In Tasmania (40 page)

The storm was felt throughout the whole island. Lightning killed a boy on a horse, toppled chimneys and ‘struck with the electric fluid' a girl sewing a shirt. But nothing matched the viciousness of its impact on Swansea.

On the night of Sunday, November 3, the
Resolution
arrived off Waterloo Point and by 11 p.m. had managed to drop anchor. As day broke, Quested, the ship's owner, told Large to prepare his family to disembark. His wife and children assembled on deck, dressed and ready for the sailors to carry them ashore. A crewman measured the water's depth with an oar: only three feet. But with the heavy sea and the wind blowing they decided to wait another hour. The wind blew harder, the rough surf making the children ill. A second anchor was lowered to prevent the ship dragging. Finally, Mrs Large said: ‘The children are untidy. Wait until morning.'

They lay, fully clothed, in their bunks listening to the wind howl and the ship straining at her chains. At 12.50 a.m., Large got up to check that his children were all right. He had returned to bed when he heard the rudder grating on the bottom – then a roar. Water was gushing into the ship. He yelled to Quested, but getting no answer ran up on deck where a sailor told him the vessel had sprung a leak in the stern and there was no pump that could save her. Minutes later one of the anchor chains snapped and the
Resolution
ran onto the shore.

Thomas Large bustled Mary, their children and his servant John Drinkwater up to the bow and wrapped them with blankets, but the vessel was tilting to one side and the sea washing over the decks with such force ‘that the blankets were swept away and we were obliged to hold the children. It was then breaking daylight.'

Large remembered with bitterness to the end of his life how none of the four sailors made any attempt to lash any of his children to the ship, nor offer to piggyback them ashore – even though the beach was only 50 yards away. ‘Each person was trying to save himself in confusion and danger.'

All this time the wind was increasing and the sea ‘coming more over'. One sailor swam to the beach with a rope but failed to find anything to which he could tie it. Two sailors launched a dinghy that smashed against the hull. They continued swimming until their legs touched sand. The owner's behaviour was the most shocking. He had retreated to the bow. ‘Mr Quested though called upon both by myself and wife to assist in holding the children he did not offer to do so. After sitting there for some time he left the vessel and I believe swam to the shore.'

Soon all the crew had abandoned ship except the cook, ‘who could hardly keep himself up', and Joseph Stanley, the old captain of the
Resolution
, who thrust his foot against the windlass ‘and after much persuasion did lay hold of one of the children'.

Large and his wife took care of the two youngest. His servant Drinkwater looked after the remaining three. Drinkwater told the inquest: ‘I held the three children in my arms as long as I could and as long as they were alive … I had the eldest boy, the eldest girl and I don't know which of the other children it was I had.'

But the storm was greater than ever. Large remembered: ‘The vessel all this time kept turning on her side more and more and the sea washing right over us, the children then became very weak and we kept hold of them as long as we could with one hand being obliged to hold on ourselves with the other, until the sea washed them away from the different persons who had hold of them.'

Drinkwater said: ‘I saw the old man they call the sailing master of the vessel with one child in his arms. It died in his arms alongside of me. I also saw the mother of the children with a child in her arms. I saw Mr Quested the master of the vessel in the bowsprit of the vessel, he had not a child in his arms.' He believed: ‘The children perished by the sea breaking upon them and I am sure they were dead before I parted with them … I then found it necessary to use all my strength to hold on myself.'

Stanley agreed that ‘the fury of the sea' had caused the death of the little girl he was trying to protect. ‘She perished in my arms and I held her for ten minutes after she was dead.'

Next to him, Large also had one of his children expire in his arms. ‘The one I had was quite lifeless some time before it was washed away.'

He looked through the wind and spray. A crowd had assembled on the beach. Desperate, he thought that if he could swim ashore he would be able to get hold of a boat to save his wife. ‘I jumped into the water.'

 

Four days later, Joseph Stanley recalled the events of that morning at the inquest in the Swansea Hotel: ‘I have been nearly 50 years at sea and I never experienced worse weather for the time it lasted nor saw a vessel and people in a more dangerous position.' Among those who watched helpless from the shoreline was Swansea's magistrate Edward Carr Shaw, an uncle of the playwright George Bernard Shaw.
¹¹
He became so distressed at the sight of the family clinging to the wreck that he shouted: ‘A free pardon to any one who would take a line out.' Responding to a promise that Shaw had no authority to make, a ticket-of-leave man plunged into the sea – and was washed back three times. Meanwhile, Captain Lyons had fetched a four-oared whaleboat on a cart and he ordered six convicts to row out and rescue Mrs Large, who now had been hanging on to the rigging for twelve hours. The boat was only a short way out when the breakers swamped it. The men refused to go a second time. As Shaw's grandson told it: ‘The captain then went in the bush and got a big stick called a waddie and told the men to man the boat again and the first one that refused he would knock his brains out, so they made another start, and reached the wreck and rescued the mother.'

 

Mrs Large was carried by cart to George Meredith's house, Cambria. She travelled beside her unconscious husband. When Large came to, he said: ‘My poor children.'

The next day Drinkwater found bobbing in the waves the body of one of the boys he had held on deck. The corpse was ‘much mutilated', according to the doctor who examined it, but from their appearance the wounds had been inflicted ‘after life had become extinct' and were caused by the body ‘being jammed between parts of the wreck or driven against any hard substance'. One by one the other bodies turned up on Nine Mile Beach, all except one.

They were laid out for Large to identify in the Swansea Hotel. ‘I have seen the dead bodies of five of my children lying in the adjoining room to this in which I now am and I have recognised them, their names are as follows, Elizabeth Large, my eldest daughter [12], Edmund James Large, my eldest son [10], Hannah Large, my second daughter [6], George Large, my third son [4] and Frances Mary Large my youngest child [2]. My second son William's body [6] I have not seen, I believe it has not yet been found.'

After recovering at Meredith's house, he and his wife left Swansea. A memorial in the north-west corner of the graveyard overlooks the bay in which their children drowned. Painted white and covered with seashells, it has this inscription:

But the story did not end there. More than six decades later, in April 1918, an old lady walked into the cemetery, looking for the memorial. Clara Travers had waited all her life to visit the beach where her siblings had drowned. She had been born to Thomas and Mary Large in November 1851, one year after the shipwreck.

Clara wrote a diary of her visit:

‘We soon found it. You could read all that was on it quite plainly. Tried to find someone to paint the stone next day but could not get anyone anywhere, then went along jetty and watched breakers coming in, it was a grand sight … An old couple pointed out where it happened and said it was visible at very low tides.'

The grave was covered with grass and gorse bushes. Clara asked permission from the rector to tidy it up. He lent her a spade and her husband William cleaned the rubbish off and righted the headstone. ‘While he was doing that I went to the beach which is close by and gathered some shells and put them on the grave in the form of an anchor and pruned the hedges, it looked very nice when done.'

‘April 11 in afternoon. Went to see Mr Shaw. Only three when it happened, but could remember his grandfather talking about it.' Shaw told them about the boat that had rescued her mother. ‘I don't know how father was saved but he was a splendid swimmer. They had been going to [Swansea] to open a brewery and they lost everything they had. Five of the children's bodies were washed on shore but one was never found … Returned to tea after spending a very sad day.'

‘April 13. Sat on beach till dinner time.'

‘April 14. Had dinner then went on the Nine Mile Beach to see if we could find the wreck but could see no signs of it. Walked about 5 miles there.'

I expect she was told the stories. The woman who vowed always to keep a lighted candle in the window of Schouten House so that the children could find their way home. The servant girl who had woken, 40 years later, to see an angel with a golden candlestick standing at her bed. The wan light that sometimes appeared in the window ‘that even the gales of winter cannot extinguish'. But Clara left Swansea before she could hear the most tantalising story, about her missing brother William – the eight-year-old whose body was never recovered.

I found it handwritten on a scrap of paper dated February 2, 1946. A memory recorded at Lisdillon by Sarah Mitchell, about her brother Edwin, who lived at Mayfield. ‘About 1920 a man came to him with a pack on his back and told him he was the boy that was saved in the sailor's arms, said he was going to see his brothers' and sisters' graves.'

 

All that remains of the
Resolution
is a rusty anchor and the occasional scrap of brass or china plate that a storm tosses up.

I ask Max if he wants to keep his piece of blue and white willow-pattern, but he would rather play ducks and drakes. I send it skimming out, towards where the Freycinet Peninsula ends in a full stop in the Tasman Sea. It bounces on the water – once, twice, a third time – and sinks back to its proper place among the rest of Large's possessions.

We walk back along our footprints that the sea has not washed away and not for the first time do I have the feeling that I am following the tracks of a strange backward-walking creature.

1

THE OLD MAN WAS ALSO CALLED MAX. HE WAS 77, HAD THE SAME
wide forehead and piercing eyes as his namesake, and was six foot tall. But a midget compared to his brothers. ‘Our family are
big
,' he said.

‘What else can you tell me about them?' I asked.

‘My father was a good sample of a Chatwin: he could turn his hand to anything, mend boots, cut firewood, make fences. He'd love to be out in the bush. Another thing Chatwins seem to like were bees. Quite a few were bee-keepers. My father had 70 hives.'

‘Anything else?'

He laughed: ‘Most of them lost their hair early in life. But you should speak to my wife. She's written a book about them.'

When I first came to Tasmania I had just finished writing a long biography, seven years' work on one man, the writer and traveller Bruce Chatwin, and I was burned out. One of the attractions of Tasmania was that Chatwin, who specialised in the remote, had never been there. The island would be
terra incognita
, unevoked by his writing or my research into his life. Tasmania's freshness – its wind and its light – might empty me of the biographer's condition: that dull abstraction brought on by many months in the shade of old documents.

That something is 200 years old does not make it interesting. My time in the archives had taught me the frustration of going through the letters of the dead. We want the dead to reveal to us what they did not reveal in life, some confessional strain they had kept hidden from the world. More often than not what we exhume are the random husks of their everyday lives: barely legible wishes for good health, hellos, how are you's, thank you's, numbing résumés of the day got through – and scattered among them faded receipts and photos without dates or names.

I was, at that period, sick of a life already lived. I hoped never to read another old letter again. I had planned to stay a week.

But in coming to Tasmania to get as far away as I could from where I knew – and in particular from Chatwin – I found a house and a story that was my own. Perhaps it was inevitable that I should also discover, five miles from North Motton, in the village of Kindred, so called because everyone was related, an entire hamlet of Chatwins.

I could not arrest my need to make patterns whatever banalities it turned up, and I contacted the head of the family. Max Chatwin was one of 37 Chatwins listed in the directory for north-west Tasmania. He told me that they descended from his grandfather Alfred, a prophet-bearded, manic-eyed Yorkshireman who ran away to sea when he was 14 and jumped ship in Victoria to join the Gold Rush. Not making his fortune, Alfred drifted across Bass Strait in 1857 and married a 19-year-old Norfolk girl, Elizabeth Pearmain, who drove a horse and buggy and was ‘handy with the whip'. In 1862, they bought a farm in Swamp Road above Kindred where Alfred built a cottage with his own hands. They had 11 children and 114 grandchildren and were buried side by side in a white marble grave in Kindred, right next to the Lehmans.

Alfred's messianic face looked out from the cover of the thick book self-published by Max's wife. Entitled
Chatwin: 6 generations in Tasmania
, it was prefaced with a quote from Edmund Burke:

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

I knew as soon as I opened it that I would find Kemps. With the discovery that Myrtle Ilma Chatwin had married William Lott Clifford Kemp in 1903 I resolved – then and there – to stop rootling about in the family tree.

2

Among his family in England, Kemp was popularly reputed to have reached the age of 112. He lived, in fact, to 95, but his declining years were uneventful. Perhaps it is that after Potter washed his hands of him a certain fire had gone out of Kemp. Once Tasmania achieved self-government he found no further project to challenge his energies.

‘It is impossible to epitomise this cranky, intolerant, courageous man, half-buccaneer, half-patriot, half-capitalist – the arithmetic seems appropriate.' So Murray Kemp, one of his descendants, tried to assess a personality that was prone to bursting out of its seams. The level-headed George Boyes was aware of just how much Kemp's character had left its mark on Tasmania, to such an extent that colony and colonist at times appeared inseparable. In February 1845, Boyes encountered Kemp's son George. ‘He spoke of the state of Society here – apparently without being aware of the part some members of his family have been said to play in the proceedings.'

Kemp saw himself as the Father of Tasmania, but Boyes considered him ‘a great Ass'. One of the few anecdotes about Kemp as an old man was told by his seven-year-old granddaughter Louise.

‘Lou?'

‘Yes, Granddad, what is it?'

‘Lou, Lou, come buckle my shoe.'

‘Oh, oh, grandfather.'

Later.

‘Lou?'

‘Yes, Granddad?'

‘Lou, Lou, come buckle my shoe.'

Repeated several times.

‘Lou!'

‘I am not coming!'

‘What a pity. I had a golden sovereign waiting to give to you but as you did not come you will not get it.'

This sounded characteristic Kemp behaviour, but then I discovered that in his last days – as an invalid being pushed around Hobart – he was known as ‘Dollar Kemp', after his habit of dispensing coins to alarmed passers-by from his wheelchair.

Kemp died on October 28, 1868. He was buried in the Albuera Street Cemetery opposite The Bertrams, his town house in Hobart, and just down from where Bridie O'Reilly's bottle shop now is. In 1936, he was still within living memory, remembered by a man who called him ‘a Jewish type'. In the late 1940s, the cemetery was concreted over and a primary school built in its place. I asked a teacher where his body was likely to be and she took me out into the playground and pointed at the base of a basketball hoop. ‘He's underneath us.'

A class of ten-year-olds finished playing hopscotch over his bones and filed out beneath a large sign that Potter might have nailed above the courtyard for Kemp to contemplate:

 

Think … is it fair?

Is it safe?

Does it show respect?

 

Despite his 18 children, he has now no descendants called Kemp in Tasmania. Today, his first house in Hobart is occupied by Madame Korner's beauty college and a hearing-aid retailer. His gravestone has disappeared. Almost all that is left of him are some letters in a yellow plastic bag.

 

In the early 1930s, about the time that Merle Oberon was shedding her Indian skin and becoming a pure white Tasmanian, Kemp's great-great-grandson – Aldous Huxley's brother – was seeking to demonstrate that ‘there was no such thing as a “pure race” anywhere in the world'.

Julian Sorell Huxley planned
We Europeans
as a scientific spoke in Hitler's wheel and to expose the German leader's nonsensical rantings about ‘the dangers of contaminating the purity of the so-called Aryan race'. Hitler's concepts of race were based on self-interest and wish-fulfilment, and they were dangerously wrong. (The word ‘Arya' was Sanskrit anyway, and used to distinguish the speakers of certain Indian languages.) In his counterblast to
Mein Kampf
, Huxley attacked the Nazis for their ‘vast pseudo-science of “racial biology”', which had turned the Jews into a colonial people within Europe.

All humans were of mixed descent, Huxley wrote, and all great nations ‘melting pots of race', the results of the amalgamations of many tribes and of many waves of immigration. ‘Man's incurable and increasing propensity to wander over the face of the globe had effected a thorough mixing between the hypothetical primary sub-species long before the dawn of the historic period.' Not even the Tasmanian Aborigines could be said to have been pure. ‘Even in its state of maximum isolation, such a group will certainly have contained many genes derived from other similar groups.'

Huxley was particularly scathing about family trees cherished by genealogists like Ivy, in which a family was traced back to a single founder and their spouse. These trees had little to do with biological heredity: ‘They are social not genetic documents.' The whole point was that ‘our ancestry will diverge as well as converge as we trace it back.'

 

I do not doubt that if I had come to another place – shall we say Idaho? – I would have found exciting cousin upon cousin. The clearances that devastated Scotland, the famines and unemployment that devastated Ireland and Wales, gave life to New Zealand and Patagonia. Icelanders made their way to Brazil and Lake Winnipeg. New York and Buenos Aires and Sydney were ceaselessly reinvigorated by new arrivals from across the ocean, by Lebanese, Italians, Germans, Greeks, escaping potato blight, volcanic eruptions, the English. Or yielding to the mutton-bird instinct that Chatwin had understood – in his case it was an arctic tern – and that Huxley had characterised as: ‘Man's incurable and increasing propensity to wander over the face of the globe.'

By coming to Tasmania, I had repeated the pattern of two hitherto undreamed-of relatives and the discovery pleased me in a profound and mysterious way. However tenuous, they linked me to this place. They reminded me that life was not a string of arbitrary events. That there were, if you like, no accidents.

3

I drove up a cul-de-sac and parked outside a red brick bungalow next to a church. I could tell by the front garden which was their house. Maud's White Ladies bloomed in pots along one wall, and the beds were bursting with tall phlox, tulips and daffodils. I was looking at
Wishing-Well Lane
.

I rang the two-tone organ bell and watched Ivy's shape grow towards me through a frosted glass door that had a stork engraved on it. I had missed by only a few moments a visit from one of her neighbours. The woman had popped in to say that Ivy's garden put them all to shame. ‘She had a husband she had to get back to. I told her, “We don't have that problem.”'

Ivy unfastened the chain. As soon as I stepped inside, I recognised the ceramic plates, the dolls, the photographs of Petre Hordern and Boode.

She showed me over the house. It was spacious, with rooms leading off one another and three doors into the garden.

‘What do you like most about it?'

‘The chains,' she smiled. ‘They make us feel secure.'

The move from North Motton to Ulverstone had been painless. Eleven cousins had welcomed them with doughnuts and cakes, and Heather, her twin, had lent the sisters a mattress so that they would not have to sleep on the floor.

We went into the kitchen where Heather was talking to Maud, and Ivy introduced us.

A train went by, shaking the windows. Ivy pulled a face. She had been here six months, but after living in the country nearly 80 years she was still adjusting to town noises. She noticed that an ambulance nearly always drove by when she was having her tea in the afternoon. ‘So that must be a stressful time.'

‘Car doors banging, that's the worst thing,' Maud said.

‘What else is different?' I asked.

‘You got a few more people looking at you,' Ivy said. ‘Maudy won't go out in front to do the garden. She keeps to the back with her vegetables. You should see them. They're that big, her pumpkins.'

In their first fortnight, Ivy and Maud had left their property only twice – to buy groceries. Since neither sister drove, Ivy had telephoned Mr Jones and he had taken them in his taxi to the supermarket two streets away. ‘We wouldn't get far without taxis! You meet a lot of people and you hear things.'

‘Really?'

‘Mr Jones said to us: “You ought to go somewhere.” We said, “We don't dare – in case we like it.”'

They had been back twice to Boode. Ivy evidently disapproved of certain changes that her nephew was making, being especially taken aback by the gnomes. ‘It's
not
a gnome garden!'

But a surprise awaited her in Ulverstone. Ivy had employed Greg Lehman's first cousin Dean to landscape their new garden. One afternoon Dean was clearing the front patio when his excavator unearthed a small brightly coloured figure. ‘He's only a little bloke,' Ivy said. ‘I sat him up on the cement. I've heard that if you take a gnome from where he's living, it's no good.'