In Tasmania (12 page)

The figure that Joseph Hooker tracked down was lachrymose, half-tipsy, dressed in rags. After their final meeting, at which Jorgenson called on him and begged for half a crown, looking miserable, Hooker wrote to his father: ‘His drunken wife has died and left a more drunken widower; he was always in this state when I saw him and used to
cry
about you. I have consulted several persons, who have shown him kindness, about him, and have offered money and everything; but he is irreclaimable; telling the truth with him is quite an effort.'

On the way back from Antarctica, the
Erebus
docked again in Hobart, where Hooker learned that Jorgenson's body had been picked up in a ditch a few weeks before. He had died of pneumonia in January 1841 and his body had lain in the open for a day before it was discovered. But then Jorgenson had always known that the joys of human life were fleeting. ‘They may be likened to two friends meeting each other on a hasty journey, who ask a few questions, and then part perhaps forever, leaving nothing behind but a tender regret.'

I could not deny that a reason his story interested me was my wife's ancestry. Although raised in Canada, she was Icelandic. This meant that our son would be half-Icelandic. Like Jorgenson, he would have a stake in two islands literally poles apart – and I wondered if one day, like W.H. Auden, he would travel through Iceland on a bus and spot the familiar shape of Australia in a patch of snow.

 

Back home, Peter had finished cleaning out the possum shit. ‘Ah, you won't get them in now.'

I explained what I had been doing, and it stirred him to tell me in the casual, understated way so typical of Tasmanians how his niece in Hobart was involved romantically with the Crown Prince of Jorgenson's native land. At first, I was wary. This was the kind of thing that Jorgenson used to boast about – how he ‘figured in courtly scenes and made much stir on the literary and political world of Europe'. But a few months later I opened the
Mercury
and there was the news of their engagement. One day Mary Donaldson, my possum-catcher's niece, stood to be Queen of Denmark.

RESCUED BY JORGENSON, KEMP THRIVED FOR A WHILE. APPROACHING
60 and wearing spectacles, he looked out on a busy port, macadamised streets and shingled roofs that reminded Mrs Prinsep, a visitor to his store, of no place other than ‘old England'. She wrote in a letter in 1829: ‘I dare say you have never dreamt of Van Diemen's Land as of any thing else than a kind of wilderness; an appropriate insular prison for the vagabonds who are sent to it yearly from England. You have never supposed that it has a beautiful harbour, a fine metropolis, with towns, streets, shops, and pretty shopkeepers, like some of the larger towns of Devonshire …' As she walked up Macquarie Street towards Kemp's emporium, ‘I enjoyed a thousand English associations … cats and cottages, ships and shops, girls in their pattens, boys playing at marbles; above all the rosy countenances, and chubby cheeks, and the English voices.' The only discordant note was the extraordinary number of spirit shops – about 50.

‘While I am now writing it is snowing on the mountain opposite my cottage.' So Kemp described the Hobart winter of 1816 in a letter to Potter. During the long dark evenings of June and July, he sat by his fire with books and tracts borrowed from the library. A growing number of them warned against the dissipation caused by drinking the gin he sold:
Satan's Snares
,
Don't Go to the Gin Shop
and
The Bottle
(drawings by Cruikshank). ‘I don't think much of them,' he once said in disgust, returning some Puseyite tracts. ‘The writers were paid for saying what they did.' At this, a look of pious horror crossed the face of the neighbour who had lent them. ‘What, Mr Kemp? Do you think that a minister of the Gospel would sell himself in that way?' Kemp answered: ‘Well, Sir, as to that I have my own opinion. I am all for the right of private judgment, Sir.' While Kemp's wife studied manuals like
Kind Words for the Kitchen
and
Female Excellence or Hints for Daughters
, Kemp liked to ‘peruse' the London
Times
that arrived six months late, along with the Christmas editions of
Punch
, the
Illustrated London News
, the
Quarterly Review.
In later life, he admired Arthur Stanley's
Life of Thomas Arnold
and Charles Dickens's novels which he read in serial form. Kemp recognised Vandemonian connections in at least two of Dickens's most striking creations: the pickpocket Fagin in
Oliver Twist
and the convict Magwitch in
Great Expectations
. The character of Fagin is said to have been inspired by ‘Ikey' Solomon, who in 1831 was transported to Hobart for 14 years for receiving stolen goods; Magwitch was a fugitive from the same hulks in which Kemp's friend Jorgenson had been incarcerated.

On Jorgenson's death, Kemp was one of but a handful of settlers who had known the colony since its foundation. He identified its fate chiefly with his own. In Kemp's opinion, it was owing to his persistent lobbying that Van Diemen's Land had become separated administratively from New South Wales in 1825. But Kemp would not rest until the colony won the right to govern itself, independent of London and its meddling Lieutenant Governors.

In 1829, he cornered the author of the first Australian novel, the locally printed
Quintus Servinton
, in Hobart's Commercial Rooms. He told Henry Savery that ‘until we have a House of Assembly and trial by Jury, we shall do no good, Sir.'

Kemp's House of Assembly was a castle that would remain in the sky for a quarter century more, but he was preparing for it, he told Savery, by ‘practising talking'.

‘Whose style of eloquence do you most admire, Sir?'

‘Whose style, Sir? Few equal to my own …'

His laws, he said, would include an Act to annul all former Laws and Acts (‘nothing like a clear stage, and plenty of elbow-room') and an Act to compel everyone to eat a daily hot lunch, with two pounds of meat per head, ‘so as to encourage the consumption and raise the price of livestock'.

Savery wrote of Kemp as having ‘a considerable degree of eagerness in his manner'. But on the next occasion they met he considered that Kemp was less animated, and that his ‘hasty impetuosity' which had at first startled him had declined into ‘a look of moody, disappointed ambition'. Over a drink at the Waterloo Hotel, Kemp complained to a visitor from England: ‘Good God Almighty, Sir, the colony is ruined. All going to the Devil.'

Another bee in Kemp's intransigent bonnet was transportation. Transportation ceased to New South Wales in 1840, but not for another 13 years to Van Diemen's Land. Until 1853, convicts came into the island at the rate of 5,000 per year and from all quarters of the Empire: South Africa, Ireland, India, China, Canada, New South Wales. At the same time, assignment was replaced by the probation system. The convicts worked in gangs and lived together in a network of remote stations, including one established on Maria Island and another on a spectacular cliff outside Swansea. It was during this period that Van Diemen's Land consolidated its reputation, as the
Gippsland Guardian
put it, as ‘that pandemonium of the most wicked and debased of England's children'.

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.