In Tasmania Read online

  I first read of Hobart at my prep school in a novel about the end of the world written by a former pupil, Nevil Shute. In On the Beach, a Melbourne scientist evokes the creeping spread of radiation following a nuclear war. ‘After we’re gone, Tasmania may last another fortnight’ – although life would still be on earth in the form of rabbits. Faced with impending catastrophe, one character muses: ‘Say I was to move to Hobart …’

  Hobart was considered out of reach of nuclear fallout but also of God. In its direst days as a penal colony, the Irish rebel John Mitchel refused to let his daughter be baptised here, not ‘till she reaches Christendom’. A perception lingers even to this day that Tasmania floats in a latitude outside the jurisdiction of normal religious and civic laws.

  Tasmania may have been the last place that Iranian bounty-hunters considered looking for him, but until 2001 a Salman Rushdie in drag would have risked arrest under the 1935 Police Offences Act which made it an offence for a man to be seen in a public place dressed up as a woman between sunset and sunrise. Homosexuality was illegal until 1997 and the crime of blasphemy still carried a prison sentence of 21 years. But under the premiership of Jim Bacon (1998–2004) many antiquated laws were scrapped, and the state now boasted legislation that was the most liberal in Australia. ‘Lesbian Love Bus Triangle’ was the Hobart Mercury’s headline on the day after the Madrid bombing in March 2004.

  Something about Tasmania nonetheless continued to give the impression that it was an outpost, a little like Tangiers, where you went when everything went wrong: when you killed your nanny, when the Ayatollah delivered a death sentence, or when you could not find the right therapist. ‘I owe a lot to good therapy,’ said an English celebrity interviewed in Hello!. ‘I probably wouldn’t be here without it. I’d weigh about 400 pounds and be living in Tasmania.’ The island still had a reputation as the kind of place where fugitives of one kind or another, who wanted nothing more than to disappear, washed up. ‘Marilyn’s love child in Tassie’ – so began an article about how Marilyn Monroe’s 43-year-old daughter – ‘the result of a brief affair with a musician’ – was living as a recluse under the name Nancy Greene. Tasmania was a promise of anonymity. Louisa Meredith, whose family once owned our land, was told by the nineteenth-century naturalist Joseph Jukes that he had decided to omit Tasmania altogether from his travel book because ‘no one will read what anyone may write about it’. Among those who had also bought property on our same beach were the spy catcher Peter Wright, who spent his last years in Tasmania; a woman running away from her husband who used to answer to Sue, but now to Ellen; a solicitor who had defrauded his clients; and a lesbian couple, escapees from the rat race who had started a café already famous for its lemon tarts.

  Another local, so it is said, was Lord Lucan, who for ten months rented a two-bedroom cottage on a farm, Glen Gala, five miles from our Swansea home. Pleased to discover that he shared my fondness for fishing at the mouth of the Swan River, I asked his landlady what truth there was in the Launceston Examiner story entitled ‘Did Lord Lucan live in Tassie?’

  Patricia Greenhill has a frank, reliable face. She had never heard of Lord Lucan, nor about the murder of his children’s nanny, when in July 1992 a figure rode up on an old yellow bicycle saying that he was looking for a quiet place to rent where he could write a book. She recalled a man in his battered late fifties – tallish build, clear face, brown hair going grey and nails that were always clean. ‘Obviously he’d never had to look after himself much – and yet he didn’t have anything in the way of possessions. He wore ordinary clothes and was living on unemployment benefit.’ He had come to Glen Gala after staying in Swansea at the Oyster Bay Guest House, at the time run by our electrician, Mike Tierney. Mike arrived home after being away awhile to find a hole in his supply of alcohol and ‘James’, as he called himself, smelling of whisky, dear boy, lots of it, dear boy. The next day, James bicycled down the road and rented the cottage at Glen Gala. Patricia said: ‘It was really hard to get a tenant, and so I was pleased to leave him alone. When he came to pay rent, he’d walk over in the middle of the day, always when no-one else was about. He was very private, but he’d sometimes sit and have a sherry, and talk in a posh voice about trout fishing, and volunteer information about his fishing gear at home in England. So I lent him a rod and he used to go to a creek and catch some small ones.’

  Mike had intended to employ him as washer-up, but one day in 1993 he left without a word. Patricia found the cottage in a hideous mess.’ He’d vacuumed up water with the Hoover and there were carpet burns.’

  ‘How do you know it was him?’

  The editor of the Examiner had sent a photograph of Lord Lucan taken in 1967. Patricia said: ‘I’m sure it was him. I was later even more convinced when I read somewhere how Lord Lucan behaved in South Africa. It was the same behaviour.’

  I dropped my wife off at the dentist and went for a walk in Hobart. Opposite the cathedral is the hotel where Roald Amundsen was initially refused entry after returning from his journey to the South Pole. ‘Treated as a tramp, my peaked cap and blue sweater – given a miserable little room,’ he wrote in his diary. Residents of Sandy Bay had waved ships off to the icecap for a century. They were not thunderstruck by Amundsen’s achievement so much as irritated by the barking of his sledge dogs. Even today, there is something unimpressable about the people of Hobart, as if there is nothing they have not witnessed, no eventuality for which they have not, at some time, prepared themselves – including a Russian invasion. Fortifications, erected in panic after the Crimean War, are to be found up and down the Derwent River, at Sandy Bay, Tinderbox, Rosny Hill, the Cenotaph, Bellerive. But despite the presence of these curious stone battlements, Hobart feels more like an English market town than a nervous outpost on the rim of the world. Mark Twain, on a lecture tour in 1895, thought it ‘the neatest town that the sun shines on; and I incline to believe that it is also the cleanest.’ This was still true: I could not stop marvelling at the clarity of the sunlight. Mainlanders put the transparency down to the frazzled ozone layer, but whatever the cause, the light was so clear and over-exposed that there seemed no gauze between it and the first settlers.

  If my enthusiasm seemed over-the-top, it was well supported by earlier tourists. In 1830, Elizabeth Fenton, recently arrived from India, stood on her balcony in the Macquarie Hotel and rhapsodised over the stars and clear atmosphere in which, she thought, the planets not only shone with the intensity of moons but appeared to cast a shadow. Some visitors had the eerie impression that they inhabited a painting. ‘In Van Diemen’s Land, almost every landscape is a watercolour,’ remarked Mrs Roxburgh in Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves. On his arrival in 1823, the more often sceptical colonial auditor George Boyes wrote in his diary that ‘all language … must be inadequate to describe the general effect’. In a letter to his wife he lost himself in superlatives. The Derwent was ‘the most magnificent thing I have ever seen’, and he went on about its ‘perfect forms … forms that till lately I thought were nowhere to be found but in the imagination of the painter’. In 1873, Harry Benjafield, a Baptist medic from the village next to ours in England, was recommended to go to Tasmania by his own doctor, who told him: ‘Hobart is the most beautiful place in the world. If there is a heaven upon earth it is Hobart.’ Among those fleetingly tempted to settle was Agatha Christie, who paid a visit with her husband in 1922. ‘Incredibly beautiful Hobart, with its deep blue sea and harbour, and its flowers, trees, and shrubs. I planned to come back and live there one day.’

  A century earlier, the 26-year-old naturalist Charles Darwin was likewise affected. His survey ship Beagle docked here on its way from Sydney. ‘If I was obliged to emigrate I certainly should prefer this place: the climate & aspect of the country almost alone would determine me.’ Eighteen years on, unable to get Hobart out of his head, he wrote to his friend, the botanist William Hooker: ‘I am always building veritable castles in the air about emigrating & Tasmania has been my headq
uarters of late, so that I feel very proud of my adopted country.’

  During eleven days in Hobart in February 1836, Darwin found 63 new species of insect, including a gall-forming wasp. He also made the obligatory five-hour climb of Mount Wellington, as I did on my first visit.

  Hobart’s omnipresent mountain – in stern command of every street – is a volcano that has not yet erupted, created from a massive dolerite injection up through and into the older rocks. I had been too busy gaping at the view of the Derwent to register the layers of Ferntree Mudstone at my feet, or the brachiopod fossils that transported Darwin 260 million years to a period when Tasmania was not an island. Now that I was living here I had become more curious, but Tasmania’s age was a vast thing to absorb, and I had to perform a schoolboy’s crude algebra to put the presence simply of Homo sapiens into context. Suppose a human life to span 70 years, 30 lifetimes took me to the time of Jesus. The oldest human habitation in Tasmania is estimated at 40,000 years, or 572 lifetimes. I thought back half a lifetime to an afternoon in Oxford and a timid man lining up this number of boys for the school photograph.

  It was Professor Pat Quilty, a geologist at the University of Tasmania with a base in Antarctica, who gave me a perspective on the geological record. ‘I try to get students to think about time, 4,500 million years of it, about 30% of the age of the universe by the latest estimates. The oldest rocks of Tasmania didn’t form until about 80% of earth’s history had passed.’ Right up until 160 million years ago, Tasmania was part of a supercontinent, now referred to as Gondwana, and situated much further north. Quilty drew a chart that indicated Tasmania’s position as it nuzzled between Australia and Patagonia. Tasmania had then waltzed south at seven centimetres a year and gradually fragmented from the supercontinent. Ice formed in the space that opened up to the south, creating Antarctica.

  But what sprang off the page was the situation of Hobart 600 million years ago. It was more than eight degrees north of the Equator. ‘The farther we go back in time, the farther north it is,’ Quilty said. ‘Australia was near the North Pole at 1.6 billion years.’

  It heartened me to think that Tasmania at one time existed where Africa now is, since I frequently had to correct people who believed this still to be the case. An early Lieutenant Governor, George Arthur, was so enthusiastic about its location – midway between India and South America – that he was confident ‘it must become the Alexandria of these seas’. Its present position confused the National Geographic: commissioned by the magazine to write an article on Tasmania, I received an email to thank me for my piece on Tanzania.

  Darwin compared in his diary ‘the older strata at Hobart Town and the bottom of the sea near T. del Fuego’. I knew Tierra del Fuego from when I lived in Argentina. The similarities I had observed on a trek along the Overland Trail had a geological explanation. Near Cradle Mountain botanists had dug up fossils of conifer, Fitzroya tasmanensis, of which the only living examples were in Chile. Quilty told me that some of the flora I may have noticed in the Andes were to be found elsewhere only in Tasmania – notably southern beech and leatherwood – and that insects like the Tasmanian cave spider were the sole family known outside Chile. ‘And they recently found a platypus tooth in Patagonia that’s 100 million years old.’

  Tierra del Fuego broke away from the South American continent at the time that Tasmania moved south of the Australian mainland, becoming a sanctuary for flora and fauna. This is what had excited Darwin. But what no-one knew until the Beagle docked in Hobart was that for the first three decades following British settlement Tasmania also existed in its own time zone.

  A chance remark by the poet Andrew Sant led me to look up a Hobart periodical, the issue of Bent’s News for March 5, 1836 – and there I read a little-known story that, to me, shed light on an aspect of Tasmania’s character. While Darwin was chiselling out 260-million-year-old fossils on Mount Wellington, two officers from the Beagle with less to do politely offered to check the town clocks using their chronometers. Heckscher, the ‘first-rate machinist’ in charge of the city’s three clocks, had worked for the Emperor of Russia, and was delighted to show off his trusted machines to Captain Fitzroy and Lieutenant Stokes. What they discovered astonished them. The town was faster than the Beagle by one minute 45 seconds. For its first 33 years, the established position of Hobart, given as 43 degrees by six south, 147 by 38 east, was incorrect by 27 miles.

  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’:

  Identity deleted,

  Close to the Continent,

  Who wouldn’t make a fuss?

  There have been wars for less …

  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.