished population and the shrieks of yellow-tailed black cockatoos are said to be the lament of dead Aboriginal children. ‘They had gone,’ writes the Tasmanian author and journalist Martin Flanagan, ‘in the way that party guests are said to have gone and left a house feeling oddly empty.’

  What you also notice about the landscape is that, despite the desecration caused by overlogging, it is free from pollution. The Roaring Forties, after blowing unimpeded from Cape Horn, smack at full tilt into the west coast. The result: Tasmania has the purest air in the world as well as some of its cleanest rainwater.

  Much of the island’s western half remains a protected wilderness of mountains, impenetrable rainforest and torrential rivers. A sailor told a newcomer who arrived a century ago: ‘In half that wilderness no man has put foot since time began.’

  The majority of the population of just under half a million live in the southern capital Hobart and in Launceston in the north. Between these rival cities, the central plateaux, which the Tasmanians call tiers, are dotted with Georgian-style houses and churches set amid orchards and open farmland.

  The east coast is fringed with bright white beaches and small inlets and has a Caribbean aspect. It is not the ruined coastline of most countries, and it would probably have looked much the same on the blustery November morning in 1804 when Anthony Fenn Kemp floundered out of the water under the bemused eye of the native population.

  III

  THE MAN WHO CAME ASHORE WAS A 31-YEAR-OLD CAPTAIN IN the New South Wales Corps. He was a vigorous entrepreneur with a spot of charisma, and a great survivor. He became in fits and starts ‘the Father of Tasmania’.

  Anthony Fenn Kemp, the son of a prominent wine and tobacco merchant, was born in London in 1773. After a brief spell working in the family business in Aldgate, he travelled to France in 1791 during the French Revolution. What he experienced turned him into a republican. His political sympathies hardened in the following year when he went to Charleston in South Carolina and met George Washington.

  In 1793 he bought a commission, and in 1795 sailed to Port Jackson – as Sydney then was – probably in the same ship as George Bass and Matthew Flinders, both of whom also left their mark. Within a very few years, these two explorers would prove that Van Diemen’s Land was an island.

  Kemp served for two years in Norfolk Island, but no record exists of his time there. By 1797, he was again in Port Jackson where he would become paymaster of his infantry company and later treasurer of the whole regiment. Like most of his fellow officers he was engaged in trade and in 1799 he opened a store on the north-east corner of King and George Street. He was a familiar and tyrannical figure in early Sydney, and had his finger in most pies. In September 1802, aboard a visiting French corvette, the Naturaliste, he was received into the grade of Antient Masonry: the first lodge known to have been convened in Australia.

  Kemp’s dealings with the French put him in a position to alert his commanding officer, Colonel Paterson, of a plan to claim Van Diemen’s Land, largely ignored by Europeans since Tasman’s original visit of 1642. Startled by the rumour, Governor King of New South Wales directed an expeditionary force of 49 soldiers, free settlers and convicts to forestall the French and set up camp at Risdon, on the east bank of the Derwent River in the south of the island. A few months later, King ordered Paterson to establish a settlement at Port Dalrymple (so named by Matthew Flinders in 1798) in the north.

  Four ships sailed from Sydney in June 1804, but gales blew them back. They set out again in October. On board were 181 people: 64 soldiers and marines (and 20 wives), 74 convicts (and two wives), 14 children, and seven officers – including Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp, second-in-command.

  IV

  ONE HUNDRED AND NINETY-FIVE YEARS LATER, I LOOK OUT OVER a strip of emerald boobyallas onto a deserted nine-mile beach. Through a glass wall of window, I can see a dorsal of pinkish granite jutting into the Tasman Sea. Below the house, there is a fenced-off garden planted with fruit trees, and a tin shed where I work.

  One day I open a bag filled with letters which my father had given me at his house in England, and which he had unearthed from the basement of my grandmother’s house. Her father had left the letters to her and she had never, as far as my father knew, read them. My grandmother was by now 96.

  ‘I believe we may have a relative who went to Tasmania in the nineteenth century,’ my father said. ‘A bit of a black sheep.’

  That was the first I had heard of a Tasmanian relative and I did not really take it in. The bag remained unopened for several months.

  The thick plastic was the colour of old toenail – and the contents smelled of rotten vegetable, not quite fermented but earthy. The first thing I took out was a loose slip of paper, a cheque made out in 1815 against ‘Kemp & Potter, brandy and tobacco merchants’. Potter was my grandmother’s name and I remembered that our family had, long ago, been involved in the drinks trade. But the name Kemp meant nothing to me. Nor had my grandmother heard of the Kemps. All she remembered her father telling her was that the papers had belonged to a ‘black sheep’ in the family who had gone to New South Wales.

  Also in the bag was a bundle of about 30 letters written on stiff paper in the days before stamps. They were packed in chronological order: the first letter dated 1791, the last 1825. Occasionally they were signed with a woman’s name: Amy, Susanna, Elizabeth. But the bulk of the correspondence was between two men: William Potter and Anthony Fenn Kemp.

  Kemp’s letters to Potter were sent from Brazil, Cape Town, Sydney, Hobart. The ink had faded to umber, but the handwriting remained distinctively slanted, the words scratched forcefully onto the page, with exaggerated tails to certain letters. By contrast, Potter’s responses – all from an address in Aldgate – were written in a neat, upright hand, and he had made copies of his own replies, so providing both sides of their correspondence.

  I opened a red marbled business ledger dated March 25, 1789, the year of the French Revolution. The paper had the scent of nutmeg. On the first page, under the heading I Anthony Kemp being of Age have this day rec’d of Col John Arnott my guardian, there was a long list of what Kemp had inherited on his 16th birthday. It included properties in Surrey and central London, stocks and cash. Together it amounted to a fortune today worth several millions of pounds. I wondered what had become of it.

  Kemp was a very rich young man, but as I read more of the ledger it became clear that, despite his wealth, he had worked as an apprentice in his father’s business at 87 Aldgate, the site today of a branch of Boots the chemist. He appears to have had a pretty free hand in its affairs, though. While the ledger recorded Kemp the father tramping with his samples to Biggleswade and N
ewport Pagnell, Kemp the son was ordering hogsheads of rum from Antigua, pipes of port from Lisbon and fine shag from plantations in Maryland. Nor did he restrict himself to buying only tobacco and rum. The purchases mounted until they culminated in the outfitting of an entire boat, the Neptune Galley, to bring a cargo of cinnamon, cochineal, sugar and silk from Jamaica. Then suddenly the ledger ran out. One of the last entries was in the younger Kemp’s handwriting: ‘June 14, 1789 … lost by betting at an horse race £15.10’.

  It transpired that Kemp had run through his inheritance in two years. By 1791, he could not repay twelve crowns to a man called Page, instead organising for ‘a very shabby insolent low-bred woman’ to march into Page’s favourite London coffee house and ‘utter impertinencies’ about him at the top of her voice. Page reported this incident in a letter to Kemp’s father, whose reaction was furious. He wrote to his son – who had, it appeared, undoubtedly wisely, absented himself from Aldgate – threatening to sue him unless he reflected upon the situation that ‘your early vice and infamy has placed you in’. Only if Kemp admitted to his ‘evil conduct’ and confessed his faults would he be welcome to return home to his father and mother. ‘If this overture is rejected, expect that I shall take speedy and effective public measures to prevent further injury.’

  One week later, a letter was brought to Aldgate by an attorney of Clement’s Inn. Its delivery had been delayed by order of Anthony Fenn Kemp until its author was safely across the Channel. Kemp’s handwriting shoves aside the centuries. ‘Hon. Sir and Madam, Behold my reply. At present I am not sensible of what distress is nor pray to God I ever shall and as to returning with compunction I hope when I do come I may.’

  On the envelope an unknown hand has scribbled ‘First elopement’. Kemp’s story was just beginning.

  The next letter was written on the day that he arrived in Calais and sent not to his father but to a friend called Frank. Kemp, clearly, was having a whale of a time, parading the streets in ‘a National Cockade’ and finding everything ‘very Cheap – a Partridge for Fourpence, a Hare for Sixpence, a bottle Burgundy 3/3, Champaigne 4/3’. He betrayed no symptom of wanting to return to Aldgate. ‘I receiv’d a letter from my Father the other day but couch’d in such high terms that I could not accede to them nor do not think I ever shall if I am so well off as I am at present.’ More attractive even than the low prices were the French women. ‘Every day here is high Mass perform’d where all the Fish Women assemble with Pettycoats up their thighs which make them cut a very droll figure. I hope before I leave the continent I shall pick up some Heiress.’ He asked Frank: ‘Pray remember me to all inquiring friends.’

  I riffled through the letters to find out what else Kemp got up to in France, but there was a gap of several years in the correspondence. The next letter I unfolded was dated March 1816 and the address was Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land.

  On our first afternoon, my wife and I had walked 300 yards to the beach. There was a hot equinoctial wind warming the sea and a clear sky over the hills above Swansea. We threw off our clothes and jumped into the surf and afterwards ran back to the house, startling a young wallaby on the path. It stared at us, then bounded off through the boobyallas, its feet thumping the warm sand with a sound like a heavy fruit dropping.

  I would go fishing for flathead at the mouth of the Swan River, where one evening I fell into conversation with an old fisherman who asked my name.

  ‘Shakespeare?’ He looked at me, excited, as if he doubted what he had heard. ‘Not Shakespeare? You couldn’t possibly be related to the family who make the fishing tackle?’

  I had never been interested in gardening before. For the first time in my life I planted seeds, bought trees, learned about mulching. I was bemused when I found myself, away from the garden, still wanting to dig.

  One day, at my desk in my shed with the bag of letters in front of me, I counted out the relationships that I had discovered: Potter, my great-great-great-grandfather; Kemp, my great-great-great-great-uncle. Their letters had revealed that they were more than business partners: they were brothers-in-law. To me, their story was about two ways of being in the world. On the one hand there was Kemp, roistering, opportunistic, peripatetic, corrupt. (The name Kemp, I found out, derived from a Saxon word meaning combat, competitive drinker, ‘a contemptible, rascally fellow’.) On the other was the sedentary, abstemious Potter.

  I was still going through their letters. In 1791, the 18-year-old Kemp was being groomed to take over the family firm. But after he left England, his father turned to William Potter, the man who had married Kemp’s elder sister Amy. He invited Potter to move into the Aldgate premises and granted him a third share of the business. On the death of Kemp senior, Potter took over the running of the firm. It had become ‘Kemp & Potter’.

  There are those who go to New South Wales and there are those who mind the store. Potter inched off the page – in his handwriting and in his character – as the opposite of his brother-in-law: a cautious, fussy, meticulous man, forever advising his family how to behave. The following pieces of advice all appeared in letters to his son: ‘Never play cards in Grantham or in any other place with strangers’ ‘Remember one above sees and knows all and will reward or punish as we deserve’ ‘Be careful at Brighton. It’s a rotten place.’ And – oddly (or perhaps not) for a man in the liquor business – there were various admonitions about drink. ‘Drink no more than you can help,’ he counselled; on the same theme, in a letter warning his son about which public houses in Ware were ‘safe’: ‘We must be very careful what we are about … the owner of the Little White Lion likes you to spend an hour with him in the evening, which calls for a bottle of wine which you may mix with water.’

  By contrast, his absentee partner out in Australia was peddling family connections with the rum trade for all they were worth. Or not worth, for Kemp’s letters – despite their charm – had revealed that he was a feckless businessman. He borrowed a vast sum from Potter, and never repaid it. He wrote out several cheques in the name of ‘Kemp & Potter’, which he never redeemed. His letters took up to 14 months to reach London and each and every one contained an excuse.

  I found it painful to observe Potter’s struggles to cope with Kemp’s escalating debts. ‘For 18 months I have had weekly applications from one or another of your creditors for the amount of bills made payable at our house,’ and yet ‘not a farthing has arrived [from Kemp], which I am much astonished at.’ Not even nineteenth-century etiquette can disguise his frustration. ‘I do not consider “Kemp & Potter” has anything to do with it. I am now completely sick of shipping goods to you.’

  Yet Potter could not cut off his brother-in-law. I could imagine him sitting at night at his mahogany double-desk, wearing a calico nightcap. I could feel his sense of responsibility, born of duty, blood, grudging envy and just enough imagination to believe in his brother-in-law’s schemes.

  I was in my shed one morning when I heard a scratching in the ceiling. The noise ceased the moment I crawled into the attic, but something was rotten in the roof, and a putrid smell and pyramids of chewed cardboard suggested that possums or bush rats had nested in boxes stacked with the previous owner’s red and yellow moodscapes. I telephoned Helen, from whom we had bought the house. She did not care what I did with the boxes. At her suggestion I contacted Peter, a builder, who agreed to take them to the tip as well as to get rid of the animals. A month later, Peter had not turned up. The smell had sharpened, and when I telephoned him again he promised to call by soon.

  I did wonder if I would ever see him. A hundred years before, a local vicar warned the newly arrived Anglican Bishop, Henry Montgomery, to watch out for ‘the languor which here soon attacks, as a dry rot, most works of all kinds after they have settled down’.

  Before Peter could come, my wife woke up with a toothache. It got worse, so I drove her to a dentist in Hobart. The two-hour drive along the coast took us through the county of Glamorgan, to Pembroke, to Buckingham, through countryside eeri
ly similar to that of where we had lived in England: Georgian sandstone houses with deep windows – fingertip to ankle; rose gardens and wicket fences; names like Kelvedon and Lisdillon and Bust-Me-Gall Hill. ‘The Tasmanians in their loyalty are all English mad,’ wrote Anthony Trollope, who was tempted to ‘pitch my staff’ here permanently – he liked in particular the mulberry jams. And yet we were most certainly not in England. Though the landscape might resemble an English nobleman’s park, beyond the bourgeois topiaries there was sadness. Anyone with ambition, I had been told, followed the example of Errol Flynn, who got out as soon as he could. Young Tasmanians took their leaving as a rite of passage. The old and the very young were left behind.

  V

  TASMANIA’S CAPITAL IS A TIDY, UNSELFCONSCIOUS PORT WHOSE water rocks with smooth reflections of white sails, bright façades and a dramatic barn-shaped mountain. (‘My predominant recollection is of its apples, its jams, its rose-cheeked girls,’ wrote Errol Flynn in My Wicked, Wicked Ways.) Once the most southerly city in the world and the final port of call for Antarctic explorers, Hobart seems more deserving than Auckland of Kipling’s line: ‘Last, loneliest, loveliest, exquisite, apart …’ In 1889, Henry Montgomery’s first reaction on learning that he had been appointed Bishop to Hobart was to dash to an atlas to see where it was.