The Road to McCarthy (31 page)

We walk over to a barn that’s being converted into a museum. There’s some old machinery and a photograph of the 1907 footie team with the captain in the middle holding the ball and smoking. On the grass outside the barn there’s a large empty cauldron.

“We used to have a whale’s head in here, but someone came in the night and stole it.”

The old mess hall is still intact. He tells me you can rent it along with
the accommodation for weddings and parties. I can see how that might be fun. Hundreds of friends would be very comforting. I’d say it would be an exciting place for couples to stay as well. Romantic. Well, atmospheric. Lots of cuddles in the dark. But on your own? It might be worth trying to pick someone up at the tessellated pavement on your way through. You might be glad of the company.

I had other plans
, but I can’t resist going back to Port Arthur. I’m haunted by so many of the images I found there, and for all I know I may never stray this far south again. I just want a little time to let the enormity of it all settle in, and to see if I can in any way comprehend how it must have been when it was a teeming community of brutalized souls, some of them here for no more than a handkerchief in Shoreditch or a loaf of bread in Galway.

I leave the Model Chapel for the second time and head down to the April 28 memorial. All I remember of that day is the international news coverage of another terrible thing happening in a faraway place. I never imagined I’d ever be here. The tragedy is referred to only obliquely on the site. Discreet notices request visitors not to ask staff about their involvement on the day. The fact of such an event occurring in a place already so emotionally charged is almost inconceivable. I feel obliged to inform myself about what happened. I go to the bookshop, buy a couple of books and sit down in a quiet corner for a long time. I’d come for Smith O’Brien, but his story was immediately superseded by the scale of the narrative I found here: That, in its turn, is now all but obliterated by what happened in 1996.I cannot bring myself to write a full account. Thirty-five people died. The image of the gunman hunting down a five-year-old girl and shooting her where she hid behind a tree will stay with me for the rest of my life. I cannot dignify the perpetrator by naming him. The shock of Port Arthur has been that, like prisons within prisons, one story has been eclipsed by a greater horror, and that in its turn by the greatest horror of all.

Why this place, on all the planet?

On the drive back
to Hobart I stop at Eaglehawk Neck just after dusk. There’s meant to be some sort of sculpted mock dog to represent the saber-toothed halitoxics who once guarded it, but it’s almost dark when I arrive, and there’s no one to ask because the shop’s shut. I stumble about a bit in the fading light, but in a place where people once avoided the dogs, I can’t find one. Defeated, I return to the car. I bought a gloomy-looking Hank Williams CD the other day, and it seems like the right choice for a gradual, mournful readjustment to life outside a prison colony. I turn on the ignition, drive to the edge of the car park and insert the CD into the player before pulling out onto the road.

Nothing. Silence.

I press eject.

Still nothing.

I turn the overhead light on and press eject again. no disc reads the display. Where’s the bloody CD then? I lean forward, and there it is, its edge just visible beyond the rim of the plastic. The problem is, it isn’t in the CD slot. With astonishing aim I’ve somehow managed to shove it into a gap in the plastic molded dashboard where two prefabricated sections meetjust a couple of inches above where it should have gone. First the trauma overload of the last two days, now this. Gently, ever so gently, I pinch my thumb and forefinger together, reach for the CD and nudge it farther into the gap. One more grab, and it disappears entirely into the fabric of the vehicle. Gone. Consumed. Vanished. Digested. The car has eaten Hank Williams. My life is turning into a Stephen King story.

In the last couple of weeks
I’ve slept in more beds than I can count without taking my shoes and socks off. More than once I’ve woken in the night with no idea of where I am and lain there in the dark, trying not to panic, until the realization dawns. I found it strangely comforting to check back into the hotel on the pier in Hobart today. The Antarctic exploration
ships were still at their moorings, so in a way it’s almost like coming home. It’s strange how quickly you can become used to the unfamiliar. Perhaps I will get back to England and feel disoriented by the absence of a brutal convict history in the hills where I live.

I managed the drive back without having to feed the car again, but I have to say that the CD incident has left me rattled. Technology, like nature and wildlife, can never resist an opportunity to laugh in my face. The rental car has now taken on some of the menace of the Tasmanian landscape, possibly through a kind of quasi-mystical osmosis. At any moment the central locking could snap shut of its own accord, leaving the airbag free to smother me as Hank Williams sings “I’m so lonesome I could cry” and the hazard lights flash. If the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, I think I’ll keep the driving to a minimum until I fly home in a couple of days.

It wasn’t late when I got in last night, but Hobart was already closed. The lady at the front desk knew a Thai restaurant she thought might still be open, so I called a cab. The driver told me I shouldn’t be going there.

“Thai food’s shiddouse, mate.”

He said he would have refused to take me and made me go to his favorite Chinese instead, but that was already closed.

“We always have the banquet. It’s such a big feed you take more away in bags than you can eat. And it’s got bugs in.”

I think he meant Moreton Bay bugs, which are a kind of Aussie langoustine, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Where you from, mate? Really? Jeez, that must be rough. Y’been anywhere else in Oz?”

Sydney, I tell him.

“Sydney?” I can see his eyes in the rear-view mirror, and he’s incredulous. I’m about to tell him that in Europe, Sydney’s regarded as one of the more glamorous cities on the planet, but then realize there’s no point.

“Bloody Sydney. Why would anybody want to go there?”

He gives the matter some thought.

“I suppose all that smog would make you feel at home. Where else y’been, mate?”

Melbourne.

“Melbourne? What a shiddouse place! Full of wogs. Where else, mate?”

Well, I was in Perth once. And Adelaide. Alice Springs?

“Shiddouse, the whole fakken lot of ’em. Y’know the place to be, mate? Here.”

What—Tasmania?

“Not just Tasmania, mate. Don’t wanna be out in the sticks shaggin’ sheep. Hobart! The big city! This is the place to be. How’s yer hotel?”

I tell him it’s great.

“They’ve fakken ruined the center of town, mate. It’s all over. Finished.”

By the time we reach the restaurant we’ve established that his street, in his newly built suburb on the very edge of town, is the only place in the world you’d want to be.

I order pad Thai and chili prawns. I was worried they might be shiddouse, but they’re actually very good.

I spend a restful long weekend
mooching around Hobart before heading for home. It’s a delightful place, more like a country town than a capital city, as everyone is keen to point out. The casino’s the only high-rise in town. Houses wind up the hills that enclose the harbor, giving the impression that everyone must have a view of the water. I decide to risk the drive to the top of Mount Wellington. It’s a clear day and I can look out over the city, the harbor and large parts of the landscape through which I’ve been traveling. It’s stunning. Maureen was right about the dark underbelly, but that’s only added to the attraction. I could quite happily come and live here. Mind you, I say that about four or five places every year.

I decide to stick with the malevolent car for as long as it takes to drive the few miles to Richmond. The road takes me through valleys and vineyards, and past a turning called Malcolm’s Hut Road. I bet when Malcolm built his hut he never imagined it would give him immortality.

Richmond’s a pretty little town, slightly disfigured by a proliferation of tourist-industry signposts and placards. There’s a famous jail, but I’m a bit jailed-out. And the oldest bridge in Tasmania, which is everything you hope it might be. antiques and collectibles, says a sign on a shop. please keep
off the grass. no prams. no pushchairs. no food. no drinks. no lollipops. no ice creams. No sharks. No earth-moving equipment. No military dictatorships. Just inside the door is an antique Huon pine chest of drawers: $7,000, says the tag. You could buy a small house in Queenstown for that.

In the nineteenth century, Richmond was a vibrantly Irish town, where the pubs were segregated along religious lines. What was once the most notoriously boisterous Irish pub in town is now a sweetie and lolly shop. As I stand outside admiring the original pub balcony, an old-style ocker in a bush hat is coming through the door, telling his wife he’ll be waiting outside. He fixes me with a conspiratorial leer.

“Bloody woman’s paradise in there, mate.”

Francis Meagher’s infant son is buried in the churchyard.

In Ross, Meagher had married Katherine Bennett, the daughter of an Irish highwayman. He was already plotting his escape from Van Diemen’s Land, a plan from which he did not deviate even when his wife fell pregnant. In a typically flamboyant gesture that seems absurdly romantic today, and probably did even then, he announced to the police that he was renouncing his parole with the intention of escaping, and it was their responsibility to try and catch him.

With the help of British settlers sympathetic to his cause, he made his way to an island in the Bass Strait, where he spent ten days waiting to rendezvous with a boat that was to take him to America. For some of the time he was unexpectedly joined by a rowing boat of escaped convicts who were heading for the gold rush in Victoria. They cooked Meagher seafood stew on the beach. He eventually made it to New York via Brazil, and was greeted with a hero’s welcome. His adventures were only just beginning.

Katherine made plans to go to America and join him, but before she could do so the four-month-old son he had never seen died and was buried here in Richmond.

In 1853 an old friend of Meagher’s, the wonderfully named Pat “Nicaragua” Smyth, turned up in Hobart on behalf of the Irish Directory, a New York-based “secret” organization that everyone seems to have known about. His mission was to arrange the escapes of Mitchel and O’Brien.
O’Brien was reluctant to go, knowing that it would mean he would never be able to return to Ireland. Mitchel made his bid for freedom in an outrageous escapade straight out of a
Boys’ Own
comic.

Accompanied by Nicaragua, who had a gun under his coat, Mitchel went to a police station and gave notice that he was withdrawing his parole. The two of them galloped away on horseback, pursued by police, while kids on the corner offered odds on who would win the race. It turned out to be Mitchel. He went into hiding for a while in an Irishman’s attic; the ladder he used to climb in and out is still put on display every St. Patrick’s Day. He was sheltered after that by Tasmanian and English settlers. Disguised as a Catholic priest, but with a weapon under his cassock, Mitchel the Protestant traveled across Van Diemen’s Land by stagecoach, and came through a police inspection without being recognized. Disguised once again, this time as Mr. Wright, he openly boarded a ship bound for Sydney on which Nicaragua and Mitchel’s wife and family—who had joined him from Ireland—were among the fare-paying passengers. From Sydney the Mitchels traveled via Tahiti, San Francisco, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Cuba to New York. His arrival in Brooklyn was greeted with the official thirty-one-gun salute traditionally reserved for visiting heads of state.

Poor old O’Brien had a rather dull time by comparison. Before he could escape he was conditionally pardoned by the British government, with the proviso that he lived anywhere except Britain. After staying for a while in the presbytery here in Richmond he sailed to Melbourne, where a lavish dinner was held in his honor by the Irish community. He subsequently went to live in Brussels, was reunited with his family and died not in New York or Nicaragua or Costa Rica, but in Bangor, North Wales, in 1864.

Despite the shared ideals that drove them to rebellion, Mitchel and Meagher ended up fighting on opposite sides in the American Civil War. Meagher finished his days as governor of Montana, where a statue of him stands to this day.

On my last afternoon
in Hobart, there’s an Irish music session in the New Sydney Tavern, a Victorian pub with no poker machines, a roaring
fire and a wonderful atmosphere. There are about ten musicians: fiddles and pipes, a guitar and a bodhran, and also the first sousaphone player I’ve ever seen at an Irish session. His inclusion seems to be a subject of controversy among some purists in the corner. The conversation flows and I could almost forget all the time I’ve been spending muttering to myself in weird and lonely places. I get talking to George, a harp player and artist from Belfast who’s been here for decades. One of his prints adorns the pub chimney. He tells me about the local Irish Association, and how he doesn’t think there should be one, as it divides rather than integrates. He has, however, been voted on to the executive committee, on which he’ll now be able to sit as he argues that it should be abolished.