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CHAPTER 1
IN OUR THIRD YEAR ON DOLPHIN SANDS, A FRIEND TELEPHONED from England. "Did you know you had a double in Tasmania?"
He had contacted directory enquiries and been put through to N. Shakespeare in Burnie on the north coast, who told him: "You got the wrong fella." In Argentina I had once met a Reynaldo Shakespeare, a photographer, but in four decades of wandering, I had never come across another Shakespeare with my initial. So I called him.
A young-sounding man answered. He was not put out to hear from me and the idea of meeting up appealed. "I'm pretty poor on the family side," he warned. "Not a family tree man."
A double is an invitation and a dare. I arranged to be in Burnie the following Sunday.
I found my namesake getting off a glittering black motorbike in the drive of a house behind the Old Surrey Road industrial estate. "I'm in trouble," he grinned through his visor. He had gone to Smithton "for a hoon", as he called his ride, and enjoyed himself so much – "no distraction, just concentrating on the road and what the machine's doing" – that he had lost track of time.
"I've only had him a week," he said.
"What is he?" I asked, feeling a stab of envy. I had never ridden on a motorbike, not even as a passenger.
"Suzuki 750 GSXF," he said, with great fondness, enunciating each syllable. His parents had been dead set against him buying it. His father had worked as an apprentice turner and lost four of his friends on motorbikes. Motorbikies were known widely in Tasmania as "temporary Australians".
"It does look fast," I said.
"Nah, good cheap little cruisy bike."
He took off his helmet and we shook hands. I looked into a decent, laid-back face, early thirties, framed by a thick black beard, brown eyes. I had no idea what he saw, but he knew well enough where I lived: he had installed the alarm for a house just down the road from us and had discussed with his wife buying a property there.
I asked, "What does the N stand for?"
"Nevin."
Nevin Shakespeare ran his own one-man electrical business. Blocking the steep drive was a red van with the Chandos portrait stamped on the doors and the logo "Shakespeare Electricals". Among his clients was the founder of the Delta Force, a New Yorker in his seventies who lived in Tasmania for his safety. "He killed two of his own men so as not to leave them wounded and once had Qaddafi in his crosshairs when orders came not to shoot." Nevin had rewired his home. But he was cutting back on residential work. "You're always chasing the money."
His wife came out to tell him that he was late and he introduced me to Laurelle, whom he had met at a hockey match – "while trying to get off with my sister," she said. Then their two sons: Garion, ten, and Martyn, six – both curious to see this interloper from England with a name like their Dad's.
"Does it interest you to know where you're from?" Nevin asked Garion.
"Not really."
Nevin had also invited his parents, Gavin and Gloria. Gavin so resembled my own father that when I introduced them to each other a few months later, my father leaned across the table and said: "I don't know what I look like, but you look like what I think I look like."
Gavin had a stronger grip on family history than his son. His grand-father James Shakespeare came from Staffordshire in the nineteenth century and was a bricklayer in Sydney. In 1959, he left the Australian mainland to work in the paper mill in Burnie, where Nevin was born.
"I'm darn pleased my parents didn't call me Bill," Nevin said.
"Were you teased?" I wanted to know. In the army, my father was addressed as "the effing swan of Avon", and at prep school I had had to endure everything from Shagspot to Shaggers.
"I was Shakey," Gavin said.
"I was Shakers, or Bill," Nevin said. "'Good day, Bill. Do you write many songs?' They say a lot of weird things here, a lot of misinformation. 'No,' I tell them, 'he wrote plays.'"
"Speaking of the plays," Gavin said. "I was the bottom of every class in English. It was my worst subject."
"Mine, too, pretty much," Nevin said. "That's been passed on. Comes from the bricklayer's side. Don't have to write anything. Just get the bricks level."
We discussed other family traits. Gavin's wife Gloria said, apropos of Nevin's youngest son: "He's a Shakespeare."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
Gloria said: "You never argue with him."
Gavin said: "My father wasn't interested in arguments."
"Nevin avoids arguments," Laurelle said.
"No, don't like confrontation," Nevin said.
"Something that can be settled in two minutes he lets drag on for two months, that's my pet hate."
"I'm with you," I said to Nevin. "I hate arguments."
Then Gavin remembered another Shakespeare trait. "My father wasn't interested in family history."
Nevin had inherited this characteristic as well. "Once they go, you've got no idea. It's just a heap of old photos. It's just history."
Even so, Nevin had been reading about Tasmania's forthcoming bicentenary in the Burnie Advocate and he felt a grub of regret to realise how little he knew about his birthplace. "We were never taught Tasmanian history at Parklands High School. We were told that Truganini was the last and that the Aborigines couldn't light a fire, couldn't swim and all hated each other anyway. We spent more time on English and European history, which at the end of the day means nothing."
"How much do you know about the man they call the Father of Tasmania?"
"Who's that?"
"Did they tell you about the settlement at York Town?"
"What settlement?"
"Do you know York Town?"
"Of course, I know York Town!" Nevin had driven through it heaps of times. He had camped there and it was also where he had had the motor-bike accident that so alarmed his parents. He was overtaking a line of traffic when a car pulled out. "I hit the brakes and high-sided, and went surfing on my hands and knees. The car didn't stop, didn't even know he'd caused an accident. But I ended up in Deloraine Hospital. Luckily, I knew the blokes because I'd serviced the ambulance station."
"Well, York Town is near where the Europeans landed 200 years ago," I told him. "It's the first place they settled on this coast."
He shook his head. "We knew nothing of it. You ask anyone in the street, they wouldn't have much knowledge."
An idea was forming. I said to Nevin, "Take me on your bike, and I'll show you."
CHAPTER 2
SEPARATED FROM THE AUSTRALIAN MAINLAND BY 140 MILES OF the treacherous pitch and toss of Bass Strait, Tasmania is a byword for remoteness. As with Patagonia, to which in geological prehistory it was attached, it is like outer space on earth and invoked by those at the "centre" to stand for all that is far-flung, strange and unverifiable.
Tasmania is in myth and in history a secret place, a rarely visited place. Those few who did make the journey compared it to Elysium, or sometimes to Hades. For the first 50 years of its settlement, it was, with the notorious Norfolk Island, Britain's most distant penal colony and under the name of Van Diemen's Land was open panopticon to 76,000 convicts gathered from many pockets of the Empire, the majority of them thieves. The average sentence for the transportees was seven years – to a destination that was described by English judges as "beyond the seas" and might take eight months to reach. "They call it the end of the world," was one convict's verdict, "and for vice it is truly so. For here wickedness flourishes unchecked." Reports and fables of depravity and cannibalism sometimes made of Van Diemen's Land a synonym for all kinds of terror and dread, but after 1856, under the new name of Tasmania, the island – which is the size of Ireland, Sri Lanka or West Virginia – became popular as a health resort. Its exceptional natural beauty, fertile soil and temperate climate attracted immigrants who were sick of the English weather and yet wanted to be reminded of "home". The extinction of the original native Aboriginal population by 1876 further bolstered the illusion of a society that Anthony Trollope, dropping in on the way to visit his jackaroo son, described as "more English than is England herself". Because it was so far away, it did its best to be very near.
First sighted by a European in 1642, when the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman mistook it for the mainland of Australia, Tasmania was not colonised by the British until the first years of the nineteenth century. It is a place that the Hollywood actress Merle Oberon was persuaded to claim as her birthplace, in which Errol Flynn and Viscount Montgomery of Alamein grew up, and into which all manner of felons and explorers and adventurous sorts disappeared, of whom perhaps the most interesting was a turbulent British officer called Anthony Fenn Kemp and among the most recent perhaps the fugitive Lord Lucan; a place where not even Iran's fundamentalist police would dream of looking for you. In an essay that Salman Rushdie wrote after the fatwa, he quoted a joke that was circulating: "What's blonde, has big tits and lives in Tasmania?" Answer: "Salman Rushdie."
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 park-like 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.
CHAPTER 3
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 northeast 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.
CHAPTER 4
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.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In Tasmania"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Nicholas Shakespeare.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
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