Read Online In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare - Free Book Online Page A

PARKED above the beach where Kemp eventually landed. The river mouth was sprinkled with caravan parks and bungalows sporting names like ‘Ups-n-downs’, but the shoreline was pristine, the sand empty and the sea an outlandish ultramarine.
    Emerging from the tempest, Kemp’s ship had slammed into an unexpected sandbank off Lagoon Beach. I doubted the future ‘Father of Tasmania’ was happy to be on board. He would have been separated from his grog store. He would not have shared my love of the sea: for him it would have been something for convicts to wash in. He would have avoided the sun so as to preserve his complexion and distinguish himself from the Aborigines who watched the bungled landing of the Buffalo in puzzled silence.
    Kemp and the crew hurried to unload the stores on the east shore of the river. The wind blew in heavy squalls and was still blowing four days later when Colonel Paterson took formal possession of the colony and swore in Kemp and Riley as its magistrates.
    Riley owed his presence on the beach to a conviction that this latitude was the most productive possible for plants and fruit, with a climate that shed ‘fruitfulness on the earth and happiness on mankind in general’. He believed that the further away people were from this latitude, the less happy they were. Impatient to test his theory – which, he assured Kemp, ‘never fails’ – he had come out from England with hopes of making a fortune from growing silk, opium, hemp and rhubarb.
    A quick walk along the east shore revealed brackish water and stony soil. Paterson left Kemp to oversee the erection of a church and jail, and crossed the Tamar River. He decided to establish a permanent residence on the edge of a shallow rivulet. Riley’s optimism had infected him. ‘It is my opinion,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘that the Country will turn out to be Superior to any yet discovered.’
    The settlement of York Town is recollected today by a bronze map in a deserted picnic spot beside a garden supplier. The pyramids of wood-chips and ‘chook-poo’ are, at first glance, all that remain of the first permanent settlement in the north.
    I was poring over the map when a man drove past and parked in front of a shack. He tracked me with a sheepish expression as I walked towards him, and looked even more apprehensive when I explained that a relative of mine had founded a town that was possibly buried under his property. Had he, I asked, come upon any evidence of the settlement?
    He nodded. Only ten weeks ago he was clearing the bush out the back when his spade struck something. Now, he called over to his son, who had come onto the porch. ‘Michael, remember those convict bricks?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜Can you show them to him?’
    Michael led me through the scrappy back yard – a dog in a cage watched on hind legs – and into the bracken and thistles. He darted his glance here and there, unable to find what he was looking for, and then I saw a clearing. In the clearing, a floor of pale red bricks.
    He let me take one. ‘We hit those when we were pulling up scrub and then we broomed it.’
    I could see the ironstone in the brick. The iron ore that Paterson dug from here in December 1804 was the first mineral deposit found in Tasmania. ‘If I had carts,’ he wrote, ‘I could load in time the whole Navy of Great Britain.’
    Kemp’s cottage, possibly one of two prefabricated wooden houses brought out in the Lady Nelson , was on a high piece of land among the black wattle and gums. It looked down on the quarters housing 42 convicts and a flat area of five acres, known inaccurately on the bronze map as ‘Major Kemp’s garden’. Kemp was a captain and the original garden was, in fact, Paterson’s creation.
    His horizons reduced by ophthalmia, Paterson concentrated on his plants and apple orchard and soon was able to treat Kemp to a