In Tasmania (14 page)

I DROVE TO MOUNT VERNON ALONG THE SAME ROAD THAT THE
Arnolds and their two children rode in their phaeton. The signposts were punishingly familiar – Glenorchy, Chigwell, Brighton – but a reminder, too, of how few Aboriginal place names I had come across since living here. In their project to annihilate distance with sameness, colonists like Kemp ignored native words and replaced them with domesticating ones like Egg and Bacon Bay and Blinking Billy Point. In the north-west I had come across the hamlets of Paradise and Nowhere Else – after the comment of an early settler who, whenever he saw people cross his property, would tell them they had proceeded far enough. ‘The track,' said Charles Ivory gruffly, ‘leads nowhere else.' And yet the landscape had fought back. I found myself making a list of those who had presumed to rename it:

Tasman – d. in disgrace; Baudin – d. in Mauritius of dysentery; Flinders – d. on the day his
Terra Australis
was printed; Schouten – allegedly stoned to death; Hellyer – committed suicide; Lorymer – drowned when surveying the north-west coast with Jorgenson; Jorgenson – d. in ditch.

I could not discover the fate of the Royal Marine private who passed this way in 1804, to hunt kangaroos to feed a starving population in Hobart. Hugh Germain had reportedly packed two books in his knapsack, the Bible and
The Arabian Nights
, and with the insouciance of a seed-sower he flung names at the hills and rivers, some of which I could see through the windscreen: Jerusalem, Jericho, Abyssinia, Jordan, Lake Tiberias, Bagdad.

 

Bagdad lay a few miles north of Brighton. On the car radio the news from Iraq was that American troops from the 3rd Infantry were sweeping through the eastern suburbs. Crowds were throwing flowers at them and 20 American tanks had taken up position in the centre of Baghdad. The day was Wednesday April 9, 2003.

In Bagdad, Tasmania, the morning was overcast. Signs beside the Heritage Highway advertised ‘canaries for sale' and ‘clean dirt' and ‘chook-poo – $3 a bag'. Leaving the Hobart Gun Club on my right, I stopped for petrol at the post office, where there was another sign. ‘
WHEN YOU BECOME QUIET IT JUST DAWNS ON YOU
'.

‘I change the message every day,' Roland Berry explained, a compact, ex-army man in a Caltex bomber-jacket. ‘Saturday I was going to put on “
GEORGE W OUR POST CODE IS
7030” – in other words “Don't mistake us for the other side”, but then a bloke came in and wanted something for his wife's birthday.'

Berry's wife was the postmistress. She said it was all nonsense.

‘What's nonsense?'

‘The stories about hate mail and stuff being sent to Saddam Hussein here and we can't cope with it. Not one iota. You'd think people have better things to do,' she told a woman who had come in to buy barley sugar.

Roland had just returned from Victoria where he had grown sick of showing people his car licence. Even so, you could not have a madman running around the world. ‘They should have learned from history. In 1936, they should have stopped Hitler. Compared to the First World War, this is a skirmish.'

‘What if they don't find Weapons of Mass Destruction?'

‘Plant some.'

He was descended from an English poacher, and his grandfather was a rabbit-trapper who sired eight children. ‘Grandad on mum's side won a Military Medal at Gallipoli and was gassed in France. He wouldn't talk about it at all, but the man could drink, I'll give him that.'

I ordered a ‘cappacino' from the chalked menu and sipped it while leafing through the latest issue of the
Bagdad News
: the Bagdad singers were seeking a pianist and a number of items had ‘gone walking' from the kitchen in the Community Club. ‘Please check your cupboards and see if they mistakenly made their way into them.' And an advertisement for a voluntary position for six months, starting immediately. ‘Have you got what it takes to be a Vice-President? If so, the Bagdad community needs you.'

Further up the road, Neville Gangell, the ex-butcher of Bagdad, shut his door on me, but I spoke to a farmer who remembered Bagdad when every inch of its soil was planted with apples, and you could see blossom all the way to Kempton. Geoff Chalmers was not interested in the goings-on in Iraq. ‘I've lived in Bagdad all my life. We know there's another one on the other side of the world. But this is Bagdad. It's always been Bagdad.'

I left Bagdad and drove up Constitution Hill – so called, the locals joked, because you needed a very strong constitution to climb it. Kempton lay in a shallow valley on the far side.

KEMP WAS 57 WHEN HE DECIDED TO WITHDRAW TO HIS ESTATE. HIS
800 acres were situated close to Kemp's Lakes, in countryside named after him during Laycock's crossing of the island. Daring attacks by bushrangers, and later by Aborigines, had meant that he had so far only grazed the land – with merinos purchased out of Potter's loan. Their wool brought him sizeable profits, but he complained frequently of sheep-stealing – ‘a hundred at a time, being driven off their pasture ground and never heard of again'. He was afraid of bushrangers, who had long memories of his brutality as a magistrate.

His enthusiasm to develop his grant coincided with the return of his eldest son from Aldgate. With no concern for his safety, Kemp dispatched the 19-year-old George into the interior – where immediately he came up against one of Tasmania's most dangerous outlaws, Matthew Brady.

In March 1825, Brady stole a valuable horse belonging to Kemp. A month later, George found a message nailed to the door of the local inn, the Royal Oak. It was addressed to the Lieutenant Governor, but might as well have been directed at George's father. ‘It has caused Matthew Brady much concern that such a person as Colonel Arthur is at large. Twenty gallons of rum will be given to any person who will deliver this person to me.' Three months later, George was shaken awake in his brick cottage – Brady, holding a pistol to his temple. Brady demanded tobacco, tea and sugar, as well as a copy of the
Hobart Town Gazette
. He stole George's guns, and two weeks later let it be known that his gang would shoot Kemp's horse – ‘as they would him, if they fell in with him'. Back in Hobart, Kemp gathered 48 signatories and sent a petition to Arthur, writing that he had witnessed ‘with inexpressible alarm the manner in which the banditti now at large have continued to evade apprehensions and to contrive to carry their Depredations upon the peaceable Inhabitants of the Interior, keeping even the Metropolis in a State of continued agitation & alarm.' The bushrangers' threats were not empty. In 1830, George discovered two charred corpses on the farm: one poisoned after corrosive sublimate of lime had been added to the man's rum; another, ‘Pretty Jack', sewn into a raw hide and burned to death.

But by the early 1830s, Brady was dead, the Black War had driven the Aborigines from the Midlands, and Kemp felt that it was safe to retire here. He commissioned a government architect to add a grand façade to the cottage and to convert the whole into a full-blown Regency building, and in the grounds he planted his signature pear trees and oaks in rows that traced out a Masonic sign, the only known instance of his ever doing anything as a Mason.
⁵
Mrs Prinsep described the effect in a letter: ‘At the back of his estate rise hills, like downs, naturally bare of trees and clothed with excellent pasture for sheep, with which their sides were covered. The Jordan meanders below, on the banks of which the farm houses are situated, and between us and them rich fields of corn and grain stood ready for the reaper.'

Soon Kemp had expanded his estate to 3,400 acres. He introduced drought-resistant dwarf American corn, and bred horses for his racecourse and Sambhur deer for his pleasure garden. He even had his own football team, Kemp's Tigers, and in 1838 the local township – which used to be called Green Ponds – was named Kempton after him, a punning parody of the royal resort.

It was through Kempton that the Arnolds drove their phaeton on New Year's Eve, 1855.

 

The house is still there, at the end of a half-mile drive: tall, two-storeyed, with a façade the colour of dried orange peel. And guarded by a pair of Rhodesian ridgebacks. They bounded out as I climbed from the car. One had something bloody in its mouth. Close to, I saw that it was growling through teeth clamped to a fleece.

In the 1930s Mount Vernon was owned by a butcher-cum-builder who razed the handsome sandstone outbuildings and carted off the rubble to create the foundations of Hobart's Wrest Point Hotel and Casino. The house was then occupied for 27 years by Zelda Dick, a Kemp descendant.

I had met Zelda the afternoon before. She sat in her tidy apartment overlooking the Wrest Point Hotel and spoke of the day she moved in to Mount Vernon, and how she stood dumbfounded at the foot of the staircase. ‘The windows were so filthy you couldn't see through them.' On the arms of her chair, her knuckles whitened at the memory. ‘The last owners had taken the handles off the doors. They'd kept cheeses in the upstairs bedroom and there were circles of grease on the Huon pine floor. They'd skinned rabbits in the sun room. They'd ripped the lead from the bathroom roof and the iron railings from the veranda – and buried them under the Casino.' The stairwell to the ceiling was the length of one roll of wallpaper. Zelda had spent her first months stitching 20-foot curtains for the drawing room, and in the evenings she shot possums from the veranda. ‘The brutes were eating my mulberry trees and roses. I was known as Dead-Eye Dick. It was either them or my roses.'

An archivist today owns Mount Vernon. ‘God, you're a beauty,' was Barrie Paterson's response when he saw the advertisement and the ‘unbelievable' small amount of money attached. He arrived on a sunny morning, ‘place shining like a jewel'. But he had not reckoned on the wildcat frosts that in winter pounced from the hills behind and gripped the house for two or three windless days until the pipes froze.

He walked me through a hallway littered with modern novels and rocking-horses to the two tall front rooms. They were fitted with floor to ceiling windows and red cedar shutters that folded across the old glass to keep away the frost. I looked out, the ridgebacks barging against my legs, and it was an odd feeling to think that this grand crumbling house would not be here today if Kemp had not embezzled my family's money almost 200 years ago.

The shutters were also to black out Mount Vernon against bushrangers. One night there was a hammering at the back door. A maid raced across the flagstones to see who it was.

‘Come and have a look,' said Paterson.

I followed him into the kitchen, and he showed me a door made of cedar – save for one panel, which, he said, had been replaced by the coffin-maker.

He opened the door, letting in a bolt of cold air. ‘They shot her through it.'

IN SPIKY, RIGID HANDWRITING LIKE BARBED WIRE, JULIA HAD
replied to her fiancé: ‘I almost wish that you had called at Mount Vernon on your day off. I should like you to have seen the place.'

Since his marriage to Kemp's granddaughter, Arnold had had plenty of opportunities to stay at Mount Vernon. ‘Here, on the score of relationship, my wife and I were of course welcome,' he wrote with diplomatic restraint in his autobiography. His dreamy poet's face and his stammer, not to mention his famous father – Kemp had read Stanley's
Life of Thomas Arnold
– contributed to make Arnold the most satisfying audience that Kemp had enjoyed in several years. And yet on Arnold's part there was a definite sense that ‘poor old Kemp', as he had come to call him, was beginning to represent all that his delicate nature was beginning to resist. Six months earlier, on June 26, 1855, Arnold had written to Julia from Tunbridge: ‘I went to Mount Vernon on Saturday morning and stayed there over Sunday. The old gentleman tried hard to make me stop another day, but it would not do.' Though Arnold was reluctant to accept the latest invitation, a refusal was out of the question. Kemp had ordered his vast brood to Mount Vernon to celebrate the new colony, and with one or two glaring exceptions, like Julia's mother, all twelve of his surviving children were expected. Startling comparisons to the Last Supper must have floated into Arnold's mind.

Also in the phaeton was Arnold's four-year-old daughter Mary, ‘a child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across. It is very painful to punish her (which I usually do by locking her up) for the resistance of her will.' Mary had very possibly been conceived in Mount Vernon, possibly in the four-poster bed that Kemp had swapped for 30 of Potter's ewes. Fifty years later she tried to understand ‘the extraordinary transformation' that was going on in her father's head as the phaeton turned up the long drive to Kemp's house. By then she was arguably the most famous living author in the world, ranked by Tolstoy as England's greatest, and her name known to tribesmen in India for novels like
Helbeck of Bannisdale
(in which she had drawn on her mother's anguish for the portrait of Laura Fountain). And yet not even Mrs Humphry Ward was satisfied that she had the answer. ‘He was never able to explain it afterwards, even to me, who knew him best of all his children. I doubt whether he ever understood it himself.'

Arnold was vague about his abrupt defection: ‘Moved by various influences I resolved to be a Catholic.' His daughter's explanation was that his mind for ten years had been in a ‘welter of uncertainty' on the subject of religious truth, and then, when staying in a pub while inspecting a school, maybe in Swansea, he had read the Life of St Brigid in Alban Butler's
Lives of the Saints
, and had heard a mysterious ‘voice' as he rode in meditative solitude through the sunny spaces of the Tasmanian bush.

But I found a less anodyne clue among his papers at Balliol: the fragment of a novel that he started at this time, and abandoned. The hero – plainly Arnold – arrives in Van Diemen's Land, where he meets and marries ‘the fairest of Australia's damsels'. However, there is a fly in the ointment. For some unspecified reason, he became ‘ashamed of his rabid democracy after witnessing the absurd failure of all its most ardent votaries.' Strong stuff – but who did Arnold have in mind? Since coming to live in Hobart five years before, Arnold could not have met any democrat more ardent than Anthony Fenn Kemp. He had lost count of the occasions when he had had to sit and listen to Kemp drone on; of the evenings when Kemp had, as Arnold wrote, ‘
glorified himself on account of his democratic experiences
'. Rereading that line in his autobiography, I began to suspect that the ‘absurd failure' of Arnold's democratic ideals had something to do with Kemp, and that Arnold's exposure to his cranky, bigoted and irascible father-in-law had led him to doubt that Kemp could be the representative of any political or religious truth whatsoever. The hero of Arnold's unfinished novel ‘needed but some slight impulse from without to turn the balance irrevocably in favour of belief. In some way or other an impulse was given.' Had his host at Mount Vernon provided it? As I walked through the house, I found myself succumbing to the Tasmanian habit, when unable to explain or locate a fact, of permitting a latitude and longitude as exaggerated as the geographic location that I was in.

 

I stood in the drawing room and pictured the scene.

Dinner is over, but midnight still some way off. Kemp turns from the black marble fireplace: bespectacled, silver hair curling in waves over a high forehead, an expression of fierce joy in his small proud eyes.

He raises his glass.
Sic crescat liberata Tasmania!

The toast is echoed round the room.

In his other hand, Kemp clutches a copy of the
Mercury
. All day he has marched up to each of his twelve children in turn and pestered them to look at the editorial. Arnold, too, has read it. He agrees: the settler does rather resemble his host.

The editorial hails the New Year and also the new colony from the perspective of an early settler: ‘One who had come into this land ere it was yet peopled and in his first rude attempts was obliged to content himself with a rough log hut which his own hands helped to rear and sowed his first seed on land from which the stumps and blackened logs were only half removed … Now he can look abroad from his elegant portico, glance his eye over hundred of acres of corn and grass land and count his flocks by the thousand.'

Kemp has always linked the character of the colony with his own. His contemplation of its new name moves him to do what he loves best: make a speech. He asks his family to recall the previous occasion when he summoned them – to St David's Cathedral, three years ago. Then it was to celebrate the island's jubilee and the arrival of the last convict ship. At the New Wharf they had eaten slices from a massive cake – 14 feet in diameter and carried by eight men – and sung the national anthem to new words:

But the end of transportation is insignificant compared to the event that brings them here tonight.

During the next two hours he takes his family back over his life. His exploits in the French Revolution; his part in overthrowing the tyrant Bligh; and, most imperishable, his life-altering conversation with George Washington, when he was his guest at the original Mount Vernon. As they all know, Washington's example has governed Kemp's almost every action in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. From the moment when he landed on the beach at Port Dalrymple, he has battled to secure the liberty of the individual and the independence of the new colony. His veneration of Washington has inspired the name of the house in which they are sitting. Also – his eyes grow smaller, graver – the sobriquet by which he is known throughout Van Diemen's Land.

A number of possibilities flash through Arnold's head. He clears his throat. He will be leaving in six months, taking his family to England, and will never return. I hear him stammer: ‘And … and what is that?'