In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  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?

  XIV

  ‘GARNET IS AS GOOD AS DEAD. WHAT USE IS A BOY TO HIS MOTHER, or anyone else, living down there in Van Diemen’s Land?’

  Kemp’s family in London could not forget him soon enough. He was more than a black sheep: he was a dead ringer for the dissolute Garnet Roxburgh in Patrick White’s novel, A Fringe of Leaves, headstrong and unwise, who had fallen among bad company and come to a place where people who defected ‘to sensuality and worse’ were packed off as quickly and quietly as possible. As Garnet says: ‘Most of us on this island are infected.’

  Kemp, too, had run the gamut. He had already been in charge of the colony’s finances, religious affairs and judiciary – as well as spearheading the tradition, still vibrant in Australian politics, of jobs-for-the-boys. But I had underestimated my uncle. Almost the last virgin territory to explore was to be Kemp the Puritan. His penultimate incarnation was a caricature of all that he had fled: the God-fearing, respectable and abstemious family man of Aldgate, William Potter.

  The tender shoots of Kemp’s moral awakening can be credited to Davey’s successor. Colonel William Sorell was a rare example of someone prepared to stand up to Kemp and, unusual in this cast of characters, teetotal. During his six-year rule, Sorell became the benevolent patriarch of the colony: a fatherly, much-loved administrator, known because of his snowy shock of hair as the ‘Old Man’. Friendly with the citizens of Hobart – he stood at his gate to hear their complaints – Sorell was wise, honest, grave and firm. But he had an Achilles heel that Kemp went for.

  The 44-year-old Sorell arrived at Government House in April 1817, accompanied by a beautiful wife pregnant with their fourth child. Kemp detested Sorell from the start, but he seemed – for once – to have come up against an authority who was unassailable.

  The roots of their dispute were petty: a quarrel over a wall and a refusal by Sorell to assign Kemp two more convict servants (because he already had 17). Menacingly, Kemp reminded Sorell’s secretary of what had happened to Governor Bligh. Sorell’s reaction was to strip Kemp of his magistracy and to describe him as a sordid and mischievous man with a slanderous tongue and a black heart. A month later, Sorell fined Kemp £1 after he had refused to supply a list of the people in his house – and sent him to prison for an hour.

  Kemp’s 60 minutes in Hobart jail unleashed in him a hysterical desire for ‘retributive justice’. He was unused to being detained, let alone crossed. On another occasion when a Governor contradicted him his response was equally intemperate. ‘I am piqued, Sir,’ he told a journalist whom he buttonholed in the street, ‘and will be piqued, Sir, and mean to be piqued, Sir – ’tis a most unwarrantable liberty, Sir, with a man of my bearing, Sir, and I was never so piqued in all my life, Sir.’ Lloyd Robson observed in A History of Tasmania: ‘No prima donna was more sensitive of her reputation than the upstart settlers of Van Diemen’s Land.’ Soon Kemp was slandering Sorell in his shop and in the streets, ‘wherever he could find a listener’.

  To begin with, no-one did listen. Sorell’s popularity was, in the words of his obituary, ‘as unbounded as it was merited’. Then a package arrived from Potter containing a bundle of English newspapers.

  This, I realised, was the bundle stuffed at the bottom of my grandmother’s bag of letters, but it was only when I opened a copy of The Times of London and read about a court case against Sorell, who was charged with ‘criminal conversation’ after eloping with another officer’s wife, that I understood Kemp’s excitement.

  Kemp raced about Hobart showing the article to everyone. The elegant ‘Mrs Sorell’ was none other than Mrs Louisa Kent, the wife of an aggrieved lieutenant in the 21st Dragoons who had successfully sued Sorell for substantial damages. Oblivious to any parallels between Sorell’s mistress and his own former ‘concubine’ Judith Simpson, Kemp launched a vindictive attack on Sorell for his ‘immoral Habits and pernicious example’.

  Conceiving it a duty that he owed his family, Kemp sent off letters to Lord Bathurst, Lord Liverpool and the Bishop of London. He asked Bathurst to peruse The Times of July 7, 1817 for the trial of Kent v Sorell, ‘and after you have perused it, I am persuaded to hope it will occur to your honourable Mind that Mr Sorell is not a fit and proper person to administer the Government of this Island.’

  It was Kemp’s ‘painful task’ to write on behalf of ‘all the married men of Respectability’. He had watched Sorell’s mistress ride through town in an open carriage at government expense, and considered it ‘lamentable to see the highest authority in the island living in a public state of concubinage’. Even more distressing to Kemp than Sorell’s habit of introducing Mrs Kent as his wife was the woman’s presence at church. ‘On seeing Mrs Sorell in the Government House when Divine service was performed under the veranda I determined to decline all further intercourse.’ Kemp subsequently read prayers to his family at home. Confident that this insult to public decency could not be forgiven, he bluntly requested that Lord Bathurst remove the Governor from office.

  In Kemp’s words I wondered if there were not the residue of his father’s indignation towards his 18-year-old self. He appeared to savour his new role as the safeguard of Vandemonian rectitude, as if in felling the paternal and honest Sorell, he could take the stand against not only his father but all those who had sat in judgment.

  ‘What hypocrisy and falsehood!’ Sorell replied. He told a commission of enquiry that Kemp’s accusations were ‘a malignant tissue of lies’. Kemp could not have seen Mrs Kent in church at Government House for one simple reason: the house had been pulled down. ‘He was never there, nor has ever attended divine service.’ He complained that Kemp had vilified him non-stop – ever since Sorell’s arrival in 1817. He was ‘the most seditious, mischievous and the Man least meriting favour or indulgence of any kind in this whole Settlement’. It was a damning portrait, but Sorell was not finished. He was able to assert ‘without fear of contradiction from anyone with whom Mr Kemp has come into contact, that his conceit and credulity, envy and malice, turbulence and arrogance, have been at all times equal, to which may now be added a total disregard of truth …’

  But the same habits, Sorell reminded the commission, had characterised Kemp throughout his life – ‘from the moment that emerging from behind his father’s counter, he became an ensign in the New South Wales Corps’.

  Unfortunately for Sorell, Kemp’s mud stuck. Kemp had exposed what Sorell admitted was ‘the one great error’ of his life. In October 1823, Sorell was recalled.

  Days after the news leaked out, an extraordinary public meeting was held in Hobart. The motion was passed unanimously. An urgent petition was to be sent to George IV entreating him to extend Sorell’s tenure as Governor. It must have astonished Sorell to discover the identity of the committee’s chairman. Starting with an admission that they had had some difficulties in the past, the speaker, Anthony Fenn Kemp, went on to lavish praise on Sorell as a leader who showed ‘steady, calm, decided and experienced Judgment, uniform impartiality and disinterestedness’.

  Too late. In June 1824, Sorell, Mrs Kent and their six children left Van Diemen’s Land on the Guildford. The citizens of Hobart had followed them en masse to the shore. In the words of Sorell’s obituary, ‘each colonist seemed as if he were losing a cherished personal friend.’

  XV

  WHENEVER I PEERED INTO
TASMANIA’S EARLY HISTORY, EACH TIME I rubbed away the dust I found Kemp staring out. The next episode involving him was one of the goriest ever to take place in Van Diemen’s Land, and it began – innocently enough – with an attempt to pirate his boat.

  Anchored alongside the departing Guildford was a cargo of merino fleeces. Thanks to Potter’s loan, Kemp had bought some of John Macarthur’s merino rams to upgrade his wool as well as a schooner to ferry the wool to his warehouse on the wharf. Two years before, on the evening of March 30, 1822, five convicts were arrested on board as they grappled with the anchor. Their trespass had consequences that have since riveted historians from John West to Robert Hughes, and the story was well-known in Tasmania, though I had never heard of it.

  The attempted pirating of his boat infuriated Kemp, who was never lenient towards those who tried to rob him. A thief caught escaping from his cottage in Collins Street with a gold watch and ‘trinkets’ received 200 lashes and was shackled in leg-irons for a year. In his attitude towards anyone who crossed him Kemp reminded me of the officer in Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’, who is keen to show off his chosen instrument of punishment, the harrow, and who decides every sentence arbitrarily, without a trial. ‘My guiding principle is this: guilt is never to be doubted.’

  Unfortunately for Kemp, he was no longer on the Bench since Sorell had suspended him. ‘It broke down under me some years ago,’ he complained to a journalist, ‘and has never been since repaired.’ Nonetheless, he was owed a favour by the adjudicating magistrate in the case, his friend the Reverend Robert Knopwood, who had baptised two of his children and shared Kemp’s notion of justice. The punishment that Knopwood handed down on the gang’s leader, Robert Greenhill, and his rumoured lover Matthew Travers, would traumatise them.

  Greenhill, the wiliest of the group, was a 32-year-old sailor from Middlesex transported for stealing his wife’s coat. In Van Diemen’s Land he had worked as a stockman in the bush north of Hobart, and there formed a close friendship with Travers, an Irishman convicted of theft. Shortly before Greenhill ate him, Travers confessed that the two of them had always communicated on every subject, ‘and had entrusted each other with the most guarded secrets’.

  The attempted hijack of a valuable schooner belonging to Hobart’s ‘most respectable merchant’ was a serious crime. Mindful of the role that Kemp had played in clearing his name four years before, Knopwood ordered the men to receive 150 lashes.

  I had read umpteen accounts of floggings, but it was not until I untied a grey folder in Hobart’s Tasmaniana library that I had a notion of what Greenhill and Travers suffered. The folder had belonged to Kemp’s obituarist, James Erskine Calder, and inside was a letter written to Calder by a man suffering from vertigo – possibly brought on by his memory of the event. In horrified tones the letter described a flogging by the government executioner, Mark Jeffries, ‘one of the most horrible and inhuman monsters in the shape of man’.

  The lashes fell every 30 seconds, watched by other prisoners who formed a circle. No word was spoken except ‘NOW’ and not a word was spoken by the victim until his release – all blood and raw opened flesh, from his neck to his loins.

  ‘Jeffries threw off his coat, bared his herculean arm and with evident and demoniacal pleasure in his horrible countenance gave the first lash with all his strength, cutting into the flesh and so placed that the wound was one straight and continued line till it ended round by the wretched sufferer’s ribs where the knots of the newly made cat made a deeper and more sanguinary end of that line.

  ‘Can you imagine what must have been the state of that poor wretch’s back after receiving 50 such lashes from such a monster, can you imagine, can you picture to your mind the awful scene? Those 25 minutes appeared to me like so many hours.’

  Knopwood sentenced Greenhill and Travers to a lashing three times longer. But the clergyman was not done. He ordered the men to be shipped to Sarah Island, a place of secondary punishment that had opened three months before on Tasmania’s remote west coast.

  XVI

  BEHIND KNOPWOOD’S SENTENCE ROSE THE SPECTRE OF THE FRENCH revolution. The Tasmanian historian Peter Chapman told me: ‘Knopwood represented a society where crime and social order were a burning concern. “Look what happened in France,” went the thinking of his political masters in London. “They stormed the Bastille and killed everyone. Who’s next?”’ It would not be Knopwood.

  It is hard to resist the conclusion that Van Diemen’s Land – occupied specifically to prevent French occupation – had stumbled into becoming a penal colony, and that it drifted for several years in the wake of New South Wales without a clear strategy and with its government left chiefly in the hands of a rabble of cashiered officers. Until Kemp’s reappearance in Hobart, the occasional boat of convicts had sailed from Sydney, but not until 1818 did regular shipments from England begin. By 1833, an average of 1,700 male and 300 female convicts were sent each year to Van Diemen’s Land and Sorell’s stern successor, Lieutenant Governor Arthur, wrote: ‘The whole territory is [now] one large penitentiary.’

  Nonetheless, as Arthur complained, the colony’s distance from England meant that it was difficult to obtain ‘accurate statements of facts’ about Van Diemen’s Land. Horror in a small place touches everyone and it also travels. Trollope became aware on his 1872 visit that ‘no tidings that are told through the world exaggerate themselves with so much ease as the tidings of horror. Those who are most shocked by them, women who grow pale at the hearing and almost shriek as the stories are told to them, delight to have the stories so told that they may be justified in shrieking.’ Writing to his sister, the exiled Irish MP William Smith O’Brien must have shocked a reader or two with his description of Port Arthur: ‘as near a realisation of a Hell upon earth as can be found in any part of the British dominions except Norfolk Island’. But Lloyd Robson cautions against accepting every description as gospel. ‘The artist who painted the society of Van Diemen’s Land employed a palette well-equipped with blood-red to execute scenes of brutishness, bawdiness and hair-raising and grisly death.’

  The misapprehension survives that those sent as convicts to Hobart were all locked up from the moment they landed in lurid institutions like Port Arthur and Sarah Island. The fact is that these two prisons were designed for men and women who reoffended once they arrived in the colony. The majority of the 76,000 convicts who came to Van Diemen’s Land between 1804 and 1853, when transportation ceased, were sent in gangs to build public bridges, roads, houses and boats, fell timber and make bricks; or ‘assigned’ to settlers like Kemp to work as farm labourers and domestic servants. After a year or so of good conduct, they might be given a ticket-of-leave, and freedom to live and work within the island – so long as they reported to the police once a month and attended church every Sunday. To the majority of convicts, this is what happened. It was a penal system that was open to appalling abuse – and it deteriorated further in the 1840s when assignment was scrapped in favour of probation – but the philosophy that drove it was more humane than one might gather from The Fatal Shore or from Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel, For the Term of His Natural Life. The potter Edward Carr Shaw writes in his memoirs that people from his district in Ireland were known to steal ‘a loaf o’ bread or some heggs’ in order to be given free passage to this new country full of opportunities. ‘Jus’ make sure you gets caught …’ The truth lies somewhere in the middle, namely that transportation was successful in providing a better life to thousands of men and women who were sentenced to it. ‘Thus it is,’ Arthur explained to the Archbishop of Dublin in 1833, ‘that every man has afforded him an opportunity of in a great measure retrieving his character and becoming useful in society, while the resolutely and irrecoverably depraved are doomed to live apart from it for the remainder of their lives.’

  In Knopwood’s judgment, the men who had attempted to pirate Kemp’s schooner were ‘irrecoverably depraved’. Until 1821, he would have sent Greenhill and Travers to the town
jail on the corner of Murray and Macquarie Street, but in that year Sorell established a penitentiary on an island in the middle of Macquarie Harbour, 200 miles north-west of Hobart.

  I drove to Strahan and took a boat through Hell’s Gates into the large inlet of Macquarie Harbour. Sharp rocks weathered to the profile of frozen surf guarded the narrow entrance and an eight-knot tide was running in from the sea. A couple held on to each other until the Lady Franklin had passed safely through.

  The island where Greenhill and Travers were imprisoned is a tree-covered, 15-acre hump that lies at the far end of an immense sheet of water and four miles from the entrance to the Gordon River. It is hemmed in on one side by a battering ocean that runs, without interruption, to Patagonia, and on the other side by a damp sclerophyll forest more impenetrable than the Amazon.

  In 1822, the nearest settlement – Hobart – took up to 77 days to reach from here by sea. Escape was scarcely an option, although in the first five years of its existence 116 convicts tried it, of whom 75 ‘perished in the woods’. Christened ‘Devil’s Island’ by the convicts, Sarah Island became the most dreaded penal station in the southern hemisphere: associated, wrote John West, with ‘inexpressible depravity, degradation and woe’.

  I stood on the deck of the Lady Franklin, waiting for the island to come into sight. Button-grass plains grew in peaty soil to the water’s edge. Beyond, there spread a line of ti-trees and, further back, the darker foliage of sassafras, laurel and myrtle. The sun had burned off the mist and in the clear morning sky I could make out, to the east, the familiar quartzite peak of Frenchman’s Cap, one of the mountains from which Greenhill took his bearings.