The Road to McCarthy (25 page)

It’s a dramatic arrival that doesn’t feel like driving into town so much as coming in to land. queenstown, says the sign. mining since 1880. There’s a solitary derelict building—a gaunt burned-out shell still bearing the legend 1910 ROYAL HOTEL T KELLY—then the road snakes up the stark ravaged mountain behind the hotel past what look like three or four prospectors’ cabins. It’s like the opening shot of a bleak and violent movie set in a nineteenth-century mining claim in the Wild West. There’s a ninety-degree bend at the top of the mountain and there, far below, is a cluster of wooden buildings, dwarfed by the devastated and barren landscape, like a gold-rush town on the dark and jagged side of the moon.

The sensation of making a landing is enhanced by the fact that I’m descending through clouds as I zigzag down the mountainside. Golden yellow
ore, shiny from the rain, gleams through the rock that borders the road. I’m hoping for lunch, but Australia’s celebrated Pacific Rim fusion cuisine may not have made it this far, and I may have to settle for a sausage. A sign on a garage says enter at own risk; but does it mean the garage, or the town?

I park outside the Empire Hotel, a Victorian confection with an ornate arched balcony. There’s a view up a single street of run-down wooden buildings; where the street ends, and instinct tells you the dust and red rocks of Arizona should begin, is a mountain shrouded in cloud. A sign advertises a chairlift, but you’d be lucky to see your own feet today.

Across the street an elderly beaten-up white Valiant is parked at the curbside. Stretched across the front seat with his feet on the dashboard, a tough-looking man in his thirties sits staring at me. He’s unshaven and covered with so much dirt that I’m only guessing about him being unshaven. As I walk past his windscreen I feel as inconspicuous as Kirk and Spock beaming down in Dodge City.

The street’s deserted, as if today’s gunfight is due at any moment. A shop on the corner doubles as the tourist information office, but a sign says it’s closed till four. Perhaps that’s when they get the daily rush. There are some rocks in the window and a notice headed things to do in town. Item four is “Walk Round the Town,” so I do.

The Paragon Theatre has a yellow and pink art deco façade and a corrugated roof. A man with what appear to be plaits in his beard—but I don’t like to look too closely—is standing outside with the two most frightening dogs I’ve ever seen, enormous, wolf-hyena hybrids with Mike Tyson shoulders and fangs dripping with drool. The three of them look strangely alert, scanning the street as if they have an appointment to keep. Maybe the guy with his feet on the car dashboard is waiting for the clock to strike the hour, when he will come round the corner and stand in the middle of the street. Plaitbeard and the hyenas will step out to block his way, and the shooting will begin. Or perhaps they’ll use flamethrowers, or crossbows. Anxious not to get caught in the crossfire, I head on up the street past Axel’s Takeaway, a café offering souvlaki, kangaroo steaks and Internet access. business for sale, it says in the window. genuine enquiries only.

Across the street is Hunters Hotel—1898, another ornate wrought-iron
and balustraded job that looks as if it’s been boarded up for years. Even the for sale sign looks worn out. lifelike plants, reads a card in the supermarket window. Another advertises miner’s cottage—original character. two bedrooms. partly furnished. previous owner—miner. $18,000.

I’m hungry, but not hungry enough for kangaroo or souvlaki, so I decide to settle for a sandwich and a beer if I can find a pub before they put it on the market.

counter lunches, claims a sign in the pub window, misleadingly as it turns out, because according to the guy behind the counter they don’t do food. I order a low-alcohol beer in an English accent, a potentially hazardous act from which I emerge unscathed. There’s a pool table at one end of the room on which no one is playing. Above the bar a TV screen is showing what seems to be the gambling channel, rows of numbers interrupted at intervals by the announcement of prizes. Five men sit at five stools along the bar, beers in hand, gazing up at the screen. They look tough but vacant, willing but broken in spirit. After a while one of them gets up and takes the two paces to the poker machine, and begins to play. The other four swivel in unison to watch. He has a couple of wins, but keeps going until he’s put all the money back in. Then he returns to his seat, the guys spin round and everyone watches the gambling channel again. As I get up to leave the man on the end of the row gives me a gentle nod and a warm smile, which is cheering. I smile back, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that something’s bothering me.

In the fifteen minutes I’ve been in here no one has spoken.

In 1815
a twenty-four-year-old ship’s captain called James Kelly—a convict’s son from Parramatta in New South Wales—set out from Hobart in an open whale boat propelled by four oarsmen in an attempt to circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land, a feat that had not previously been achieved in the twelve years of the colony’s existence. On the unexplored and unknown west coast, hemmed in by impenetrable rainforest and unforgiving mountains, and situated in the wettest place in Australia, he discovered a harbor bigger than Sydney’s. He named it in honor of the then governor of New
South Wales. Within ten years Macquarie Harbor was home to the most dreaded penal settlement in the southern hemisphere. The rainfall, though prodigious, would probably have come low down the list of the inmates’ complaints.

So wrote a convict called Davies, Christian name unknown, whose account of his experiences has survived. I’d say it made quite an impression on him. I’m going to remember the “back like Bullock’s Liver” all my life, and I wasn’t even there.

The settlement was to be the destination of repeat offenders—those convicts who had failed to observe the terms of their original sentence, and so were deemed to require further punishment than the standard slave labor and 13,000-mile banishment from home. Though characterized as the worst of the worst these supposed incorrigibles were, according to the testimony of the prison surgeon, guilty of such crimes as “disobedience of orders to their masters, neglect of duty, absence from the farm without permission” and—a particular favorite, this one—“drunkenness.” Convicts were pressed into service as guards, guaranteeing a never-ending cycle of resentment and recrimination. So harsh was the system that prisoners would prearrange vicious assaults on each other so they might be guaranteed the trip to Hobart to stand trial or give evidence. Others sought more permaescape,
and committed murder for no reason other than to secure their own execution. But why not commit suicide rather than kill another man? asked the chaplain of one such murderer, according to the account of the prison storekeeper.

“If I kill myself I shall immediately descend to the bottomless pit, but if I kill another I will be sent to Hobart Town and tried for my life; if found guilty the parson would attend me and then I would be sure of going to heaven.”

Macquarie Harbor was chosen because of its total isolation. To cross the mountainous interior of the island and reach it on foot from Hobart was impossible, and a hazardous sea voyage was required in order to arrive or depart. Sole entrance to the thirty-mile-long harbor was through a bottleneck opening known as Hell’s Gates, beyond which the Roaring Forties could cause the Pacific Ocean to foam and swell, stranding ships at sea for days before they could enter and reach the prison island within.

Sarah Island, deep inside the harbor, was named, in the words of Captain Kelly, “in honor of Mrs. Birch, wife of Thos. William Birch Esq. of Hobart Town.” Even today this is an isolated island near a larger isolated island off the shore of an isolated continent. The nearest settlement—one of only a handful on the whole west coast of Tasmania, much of which is still as untouched as it was in Kelly’s day—is the tiny town of Strahan.

The Strahan waterfront is a pleasing collection of old wooden buildings facing a few small wharfs and piers. In the 1890s it became the busiest port in Tasmania, servicing the prospectors and mining fields around Zeehan and Queenstown. Horses, machinery and miners arrived by sea, and the ore left by the same route. The mining boom is long over, though, and the new industry on which economic hopes are pinned, as it is everywhere else in the world, is tourism. Today there are just thirty or forty of us gathered on the quayside waiting to board the boat that will take us first to Sarah Island, then up the Gordon River into the rainforest. This has the makings of a memorable day, a fact that’s not been lost on the couple next to me in the queue to board.

“The buffet’s included in the price, and Annette says it’s reely, reely excellent. She says remember to take piles and piles of smoked salmon. Don’t
worry about the people behind you. They bring out more when it’s all gone. And they serve it in the downstairs lounge, so don’t hang around on the top deck looking at the trees and get stuck at the back of the queue. We don’t want to miss out on the salmon.”

“I thought you said they put more out if it all—”

“Look, I don’t want to fight about this! Do you think you could just do what I’m asking? Thank you! Some day out this is turning out to be. And the Chardonnay’s extra but Annette says it’s worth it. You’ll have to queue separately for that.”

It’s a comfortable modern catamaran with plenty of room to move about until the feeding frenzy starts. Daunting mountains rise up to port as we head out into the harbor towards the ocean. The waters are an eerie shade of browny-black, with an orange foam of a distinctly urinous tinge—not pollution, but natural tannins and minerals.

The boat takes us out past thick blue gum forests—“the only source of blue gum in the whole of ’Stralia,” according to the commentary—to Hell’s Gates, then for a few minutes into the unforgiving ocean beyond. The harbor mouth is fifty or sixty yards wide, with jagged rocks and treacherous sandbanks on which many vessels have foundered. Despite a biting wind, conditions are calm today, and our precious cargo of smoked salmon is safe enough. We come through the Gates and head back into the harbor beyond Strahan, following the route that the convict ships would have taken. Pearce, of course, made the trip twice.

The island’s macabre atmosphere is inevitably diminished by arriving as part of a multinational taskforce in a dozen shades of Gore-Tex. Many of my co-passengers are fully psyched- and tooled-up for the first hint of a photo opportunity, while others seem to be just killing time until the buffet. A Japanese couple are sitting on the jetty eating chocolate and ignoring each other. I’m resigning myself to an imperfect tourism experience when proceedings take on an altogether rosier hue.

Richard is an itinerant actor/manager/author who has spent his life performing his way around Australia, America, Mexico, Europe, Egypt and other places I can’t remember because the wind is cold and starting to hurt my ears. Dressed in full-length waxed coat, riding boots, leather hat and
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Nazi spectacles, he cuts an imposing figure, working the crowd with passion and skill as we tour the brick and timber ruins.

There was another prison offshore for those deemed too troublesome even for Sarah Island. Grummet Island is visible a few hundred yards across the water, a bare rock on which men were dumped in chains and sodden clothing to spend the night in the teeth of the elements. I have to keep reminding myself that these events are not some wild Gothic fiction, but as real as the jailhouse bricks beneath my feet, and more recent than the house in which I live.

As we shuffle from the site of one horror to another Richard offers a constant barrage of insights into how things might have been, none of which I found in any of the mainstream published accounts of life on the island. “These guys weren’t master criminals but the long-term unemployed—long-term self-employed I prefer to call them.” The oven we see at the bakery, he says, produced 400 loaves a day. A substance called ergot was added to the bread so it would quickly go mouldy and couldn’t be saved for escape attempts. Ergot, however, also has similar hallucinogenic properties to LSD. “Add it to the natural amphetamine in the sassafras trees and the large magic mushrooms that grow here, and you have a powerful chemical cocktail.”

Rather than a place of subjugation and passive acceptance, says Richard, the island would have been “a battleground,” where prisoners fought for their identity and their souls. There were also Irish politicals and English trade unionists here, and there are records of men being flogged for organizing strikes from forced labor. Homosexuality was a way of life—it’s sometimes cited as one of the reasons for the closure of the settlement—and prisoners “openly flaunted homosexual marriages,” claims Davey, “because they knew that the authorities didn’t like it and it showed that whatever they did to them they could never truly control them.” Other proclivities flourished even among the forces of law and order. On one celebrated occasion a soldier was caught in flagrante with the chaplain’s goat. No doubt there was a bit of good-natured ribbing in the barrack room that night, after which it would have been quietly forgotten.

Our tour is reaching its climax, but a baffled-looking couple in jogging
suits fashioned from by-products of the Soviet space program have had enough.