In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Kemp had been only too pleased to build up his business using free convict labour, but now that he was a God-fearing and respectable family citizen he resented the stigma that ‘convictism’ had lent to his adopted colony, not least in the eyes of Potter and Kemp’s sisters back home.

  In 1837, Potter read a letter in The Times that confirmed any lingering doubt as to the character of the society in which his brother-in-law had settled. The letter, written by Alexander Maconochie, private secretary to Lieutenant Governor Franklin, was part of a blistering attack on the effect of transportation to Van Diemen’s Land. ‘It seems to me too severe for any offence whatever’ – and in every case involved ‘further deterioration of character’. Maconochie warned that distress, vice and dissipation were common ‘among the free as among the bond’, and he had no hesitation in characterising the established settlers like Kemp as slave-drivers. ‘The evil, then, is crying and I almost hesitate as I thus sum it up; for it seems at first incredible that, being so great, it should not sooner have attracted notice.’ Once detected and publicised, Vandemonian evil was impossible to sweep under the carpet. Committees looked into it, Lieutenant Governors reported back on it and the Colonial Office worried what to do about it.

  Until 1853, when it decided to end transportation, the Colonial Office had to field a flow of reports of unnatural practices indulged in, wrote Lloyd Robson, ‘on a scale not dreamt of by readers of Catullus’. In 1843, the newly arrived Lieutenant Governor John Eardley-Wilmot brought to Lord Stanley’s attention ‘the prevalence of a nameless crime among the male and female prisoners’. The previous year, Elizabeth Ainsworth had been convicted of this nameless crime ‘with a woman’. A trawl through court records unearthed yet more dramatic cases. In 1843, John Demer, Stewart Jenett and William Chiffet were convicted ‘with a mare’ and in 1846 four men with a goat. (‘Acquitted Edward Spackman and Robt Earl, one with a cow, the other with a bull.’)

  ‘The capital charge is seldom sustained,’ complained one superintendent, but in 1845 Job Harries and William Cottier were executed for the rape of a boy at a coal mine. The medical officer could not say ‘who has diseased him because the act had occurred on his being lowered one day into the Mines to work when five or six of the men seized and dragged him to one of the dark passages and there forced him to submit to their will.’ In 1845, a former prison warder at Pentonville, James Boyd, made a private report into the probation station on Maria Island after visiting the dormitories. The following text was omitted from the account that reached the House of Commons: ‘I have every reason to believe that crime in these wards was, prior to my arrival, by no means infrequent … In one night I found that eight men had removed the separation boards, and were sleeping together … They were tried and sentenced to nine months’ hard labour in chains … Two of the eight had the bold and disgusting effrontery to tell the visiting magistrate that they had never heard [of] sleeping together prohibited at other stations where they had been.’ Nor did the probation stations have a monopoly on vice. The Irish convict Patrick O’Donohue wrote to his wife about Hobart: ‘I suppose the earth could not produce so vicious a population as inhabits this town; vice of all kinds, in its most hideous and exaggerated form, openly practised by all classes and sexes.’

  The official most shocked was William Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies. His attention had been drawn to ‘this great moral evil’ by his Permanent Under Secretary, James Stephen, who passed on a conversation he had had with an old friend from Van Diemen’s Land, George Dougan. ‘My informant told me that the state of vice and moral debasement at the gangs which he visited was something so shocking that (I believe I quote him exactly) it made his blood curdle to think of it. He told me that he had no doubt that more than two-thirds of the members of these gangs were living in the systematic and habitual practice of unnatural crimes, that people were actually paired together, and understood as having that revolting relationship to each other; that his own host, the physician, came to a knowledge of these things by the loathsome diseases resulting from them … and that the whole scene was such as not to be fitly described in words.’

  Stephen’s words galvanised Gladstone. He believed that the convicts of Van Diemen’s Land had ‘fallen into habits of life so revolting and depraved as to make it nothing less than the most sacred and imperious duty to adopt, without the necessary loss of a single day, such measures as may best be adapted to arrest the progress of pollution.’

  Almost as important a factor in Kemp’s growing antipathy to transportation was the cost to his own pocket. The implementation of the probation system withdrew convicts from the free labour market. New regulations meant that those who wanted to use convict workers had to pay for them: four shillings and eight pence per day for a mechanic, and two shillings and tuppence for a labourer. In addition, free settlers were required to foot the bills for policing and imprisoning convicts, as well as to finance their own passage to the colony. And on top of everything there was the influx of 5,000 convicts a year. On October 3, 1850, Thomas Arnold, who had recently married into Kemp’s family, wrote to his mother: ‘The hateful red flag is flying at the signal staff, showing that another ship with male convicts is coming in. A thousand more of the worst among men are expected before the end of the year. Conceive what you would think, if every year 20 men, embellished with every hue and shade of villainy, murderers, burglars, forgers, thieves, etc., etc., were sent to your valley and permanently established there, and you will be able to realise in some degree the horror and disgust which those feel, who are bound to this unhappy country by ties which they cannot break, who see free emigration entirely stopped and its place supplied by the deportation of the felonry of England to their shores.’

  In 1842, New South Wales was granted a measure of self-government, the Legislative Council henceforth being two-thirds elective. From then on, the abolition of transportation and the introduction of self-government became Kemp’s chief ambitions. Here is an extract from the Hobart newspaper Britannia of July 6, 1848: ‘A. F. Kemp, Esq. – We are gratified in being able to announce that the father of the people, the Washington of Van Diemen’s Land, has recovered from his recent severe indisposition, and that, in his mental energies, he is as strong as ever. We wish him to live long enough to take his place, even if it be only for a day, in an elected Legislative Assembly, and then having consistently and successfully fought for the freedom of his adopted country, he may retire to Mount Vernon until the colony, in the usual course of events, is called upon to mourn his loss. Every man has his peculiarity, and Mr Kemp’s peculiar peculiarity has been the expression, on all occasions, of his hope to see Van Diemen’s Land with her irons off, enjoying liberty, not in mere theory, but in reality. We write this brief notice of Mr Kemp, on the 4th of July, the anniversary of the day on which the United States of America declared their independence, after having been for years ridden rough-shod over by a tyrannical British ministry with whom, as with those who deal in the most vital interests of this Colony, “might is right”. Will it last for ever? No – the hand-writing is on the wall.’

  No hand had been busier than Anthony Fenn Kemp’s. Although less in evidence at political gatherings, Kemp remained an influential figure locally. He was the first person that the landscape painter John Glover, ‘the English Claude’, turned to as a referee for his land grant application at Mills’ Plains. He was one of the founders of the Theatre Royal; he was reappointed a JP; and in 1845, he staged a Punch and Judy show outside the Legislative Chamber, helping to defeat a bill that threatened to raise taxes. But from 1830 until his death in 1868 his energies were focused increasingly on his estate outside Green Ponds.

  At ‘Dulcet’, surrounded by his fat pastures, Patrick White’s Garnet Roxburgh had ‘paraded the assured insolence of the lapsed gentleman’. At Mount Vernon, surrounded by his numerous family, Kemp was ready to develop his final incarnation: Father of the People.

  XX

  HE WAS BORN EARLY ONE
OCTOBER MORNING AND WEIGHED ALMOST twelve pounds. ‘That’s not a baby, that’s a giant,’ the midwife said. We christened him Max George Tasman Shakespeare.

  Genealogy may generally be the preoccupation of the elderly, but the impulse to look back at the tracks in the sand can be triggered by having a child of your own, especially when that event occurs, as in my case, somewhat late in life.

  In the uproar of my son’s ancestry were some pretty disappointed expectations, but like any incipient parent I was prone to self-deception and wishful thinking. I wanted his life to be perfect.

  The genes, they come down. If I had a say, whose genes did I wish to dominate my son: the sensible Potter’s or the adventurous Kemp’s?

  Kemp was a baby once, some mother’s darling. So would have been Potter, for that matter. Their letters made me think that what held both men back was that each was not more like the other. If Kemp had hurried a little more slowly, if Potter had left his desk and lived a little more …

  Perhaps every affair of business, of love, of writing itself, calls for a necessary balance between the Potter and the Kemp, between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac, between the ledger and the rum. And I wished this balance for my son.

  XXI

  THE FATHER OF TASMANIA HAD BEEN QUICK TO ABANDON HIS OLDEST two legitimate children in London with the Potters: the nine-year-old George, who was born in York Town, and his seven-year-old sister Elizabeth. Kemp wrote in a letter to Aldgate that his children were ‘ever uppermost’ in his mind. ‘I am sure that you and my sister’s goodness of heart will not let them want for anything until I have it in my power to make remittances.’

  Whatever scepticism I had about Kemp’s paternal feelings, I found it heart-rending to read of his wife’s anguish over their daughter Elizabeth’s illness that is 14 months old by the time Mrs Kemp learns of it from Potter. ‘Does Betsy grow tall? Her ninth birthday is just past. I hope as she grows abler she will mend in every respect. Oh! that I could but for five minutes behold her, but I fear it will be many a long day first.’

  Since 1801, the Potters had also been taking care of Emily, Kemp’s daughter by Judith Simpson. Emily remained in England. But once they had come of age Elizabeth and George returned to Van Diemen’s Land, where Elizabeth asserted her independence by getting married to the son of Kemp’s bitterest enemy.

  Kemp had not become so Puritan that he could not forgive and forget. In 1825, a year after Lieutenant Governor Sorell’s departure, he gave away his 17-year-old daughter to a thin, sallow man with bristly hair reckoned to be ‘a bit of a sis’.

  William Sorell had not seen his father since he was seven, when Colonel Sorell eloped with Mrs Kent, but at the urging of his mother – since reduced to selling fruit in Covent Garden – he had sailed out ‘to assert his claims on his father’s attention in person’. He arrived in Hobart only to discover that Kemp’s vendetta had caused his father’s recall. William briefly considered returning home. What decided him to stay on was the ravishing Elizabeth Kemp.

  A reserved bureaucrat, William did not impress anyone with his intelligence. In Kemp’s daughter, he believed that he was marrying a woman ‘who hates and abominates discord and strife’. He could not have been more wrong.

  On her return to Hobart, Elizabeth had flowered into a headstrong, beautiful woman – ‘perhaps the most beautiful woman you ever saw’, in the eyes of the diarist George Boyes, although he added that she was also ‘a very devil incarnate’. She had her father’s impulse of bolting from any situation that failed to agree with her, and five years after marriage to the dull Sorell – who managed to get a job as Registrar in the Supreme Court – she was restless. Mrs Fenton, on a visit from Calcutta, met Elizabeth at this time, and wrote in her diary that the young woman was rather too eager to know all about her sea journey. ‘She affected a becoming sort of wonderment at my “astonishing courage” to undertake a “voyage” alone. I was much amused. I assured her the days of Pamela-like adventures were fairly gone and away, and every one but the very young girls, or very simple old ones, might travel where they list as fearlessly.’ A seed had been planted.

  In 1838, after 13 years of marriage, Elizabeth kissed her husband goodbye on the wharf in Hobart and boarded a ship for Europe. William Sorell understood that she was taking their five children to visit their paternal grandfather in Brussels – where ‘Old Man’ Sorell had gone to live. In fact, she was sailing to meet her lover, Lieutenant Colonel George Deare, an officer in the 21st Regiment with whom she had had an intense affair in Hobart. Leaving her children with Sorell, she and Deare eloped to India. Kemp never saw Elizabeth again, nor did her own daughters.

  Her great-grandson would draw on Elizabeth for the alluring and destructive Lucy Tantamount in his novel Point Counter Point: ‘A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.’ Aldous Huxley was responding to the family’s precocity for havoc. He and his brother Julian were raised on tales of ‘the wild and forcible Kemps’ and their dominating characteristic: ‘an ungovernable temper’. No one incarnated this wildness with more allure than Elizabeth’s daughter Julia.

  It took two years for Colonel Sorell to arrange for his humiliated granddaughter to return to her father in Hobart. In 1847, Julia had her portrait painted by the convicted forger and poisoner, Thomas Wainewright. She is pictured with her head on one side and pitch dark, seductive eyes. The watercolour does not show that she has lost some of her teeth; nor that she is driven by the ‘intemperate passion’ that guided her maternal grandfather – a passion that she directed at a gentle 26-year-old inspector of schools with a slight stammer who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1850.

  XXII

  THOMAS ARNOLD WAS THE YOUNGER BROTHER OF THE POET Matthew, and favourite son of Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Never was a child dearer to a parent than you were to him,’ wrote his mother after he landed in Hobart. Less well known are his connections with Anthony Fenn Kemp.

  Tom Arnold

  Arnold had departed England with a reputation as the handsomest undergraduate at Oxford. A rabid democrat – the model for the hero of Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich’ – he was consumed by the idea of finding an answer to the conundrum ‘what, namely, is the ideal of human life’. He was also a hopeless admirer of George Sand’s fiction, and had sailed to New Zealand in a spasm of ‘young and democratic despair’ after a girl rejected him. But his notion of founding a classless Pantisocratic society in a five-acre block on Porirua Road, near Wellington, had petered out, and in 1849 he accepted the offer of a salaried post in Van Diemen’s Land.

  He had been in Hobart only a month when a lawyer invited him to a party in Davey Street. He arrived late. A regimental band dressed in blue jackets was playing the polka. A woman sat on a sofa in excited conversation with a red-coated officer. Arnold described the next hour in a private memoir that he wrote for his children: ‘Looking around the room on entering, I saw a lady in black, wearing a single white camellia in her black hair, with a singularly refined and animated face.’ She stood up to be introduced. They examined each other, he wrote, à la dérobée. ‘I remember how strong the feeling was upon me I must have met her before; a sense of moral likeness, an overpowering attraction and affinity, drew me to her. For me it was certainly “love at first sight”!’ Soon afterwards, he wrote to Miss Sorell. ‘I could not help looking at you every instant and envying everyone on whom you vouchsafed a word or smile; so much so that some young lady, Miss Swan I think, declared that she would never dance opposite Mr Arnold again … for his eyes were always turned towards – you can guess whom.’

  Forty years on, the memory of Kemp’s granddaughter – her dark eyes with an expression ‘full of meaning’, a short upper lip ‘shaped like a cupid’s bow’, her firm figure – still had the power to make Arnold catch his breath: ‘O my own Julia, I shall never forget how beautiful and capturing you were that night; nor what a rage I was in, at finding you had gone home without me.’ On her leaving the party, Arnold agreed to
dance an insufferable quadrille with a Mrs Chapman, and it may have been she who filled him in on the ‘alarming’ reputation of the young woman with whom he had been conversing.

  The 24-year-old Julia had days earlier broken off her engagement with a Lieutenant Elliott of the 99th (‘he had been ordered away, & I do not think she either expected or wished to see him again’). She had been engaged to at least two other men, including Chester Eardley-Wilmot, the son of the last Governor, who lent her novels and went riding with her on a white pony. Not only that, but there were rumours concerning Julia and the late Governor himself – rumours, later proven false, that had contributed to the latter’s premature death from ‘complete exhaustion of the frame’.

  Julia Sorell

  Arnold admitted to his children: ‘Your mother was no unknown person at the time … among women she had her detractors.’ According to her enemies, Julia was alleged to have seduced Sir John Eardley-Wilmot one night at Government House, where she sometimes played scenes from Shakespeare. (In one scene, reported by her daughter, she stood on a pedestal and gave an indelibly inert performance of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale – ‘till at the words, “Music! Awake her! Strike!” she kindled into life.’) The affable, courteous Eardley-Wilmot had come to Hobart without his wife and was well known to the diarist George Boyes for his ‘fondness for the younger part of the fair sex’. When young girls visited Government House, he occasionally put his arm around their necks. ‘They seemed to enjoy these little familiarities amazingly.’