The Road to McCarthy (23 page)

A peculiar thing occurs
the day I arrive in Van Diemen’s Land.

WELCOME TO TASMANIA
—home of cadbury’s, says a sign above the single luggage carousel in Hobart airport, right next to a clock that’s thirty-four minutes slow. But that’s not the peculiar thing.

I take delivery of the rental car outside the terminal under a fragrant gum tree full of red and green parrots, and drive into Hobart along a post-neutron-bomb deserted highway. The light is clear, the hills wooded, the harbor spectacular and as undeveloped as Sydney’s might have been fifty years ago. I check into my hotel on a restored wharf on the waterfront, pausing to admire the French and Australian Antarctic exploration ships loading provisions outside my bedroom window, and set out to explore the city. Though I’ve been a frequent visitor to Australia over the years, this is my first time in Tasmania. I don’t know a soul and I’m not sure what to expect. Mainland Australians, in their good-natured way, take great pleasure in mocking the island as an anachronistic backwater of inbred halfwits, particularly if they’ve never actually been there. They tell you about the Tasmanian
parents who wouldn’t let their son marry the girl of his choice because she wasn’t sleeping with her brothers or uncles. “If she’s not good enough for her own family, she’s not good enough for you.”

It’s a Saturday afternoon and there are hardly any people about, but maybe it’s always like this. I wander along a pedestrianized shopping street, watching teenagers in up-to-the-minute Tasmanian hip-hop gear kiss and punch each other. it’s mother’s day, says a sign in a bookshop window, above a display of appropriate titles, among them
The Floating Brothel
.

The shop, like the city and, I’m already beginning to suspect, the whole island, is almost deserted. I’m at the register paying for a map when a woman in her twenties comes and stands next to me and places a paperback on the counter. I glance down, and am astounded to see it’s a copy of
McCarthy’s Bar
. I’m almost, but unfortunately not entirely, speechless. She notices me staring and catches my eye, so I say, “What a coincidence, eh?”

“What?”

“The book.”

“What about it?”

I’m embarrassed now, but it’s too late to turn back.

“Well—it’s …. it’s …. my book.”

She gives me a hostile look, then pulls the book along the counter towards her.

“No,” I burble, watching the situation deteriorate with each passing second, and powerless to do anything about it, “I don’t want it. I wrote it.”

She takes a second to consider the improbable nature of my claim.

“I don’t believe you.”

“I did. Look—I’m wearing the same jacket that’s on the cover.”

Tragically, I am. It’s possible I’m wearing the same socks as well, but I’m not going to risk telling her that, as I can’t see how it’s going to improve the situation. She takes out a credit card and the bookseller gives her a pen to sign the receipt. As I turn to go, she passes the pen and the book to me and says, “Would you mind signing it for me?” Then smiles and adds, “I’m real sorry, mate. I thought you were a fackn’ loony.”

Welcome to Tasmania.

Before leaving Melbourne
this morning I had fresh tuna kedgeree with avocado salsa for breakfast, which is all very well, but you try getting something as straightforward as a bowl of cornflakes or a fried egg in a designer boutique hotel. The waiter with the black linen Nehru jacket and withering sneer would make sure you never ate breakfast in this town again. I was already in the doghouse for lowering the tone of the joint by wearing primary colors rather than black.

When I arrived yesterday I couldn’t find my way in because the cutting-edge architect has cunningly disguised the door as part of the wall. I wandered up and down outside the front window like a mad person, or that guy trying to find Princess Anne in Starbucks in New York. “Don’t worry, everyone does that,” said the intimidatingly beautiful girl with black lipstick, or bubonic plague, behind the front desk. It’s clearly a deliberate ploy to put the staff firmly in charge and new arrivals at the bottom of the food chain where they belong.

When I got to my room—and I swear on St. Dymphna’s bones that I’m not making this up—I found a pillow menu. Perhaps I don’t need to try to convince you. It’s possible that most people these days are au fait with boutique hotels and their invisible doors and pillow menus, and because I’ve always been a habitué of the scummier kind of accommodation I’m just out of touch.

This is what it said on the menu.

Okay, so there were only four, but it’s no less deranged for that.

After breakfast, I was joined by Maureen, an Irish-Tasmanian friend who wanted to tell me what to expect. She turned up with wild hair, dilated pupils and an intense expression, as if she were about to try and convert me to one of the less plausible branches of Satanism, but instead embarked on an impassioned and somewhat chilling account of her feelings about Tasmania.

“It can be a very overpowering place. If you’re sensitive you’ll feel a hostility in the landscape to European culture, which isn’t to say Aboriginal culture is necessarily at home there either. They got stuck there like everybody else. I sense a hostility to all human life. A lot of Tasmanians think, why me? Why wasn’t I born in Paris or Berlin? Why did I end up in this place? It’s an existential problem. So we go away. But there’s always something drawing us back. A bit like Ireland in that respect.”

I showed her a glossy brochure picturing blue skies and an empty beach, promoting Tasmania as the most beautiful island in the world for two years running, according to recent polls.

“This Condé Nast glamour image is a big mistake. They should have concentrated on its metaphysical qualities—the deep, dark underbelly of the place.”

But it’d be hard, I said, to market a place on such a concept. Come to sunny Tasmania, hostile to all human life.

“It’s a story of people struggling to overcome that hostility. It wasn’t by chance that it became the most notorious prison in the British Empire. Hobart is a kind of prison too. It faces Antarctica. It is surrounded by the elements, mountains behind and the ocean in front. The only way out is by taking high risks. It’s about islands within islands, prisons within prisons.”

“Not to mention the prison inside your own head,” I said, adopting an uncharacteristically gloomy tone that had sprung unbidden from some secret place.

Maureen seemed pleased. “Yeah, you’ve got the idea. I think you might have a good time in Tazzy. Just don’t expect it to be like the good times you’ve had anywhere else.”

Tasmania
is 125 miles off the coast of Victoria. It’s about the same size as Ireland, but with a population of only 470,000. Aboriginal tribes lived here for more than 25,000 years before Europeans ever saw the place. These original inhabitants crossed from mainland Australia on a land bridge and achieved the status of islanders when it was washed away by melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age. In 1642 the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman stumbled across it when he came looking for Australia, which he somehow missed. He named the island Van Diemen’s Land, in honor of his patron, but it was never occupied by Europeans until it was settled as a penal colony by the British in 1803. After the cessation of convict transportation in 1853, the name—by now a byword for heinous crime and even crueler punishments, and known as Damn Demon’s Land by the convicts—was changed to Tasmania, in a marketing ploy designed to attract a better class of settler.

More than 65,000 British and Irish convicts were sent to Van Diemen’s Land—40 percent of all those transported to Australia. It’s not known how many Aborigines were wiped out in the wake of the white settlement, because no one ever counted them; but twenty-five thousand years of indigenous
occupation was obliterated in less than a hundred. In 1828 martial law was proclaimed, giving soldiers the right to shoot on sight any Aboriginal found in a “European” area. Others died of disease, malnutrition or simply despair. The Australian historian Robert Hughes has described what happened here as “the only true genocide in English colonial history.”

For convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land, the island itself was the prison. Assigned to a master or landowner in a licensed form of slave labor, convicts were free to move within a designated area until they worked out their sentence and earned their freedom. Among them were the Young Irelanders, whose story has brought me here.

During my visit to Cobh the Bishop Basher had drawn my attention to the political prisoner John Mitchel, who had been imprisoned on Spike Island in Cork Harbor. Until then I knew little of the extraordinary story of Mitchel, his compatriots Francis Meagher and William Smith O’Brien, and the Young Irelanders’ Rebellion of 1848, which culminated in the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch in a back garden in Tipperary. If it weren’t for the widow’s cabbages, I wouldn’t be in Tasmania today.

In the early 1840s Mitchel, Meagher and O’Brien were driving forces in the Repeal movement, a political campaign to liberate Ireland from British rule. Most people today would see this dispute as fairly clear-cut: Catholics are nationalists, and Protestants are loyal to the British Crown. What drew me to the story of the Young Irelanders is that many of the key players, like Wolfe Tone before them, were Protestants. It’s good to be reminded that political ideals have not always split along sectarian lines, as some would have us believe.

John Mitchel was a lawyer, born in Derry in 1815 to a prosperous Protestant family. By 1845 he was editor of the
Irish Nation
, a Dublin-based campaigning newspaper. Francis Thomas Meagher, born a Catholic in 1823 in Waterford, was a flamboyant and gifted orator, a dashing, romantic figure who, unlike his abstemious Protestant colleagues, was fond of the odd drink. William Smith O’Brien was a pillar of the Protestant establishment who nonetheless campaigned passionately for Irish independence. He was born in County Clare in 1803, a descendant of the eleventh-century Irish king Brian Boru. Unlike your average Irishman, he was educated at
Harrow and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and by 1828 had a seat in the House of Commons. Despite being a landowner he campaigned on behalf of the impoverished Irish peasantry, and brought to public attention the scandalously exploitative behavior of absentee landlords.

By the summer of 1843 Repeal was gaining momentum, and huge public rallies were held all over Ireland. If millions of people showed support, the thinking went, they would achieve freedom without resort to physical force. The biggest rally was planned for October at Clontarf, near Dublin, a symbolic location where in 1014 Brian Boru had died defending his country against Danish invaders. Steamers were chartered to bring expatriate supporters home from England, Wales and Scotland; but they weren’t the only ships in the Irish Sea. British warships gathered off the Dublin coast, the city was packed with troops, and the rally declared illegal. Repeal supporters dispersed without a fight.

It was during 1843 that O’Brien—a respected MP, and widely perceived to be a man of principle—joined Repeal, driven by the unacceptable levels of poverty in Ireland which the government seemed to be doing nothing to alleviate. This new alliance of politicians, orators, journalists, poets and landowners was christened Young Ireland, though a unionist paper in the north jibed that O’Brien, a generation older than most of his comrades, should be known as “Middle-aged Ireland.”

In 1845 the potato crop failed for the first time and the country was devastated by famine. The following year O’Brien spent long hours in the House of Commons trying to disrupt the Coercion Bill, a measure designed to give landlords even greater powers over their troublesome half-starved tenants. For his pains O’Brien was asked to serve on the Parliamentary Select Committee on Scottish railways, which he refused to do until Ireland’s calamitous problems were addressed. He was imprisoned for a month by order of his fellow MPs. Meagher and Mitchel visited him in jail.

The situation deteriorated over the next two years. The potato crop failed repeatedly, landlords evicted starving tenants and there was a mass exodus of impoverished Irish to Liverpool, Manchester and the United States. The mood turned inevitably towards armed uprising. Meagher spoke in admiration of America’s War of Independence against British rule.
Pressed by conservative elements in Repeal and in the church to renounce violence, he instead praised the sword as “a sacred weapon.” In the years to come he would be known—in Ireland, and in distant places of which he had not yet dreamed—as Meagher of the Sword.