The Road to McCarthy (28 page)

He had been on Maria Island for two years, during which time parliament had passed a bill granting representative government to Van Diemen’s Land. No such proposal had been made for Ireland.

The haze has lifted
and the sun has come out, lighting up the wooded mountains and the white tops on the Mediterranean-blue sea. I walk back to the Commissariat stores, then up the hill behind them. According to the map, the island’s cemetery is on a hill up here; beyond it are spectacular fossil-encrusted cliffs.

At the top of the hill is a convict-built brick barn full of decaying farm tools and four wooden-shafted pony carts with rusted steel wheel rims. Everything is covered in feathers and droppings. There’s no sign of any chickens, so I suppose it must be down to the geese. It says on the map that
Cape Barren geese were in danger of extinction in the 1950s and are still one of the rarest breeds in the world, with just 16,000 remaining. A hundred of them are here, eating grass and laying eggs. “Each pair of geese establishes a territory in autumn, prepares a nest site and defends it noisily and determinedly against other geese.” It doesn’t say anything about them being aggressive to humans, but in my experience you can never be too careful. A pub I know used to have a guard goose to keep burglars away. Vicious bastard, according to the brute who owned the place, and he should know.

I can see about a dozen of them as I head across the tussocky grass towards the cemetery, which is silhouetted against the ocean and mountains of the mainland. They’ve got pretty gray plumage and vivid pink legs, and each one looks about big enough to feed a family of ten. I’m just passing a big red boulder that’s protruding from the grass when two geese pop up about thirty or forty yards in front of me, directly between me and the cemetery. My track record with wild animals, or domestic ones for that matter, isn’t good, and as a general rule I think it’s best always to be afraid of them unless you have good reason not to be; yet these guys don’t look at all menacing, and I’m finding it exhilarating to walk among such rare creatures in so dramatic a setting while breathing the cleanest air in the world.

Hang on though. One of them has just done a couple of funny little hops; and now it’s flying close to the ground like a smart missile or low-level bomber, flying fast and straight and true, and directly at me, its suddenly vicious beak aimed at my throat like a feathery bayonet as it lets rip a banshee screech. Look, I didn’t mean it about the family of ten; these thoughts just pop into my head and I don’t have any control over them. I’m sorry. It was in very poor taste. It’s landed now, digging its evil-looking heels into the turf like the roadrunner trying to slow down, but it’s still coming at me on foot, and I’m thinking you wouldn’t want a peck in the groin from the bugger, beak like teak I expect, with all that foraging. They say swans can break your arm, don’t they; so there’s no knowing what this evil fecker might do. Forget the cemetery. Sod the fossils. I’m going back to the jetty.

I turn on my heel, blindly trusting that an endangered goose must be a
liberal at heart who supports other good causes and so wouldn’t be sneaky enough to attack a man from behind, when I notice something strange about the red boulder.

It appears to be trying to stand up.

It’s on its back legs now, and it’s as big as me.
At least
as big as me. I’m caught in a pincer movement between a psychotic goose and a kangaroo whose sleep has just been disturbed, and I’m not sure of the survival etiquette. The kangaroo is just standing there trying to stare me out, and I’m looking at him, imagining him with boxing gloves on. I’m shocked at their ingratitude, ganging up on a human after all we’ve done for them. I’ve often thought that conservation is wasted on animals. You wouldn’t mind so much if they showed some sign of appreciating it. The goose has stopped advancing now, and the three of us are just standing here like chess pieces, waiting for someone to make the next move. It’ll have to be me. Tasmania’s been freaking me out enough already without being on the wrong end of a good pecking and thumping. I take two steps back. They don’t do anything. Two more. Nothing. Good. Anyway, seen one graveyard, seen them all really, and fossils are just very old. I turn and walk back towards the barn.

A couple of hundred yards away the schoolboys are marching breezily towards the fossil cliffs. I hope the Khaki Hermaphrodite knows what he/she’s doing. I wouldn’t like to be the one having to face the parents and tell them that little Daryl has been maimed by an endangered species.

Back at the car park on the other side of the water I’m still rattled, and spend five minutes trying to unlock the wrong rental car. I don’t think anyone notices. I wouldn’t want people to think I’m not fit to be let out on my own.

The Freycinet Peninsula
is supposed to be one of the most spectacular places in Tasmania, and as it’s only a couple of hours’ drive up the coast I figure I might as well take a look.

The drive alone is worth the trip. The road hugs the coastline, and as you head north the views of Maria give way to the open spaces of the Tasman Sea before the peninsula appears like a distant island on the other side
of Great Oyster Bay. This is the most beautiful landscape—to the European eye at least—I’ve seen so far, less brooding and threatening than the west and without all that rather worrying forest. I love the place names on the signs: Old Man Creek, Spiky Beach, Horse Poo, though the last one turns out not to be a place but produce for sale at the entrance to a stud farm.

On a lonely stretch of road I slam on the brakes and go into reverse so I can check if I’ve seen what I think I’ve seen. Hanging by laces and baler twine on a wire fence at the edge of a rolling meadow are fifty or sixty shoes: a lime-green jelly sandal, two nonmatching wellies, a ski boot, three assorted kids’ trainers, a range of flip-flops, plain shoes, shoes like dead pigs’ noses, a hush puppy, a green Doc Marten, a brown Blundstone boot, a fur-lined pink slipper and a rubber wader impaled upside down on a fence post. There are more shoes than I’ve seen people all day. Just when you think Tasmania has calmed down and stopped being weird, something like this happens to unsettle you. There’s no explanation, no acknowledgment, no sign of human life or habitation in any direction. Who’s done it? What can it mean? Is it in any way connected to the mystery of the roadkill?

I’m passing a field full of strange spiky clumps of grass that look like Mohican haircuts, as if someone has buried a couple of hundred punks—perhaps that was a roadside shrine and those were their shoes—when I see a guy hitch-hiking. He isn’t carrying any visible weapons, so I pull over and pick him up. He’s a nineteen-year-old German called Andreas, and he makes me feel like an old fart in a rental car. Andreas is cycling around Australia. He’s been doing it for four months, camping every night in a little tent on his own, unless he’s lying and he goes to orgies in the campsite table-tennis room with all the other cyclists. Something’s not quite right though.

He hasn’t got a bicycle.

“I do not like to cycle the same road two times. So if I must go one more time on this road, I hide the bicycle in the bush and hitchhike. Since two days now I am hiding the bike.”

It isn’t easy meeting people in a place as empty as Tasmania, and there have been times when I’ve felt the loneliness getting to me. “You must meet a lot of people,” I say to Andreas, enviously.

“Yes,” he says. “Canadians.”

I rephrase the question because I think he must have misheard, but get the same reply.

“Always in Australia I am meeting Canadians. More times I meet Canadians than Australians. Even Canadians are telling me, they are meeting more Canadians here than in Canada.” He pauses to consider. “I think they have very long winter.”

He asks me to stop on the edge of a wood where he’s hidden the bike. I wonder if he’s ever afraid the bike might be stolen.

“I think people in Tasmania are very honest.”

“Well,” I joke, “perhaps that’s because they’re descended from convicts.”

“Yes,” he agrees, and shakes my hand. “Thank you. Goodbye.”

At the Freycinet Lodge
I have a gorgeous cabin overlooking a twilit beach on which a spherical woman in leggings is doing exercises that look like a cross between t’ai chi and semaphore. It’s possible she may be signaling to another civilization that isn’t visible to the human eye. I get changed for dinner, which is just as well, because there’s a sign on the door of the lodge.

this is a smoke-free zone. dress rules apply. evening attire: collars, neat casual full-length pants. footwear must be worn. no thongs.

Despite their nation’s casual and carefree image, Aussie bars and restaurants seem very big on drumming dress sense into the population. Standards vary according to the location. In Margaret River in Western Australia, near one of the world’s greatest surf beaches, I once saw a sign on a pub door that said no bare feet or chests—singlets and thongs must be worn. Inside, a herd of bare-chested surfies with nothing on their feet were playing pool, watched by a clutch of tattooed teenage girls with babies on their laps. One guy sported a Long John Silver broomstick leg from the knee down, where a shark had bitten off the original. I doubt if there were any shirts or footwear within a twenty-mile radius, but at least the landlord was trying to make a difference. Next time I go they might all be wearing
lightweight two-piece Armani suits and suede loafers. no two-piece suits or loafers, the sign will say. waistcoats and lace-up boots must be worn.

In the last twenty years Australian cuisine has won worldwide acclaim, and rightly so. There are signs, though, that it’s started to go to their heads. Any Australian menu now contains at least one word that you’ve never seen before in your life. The restaurants must be employing experimental linguists to compile them. Tonight’s menu features smoked salmon with a lemon pepper lavroche, oysters with a mango brunoise, and beef served with pommes anna. The fresh catch comes with potato chats accompanied by a gribiche sauce, while the ravioli has a capsicum brunoise. I order a starter of seared scallops instead. They are sensational, the best I’ve ever eaten, so I order them for my main course as well. “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy from Company B” is on the stereo, and the waiter comes round with a pepper grinder as big as Danny DeVito. If you’re ever in the area, pop in. Trust me. You won’t be disappointed.

There’s another sad lonely bastard at the next table, an older guy with a beard who’s eating rare fillet steak bluto with a bora-bora grenouille papadoc lino and a side order of watutsi hucklebuck limedervish splat. It looks good, if a little plain. He picks up on my accent as I’m ordering more scallops for pudding, and immediately strikes up a conversation about rugby.

So Patrick from Sydney and I chat about sports, as men do when what they really want to say is “Help, I’m lonely.” As I’m signing my scallop account, Patrick pours me a glass of the wine he’s been drinking, a chunky-looking red. “Give this a bit of a go,” he says. “Tell me what you think.” I try it, and tell him it’s the best red wine I’ve ever tasted, because it is. “Good on ya,” he says. “Penfolds Bin 389. Best wine in Australia, bar none. Nice talking to ya. G’night.”

As I peer into the darkness from my balcony, trying to see if the woman in leggings is still signaling to the aliens, I’m thinking how much I’ve enjoyed the chat and the human contact. Tasmania is conspicuously emptier than Manhattan, and meeting people isn’t as easy as it is in Rocky Sullivan’s. Normally if you’re traveling on your own in an alcohol-oriented culture you can rely on pubs for a convivial time, but in recent years many
Aussie pubs have been hijacked by the gambling industry, which doesn’t encourage conversation. A friend in Sydney who has always taken great pride in his city’s pubs was telling me that he barely visits them these days because so many have turned into betting shops with small bar attached.

Someone has decided to package drink along with another vice to raise taxes, and sociability no longer gets a look in. keno. tab. oasis. gaming room, said the signs outside a pub I was in the other day. “The management of this venue is pleased to promote responsible gambling for Tasmanians,” said a notice in the gents’. “Gambling problems? If you have a gambling problem in your life, call Gambling Helpline Tasmania, twenty-four hours a day. Press ‘One’ for recorded info, ‘Two’ to speak to an operator, and ‘Three’ if you’d like to have a bit of a bet.”

I’m up bright and early
for breakfast. It’s just a few miles to Wine Glass Bay, a classic curve of sand that’s on all the postcards, but is unlikely to look like paradise in this drizzle. Never mind. I could do with the walk. I head uphill through shrouded forest, striding out over massive pink granite boulders, and quickly develop chest pains and pins and needles in my head. I expect it’s indigestion. Can’t be the wine. Red wine combats heart problems, doesn’t it? I was reading that the French have actually put the contents of red wine in a pill so they can sell it to health fanatics in America who want it because they know it’s good for them, but won’t drink it because they know it’s bad for them.

Apparently the pink granite is unique to Tasmania, and very beautiful it is too. There are gradations as you climb, like steps, so you feel like you’re in the atrium of a very expensive Italian hotel. As I reach the top the boulders are massive, as big as houses, and have gnarled trees with bark like ivory growing out of them. It’s like a fantasy fairy place from a kid’s storybook, with secret hiding places and strange shapes and weird images, as if your subconscious has come to life around you. On an outcrop high above, shaped in the rock, is the perfect form—head, eye, arched back—of a giant iguana gazing down.

I continue the last few yards to the lookout point, and there it is far below
me: turquoise water, white sand, wooded hills, one of the great beaches in the world; and all of it completely invisible because of the mist. I can’t see a thing. I head back to the car and go looking for Mitchel and Meagher.

While O’Brien was under house arrest
on Maria Island, Meagher and Mitchel were enjoying the life of Reilly, Reilly himself being in Mountjoy Jail at the time. Having undertaken not to try and escape, they were free to move at will within their designated areas. They were able to go riding and hunting, rent rooms in hotels and, in Meagher’s case especially, go to the pub. “I must say,” wrote Mitchel, “that the English government, since our conviction, has treated us in a frank, mild, honourable spirit.” Political activism could continue unimpeded, provided it went unseen by the authorities.