In Tasmania (9 page)

Kennelly's remark set Greenhill, a sailor, thinking. Next morning he brought up the subject of eating one of their companions. ‘He had seen the like done before and that it eat much like a little pork.' It was the ‘custom of the sea'.

Someone started to object. Greenhill stifled his protest by saying that he was happy to eat the first mouthful himself, ‘but you must all lend a hand that we all may be guilty of the crime.' In a whisper, he nominated Dalton, an Irish ex-soldier, who, he claimed, had volunteered as a flogger.

At three in the morning, Greenhill crept over to the snoring Dalton and crashed down the axe on his neck. He signalled for Travers to apply the skills that he had learned as a shepherd in New Norfolk. ‘Travers took a knife, cut his throat with it and bled him,' according to Pearce in his testimony. ‘We then dragged the body to a distance, cut off his clothes, tore his insides out and cut off his head. Then Matthew Travers and Greenhill put his heart and liver on the fire to broil, but took them off and cut them before they were right hot. They asked the rest would they have any, but we would not eat any that night. Next morning the body was cut up and divided into equal parts, which we took and proceeded on our journey a little after sun rise.'

Revolted by the violence that his remark had triggered, Kennelly and another convict offered to carry the tin-pots and go ahead. They had walked 300 yards when they melted into the bush. Greenhill stopped and ‘coo-eed', but no answer. The two men made it back to Sarah Island, and died in the prison hospital without revealing that the dry pieces of meat in their pockets were human.

Dalton's flesh had given Mather, a baker from Dumfries, an upset stomach. (More so than its female counterpart, male flesh is deficient in carbohydrates.) Constantly having to stop to drop his trousers, Mather was appalled to discover that he had lost the tinder that Greenhill had given him with orders to keep it dry, and which he had stuck inside his shirt. Travers raised the axe and said he would kill him if he did not find it. Mather discovered it down his trouser leg, and a fire was made.

Lots were cast. This time it was the turn of an English labourer, Thomas Bodenham. He requested a few minutes to pray for his ‘past offences' and was left alone, looking into the fire, when Greenhill attacked him. He split Bodenham's skull and after removing his shoes – they were more comfortable than Greenhill's – he rolled the body over for Travers to butcher.

Eighteen years later, James Erskine Calder was trekking through Wombat Glen when he discovered several articles ‘in the last stages of decay' in the hollow of an old gum tree: an old yellow pea-jacket, boots, a broken pot and a large gimlet. Possibly they had belonged to Mather, next to die.

Refusing to eat more of Bodenham, Mather boiled up a tea of fern roots in the hope of quelling his stomach, but the brew made him vomit, and as he retched, Greenhill, ‘still showing his spontaneous habit of bloodshed', struck him on the head. The blow was not strong enough. Mather leaped up, shouting ‘You won't see me killed!' and grabbed his axe. They walked on in an uneasy file, Mather nursing his bruised skull, his bowels rumbling and his ergot-fed paranoia fanned by the close relationship of Travers and Greenhill. ‘They had a respect for each other,' Pearce said, ‘which they often showed to each other.' As Mather sat warming himself by the fire, the pair came forward to throw more wood on it, and jumped on him.

After wolfing down Mather, the three survivors – Greenhill, Travers and Pearce – stretched out beside the fire and slept off the ‘sumptuous feast'.

On they went, crawling and tottering across the dolerite mountains of the Central Highlands and scattering kangaroos and wombats that looked back at them from between the snow gums. Then Travers was bitten by a tiger-snake. His foot swelled up and he lolled in and out of consciousness, bleeding from the ears. In lucid moments he begged Greenhill to leave him behind. His pleas took on a hysterical tone after he overheard Greenhill mutter that it would be ridiculous to abandon him, ‘for his flesh would answer as well for Subsistance as the others'. Greenhill refused, and with Pearce's help dragged the man – who had become, in effect, their larder – to the Nive River. A non-swimmer, like many convicts, Travers clung to a log and was pulled across. But his foot had turned black. Unable to walk another step, he was killed by his mentor who ‘was much affected by this horrid scene and stood quite motionless to see one who had been his companion'. His contemplation over, Greenhill dissected and ate him. He advised Pearce that the thick part of the arms tasted best.

Two men remained. His stomach filled with his lover, Greenhill did not dare let go his axe or fall asleep. He watched Pearce over the fire and Pearce through hazel-blue eyes watched him, ‘never trusting myself near him, particularly at night'. In the end, Greenhill's eyes drooped first. Pearce inched closer, slid the axe from under his head, ‘and struck him with it'.

The consumption of Greenhill's thigh and arm induced in Pearce a nightmare worthy of inclusion in Michael Howe's ‘dream journal'. He felt Greenhill staring at him and screamed: ‘Come out, you bastard, and face me.' Staggering into a pasture of sheep, he grabbed a lamb by its throat and was devouring it raw when he felt a ring of cold steel pressing into his head. The musket belonged to a convict stockman. Pearce had been walking for 49 days.

Brought up again before Knopwood, Pearce damned Greenhill and Travers for having introduced him to an appetite that had grown with the eating. Knopwood didn't believe a word: Pearce's ‘depraved' confession was manifestly a cover story to protect his mates – presumably still at large. Accusing him of ‘being in possession of stolen sheep', Knopwood ordered Pearce back to Sarah Island, where he escaped a year later, and in a fit of rage at a companion who could not swim, ate another convict. His sixth.

Pearce was hanged in Hobart in July 1824, one month after Sorell departed on the
Guildford.
But the story of his cannibalism haunted the island, and embedded itself into the Tasmanian psyche. No name-change could erase the power of it, any more than changing its name to Carnarvon would exorcise Port Arthur, or drowning a lake would obliterate the memory of Lake Pedder. In the image of Pearce and Greenhill eyeing each other over the coals was hatched a sense of Van Diemen's Land stalking Tasmania, ready to gobble it up. Until well into the twentieth century, down even the most innocent-looking country lane, there was the feeling that a dark shadow was ready to step out from the hedge and wrap its arm around you.

JUST WHEN I HAD DECIDED THAT I WOULD HAVE TO FIND ANOTHER
builder, Peter turned up. He was a broad, handsome man with blue, twinkling eyes, thick wavy grey hair, and the trace of a Scottish accent. He reckoned the animals pissing over my head were possums, and was confident that their smell would disappear once he had fitted wire over the gutters and cleared Helen's paintings from the roof.

I left him to his work and drove to Hobart. I was still threading my way through Kemp's life.

Arriving at dusk, I parked on the waterfront and went and had a fish and chips in The Drunken Admiral, where Kemp's warehouse had once stood. The trevalla was fresh off the boats, and eating it I could not help feeling a twinge on Potter's behalf to think how, a decade after his return to the island as a bankrupt, Kemp was riding about this wharf on a small pony and being greeted as ‘the principal merchant of Hobart'. All because of Potter's loan – which he never repaid – Kemp owned not only a schooner and this stone warehouse on the wharf, but a country estate of 2,000 acres, a house on Collins Street (built of ‘valuable stone and brick walls'), and a store in Macquarie Street that provided the colony with a range of English and European goods, as well as most of the wine and spirits consumed in Van Diemen's Land.

By the mid-1820s Kemp had reached the apogee of his power. His advertisements in the
Hobart Town Gazette
signalled his return to prosperity. He sold gentlemen's superfine hats, ladies' gloves, boxes of eau de cologne, chintz bed laces, mottled soap, butter in jars, Westphalia hams, Berlin chairs, cut wine glasses, cream jugs, ‘ornamental china of all descriptions' and ‘Jamaica rum of the strongest proof and finest quality'. He arranged tickets and freight on boats to England, and packed the holds with his sealskins, whale oil and wool. Kemp and his partner enriched themselves, but ‘they were none the less invaluable to the colonists,' wrote a local historian. ‘Through them came the ploughs and axletrees, window glass and tools, among the thousand and one articles needed in a new country.'

Who were Kemp's clients? The population had quadrupled since his arrival. In 1824, there were 12,556 Europeans, of whom 6,261 were convicts (5,790 male and 471 female). It continued to grow under Sorell's successor, the Evangelical bureaucrat George Arthur. His project was to organise Van Diemen's Land into a penal settlement so strict and efficient that it would function as a deterrent to criminals in Britain; at the same time, he worked tirelessly – using the bait of free land and free convict labour – to bring in a ‘more respectable class of Settlers than the early emigrants to Van Diemen's Land' – i.e. than Kemp. For twelve years, Arthur strived to maintain what the historian Peter Chapman calls this ‘dynamic balance'. Kemp did not take to him at all. On Arthur's recall, he would write a memorial to the Secretary of State thanking him for freeing the colony from the ‘tyrannical Lieutenant Governor Arthur'.

Among those whom Arthur tempted into settling were several respectable Protestant families from Northern Ireland, a group of retired army officers from India, a shipload of 150 mechanics and, rather less useful, 76 paupers sent by the Bristol Guardians of the Poor. Convict families were given a free passage as were a number of single young women, who were lured by the opportunities of becoming farm servants, milliners and wives. Early Van Diemen's Land was a colonial society so top-heavy with men that at a ball in Hobart in 1821, 150 bachelors were compelled to dance the polka – with each other. Selected by Mrs Elizabeth Fry and a committee of ladies working for the London Female Penitentiary and Refuge for the Destitute, 1,280 women arrived over three years to balance the ratio, although contemporary moralists declared that the free-immigrant women were often more depraved than the convicts. Practically all of these people beat a path to Kemp's shop.

Kemp's prickly character meant that he ran through several business partners. His first partner complained: ‘He was always an obstinate fellow; thought no person knew any thing but himself.' Kemp saw no reason why the colony should not be governed like his store.

The success of his various mercantile activities put Kemp in a strong position to interfere in the state's affairs. His wealth had bought him social and political prominence. ‘In no part of the world were riches more honoured than in Van Diemen's Land,' wrote Lloyd Robson, ‘no matter how they had been secured.' By 1825, Kemp the former bankrupt was President of the Bank of Van Diemen's Land, Vice-President of the Agricultural Society, and, most significantly, chairman of the movement to procure separation from New South Wales.

During Arthur's ‘tyrannical' rule, Kemp became ringleader of a group of radicals, such as George Meredith, a cantankerous landowner on the east coast, who opposed the smallest interference in their affairs. These men did not want to recreate a colony that was simply like ‘home': they chafed to make it ‘home' as it ought to have been, a society where the settler oligarchy was in the saddle. They championed political liberalism and representative politics just so long as it was their interests that were being represented. One man who got in their way remarked that they ‘concentrated in themselves such an assemblage of talent and seditious spite that their very breath seemed to threaten poor me, an individual and a convict to boot, with destruction'. How many of the group were fellow masons it is hard to tell, but all had something in common with Kemp's friend Robert Lathrop Murray, who was described in 1826 by the
Hobart Town Gazette
as ‘self first, self last, self middle, without end'. Their ultimate ambition was to transfer power from Britain – and its ‘evil genius' on the spot, George Arthur – to themselves.

To this end, Kemp chaired public meetings at the Hobart Court House arguing for an elected Legislative Council. On behalf of ‘the Free Inhabitants of this Colony', he petitioned Arthur for a system of trial by jury; also, on behalf of all merchants and traders, for a reduction in taxes on tea and wines. He wrote letters to the press in Hobart and in London under the pseudonym ‘Scrutator' or ‘A correspondent'. Most took their tone from the journalist on the
True Colonist
who announced in May 1836: ‘Governor Arthur is ordered home!!! … We now have a prospect of breathing.'

Kemp and his group caused such ructions that Arthur warned the Colonial Office: ‘There are some busy characters in this Colony whose whole happiness appears to consist of making trouble; there is, for instance, a Mr Kemp who is continually writing, as he says himself, to his friends … and to 20 other persons, misrepresenting every circumstance, and framing statements, either for the purpose of being communicated to your Department, through different channels, or, of appearing in some of the London Papers as the effusion of “a Correspondent”.'

Kemp's ‘despicable manoeuvring' may have had some effect – at least in Kemp's eyes – and on December 3, 1825, Van Diemen's Land was proclaimed constitutionally independent from New South Wales. This was a start, but it was not enough. Three weeks later, the man who had blackened the names of Governor King, Governor Bligh, Lieutenant Governor Davey and Lieutenant Governor Sorell, led a petition in favour of a free press, in which he expressed ‘the natural abhorrence which Englishmen invariably feel against personal vituperation and slander'. He declared: ‘Where the Laws of England extend, there also are the Rights of Englishmen enjoyed.' His petition was successful. Arthur was ordered by London to relax his censorship law.

Inch by inch, Flashman was becoming Prince Albert.

In the same year, Kemp chaired a banquet in Stodart's Hotel to celebrate George IV's birthday. ‘We are bound to say that a more numerous, respectable or social party never assembled in Van Diemen's Land,' wrote the
Hobart Town Gazette
. The Lieutenant Governor could not attend, but Arthur's place was ‘admirably occupied' by A.F. Kemp Esq. ‘And but one spirit prevailed at the banquet – the spirit of patriotic happiness.' After dinner, Kemp rose under a salute of 21 guns fired from the
Governor Phillip
, and proposed the first bumper toast: ‘The King lives in our hearts by the Constitutional liberty which under his beneficent sway we all enjoy.' He proposed a further toast to ‘the Ladies of Van Diemen's Land' and to ‘Van Diemen's Land', after which the band struck up ‘This Tight Little Island'.

Then in 1826 he almost went under.