In Tasmania (13 page)

HE WAS BORN EARLY ONE OCTOBER MORNING AND WEIGHED ALMOST
twelve pounds. ‘That's not a baby, that's a giant,' the midwife said. We christened him Max George Tasman Shakespeare.

Genealogy may generally be the preoccupation of the elderly, but the impulse to look back at the tracks in the sand can be triggered by having a child of your own, especially when that event occurs, as in my case, somewhat late in life.

In the uproar of my son's ancestry were some pretty disappointed expectations, but like any incipient parent I was prone to self-deception and wishful thinking. I wanted his life to be perfect.

The genes, they come down.
If I had a say, whose genes did I wish to dominate my son: the sensible Potter's or the adventurous Kemp's?

Kemp was a baby once, some mother's darling. So would have been Potter, for that matter. Their letters made me think that what held both men back was that each was not more like the other. If Kemp had hurried a little more slowly, if Potter had left his desk and lived a little more …

Perhaps every affair of business, of love, of writing itself, calls for a necessary balance between the Potter and the Kemp, between the Apollonian and the Dionysiac, between the ledger and the rum. And I wished this balance for my son.

THE FATHER OF TASMANIA HAD BEEN QUICK TO ABANDON HIS OLDEST
two legitimate children in London with the Potters: the nine-year-old George, who was born in York Town, and his seven-year-old sister Elizabeth. Kemp wrote in a letter to Aldgate that his children were ‘ever uppermost' in his mind. ‘I am sure that you and my sister's goodness of heart will not let them want for anything until I have it in my power to make remittances.'

Whatever scepticism I had about Kemp's paternal feelings, I found it heart-rending to read of his wife's anguish over their daughter Elizabeth's illness that is 14 months old by the time Mrs Kemp learns of it from Potter. ‘Does Betsy grow tall? Her ninth birthday is just past. I hope as she grows abler she will mend in every respect. Oh! that I could but for five minutes behold her, but I fear it will be many a long day first.'

Since 1801, the Potters had also been taking care of Emily, Kemp's daughter by Judith Simpson. Emily remained in England. But once they had come of age Elizabeth and George returned to Van Diemen's Land, where Elizabeth asserted her independence by getting married to the son of Kemp's bitterest enemy.

Kemp had not become so Puritan that he could not forgive and forget. In 1825, a year after Lieutenant Governor Sorell's departure, he gave away his 17-year-old daughter to a thin, sallow man with bristly hair reckoned to be ‘a bit of a sis'.

William Sorell had not seen his father since he was seven, when Colonel Sorell eloped with Mrs Kent, but at the urging of his mother – since reduced to selling fruit in Covent Garden – he had sailed out ‘to assert his claims on his father's attention in person'. He arrived in Hobart only to discover that Kemp's vendetta had caused his father's recall. William briefly considered returning home. What decided him to stay on was the ravishing Elizabeth Kemp.

A reserved bureaucrat, William did not impress anyone with his intelligence. In Kemp's daughter, he believed that he was marrying a woman ‘who hates and abominates discord and strife'. He could not have been more wrong.

On her return to Hobart, Elizabeth had flowered into a headstrong, beautiful woman – ‘perhaps the most beautiful woman you ever saw', in the eyes of the diarist George Boyes, although he added that she was also ‘a very devil incarnate'. She had her father's impulse of bolting from any situation that failed to agree with her, and five years after marriage to the dull Sorell – who managed to get a job as Registrar in the Supreme Court – she was restless. Mrs Fenton, on a visit from Calcutta, met Elizabeth at this time, and wrote in her diary that the young woman was rather too eager to know all about her sea journey. ‘She affected a becoming sort of wonderment at my “astonishing courage” to undertake a “voyage” alone. I was much amused. I assured her the days of Pamela-like adventures were fairly gone and away, and every one but the very young girls, or very simple old ones, might travel where they list as fearlessly.' A seed had been planted.

In 1838, after 13 years of marriage, Elizabeth kissed her husband goodbye on the wharf in Hobart and boarded a ship for Europe. William Sorell understood that she was taking their five children to visit their paternal grandfather in Brussels – where ‘Old Man' Sorell had gone to live. In fact, she was sailing to meet her lover, Lieutenant Colonel George Deare, an officer in the 21st Regiment with whom she had had an intense affair in Hobart. Leaving her children with Sorell, she and Deare eloped to India. Kemp never saw Elizabeth again, nor did her own daughters.

Her great-grandson would draw on Elizabeth for the alluring and destructive Lucy Tantamount in his novel
Point Counter Point
: ‘A perfumed imitation of a savage or an animal.' Aldous Huxley was responding to the family's precocity for havoc. He and his brother Julian were raised on tales of ‘the wild and forcible Kemps' and their dominating characteristic: ‘an ungovernable temper'. No one incarnated this wildness with more allure than Elizabeth's daughter Julia.

It took two years for Colonel Sorell to arrange for his humiliated granddaughter to return to her father in Hobart. In 1847, Julia had her portrait painted by the convicted forger and poisoner, Thomas Wainewright. She is pictured with her head on one side and pitch dark, seductive eyes. The watercolour does not show that she has lost some of her teeth; nor that she is driven by the ‘intemperate passion' that guided her maternal grandfather – a passion that she directed at a gentle 26-year-old inspector of schools with a slight stammer who arrived in Van Diemen's Land in 1850.

THOMAS ARNOLD WAS THE YOUNGER BROTHER OF THE POET
Matthew, and favourite son of Dr Arnold of Rugby. ‘Never was a child dearer to a parent than you were to him,' wrote his mother after he landed in Hobart. Less well known are his connections with Anthony Fenn Kemp.

Tom Arnold

Arnold had departed England with a reputation as the handsomest undergraduate at Oxford. A rabid democrat – the model for the hero of Arthur Hugh Clough's poem ‘The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich' – he was consumed by the idea of finding an answer to the conundrum ‘what, namely, is the ideal of human life'. He was also a hopeless admirer of George Sand's fiction, and had sailed to New Zealand in a spasm of ‘young and democratic despair' after a girl rejected him. But his notion of founding a classless Pantisocratic society in a five-acre block on Porirua Road, near Wellington, had petered out, and in 1849 he accepted the offer of a salaried post in Van Diemen's Land.

He had been in Hobart only a month when a lawyer invited him to a party in Davey Street. He arrived late. A regimental band dressed in blue jackets was playing the polka. A woman sat on a sofa in excited conversation with a red-coated officer. Arnold described the next hour in a private memoir that he wrote for his children: ‘Looking around the room on entering, I saw a lady in black, wearing a single white camellia in her black hair, with a singularly refined and animated face.' She stood up to be introduced. They examined each other, he wrote,
à la dérobée
. ‘I remember how strong the feeling was upon me I
must
have met her before; a sense of moral likeness, an overpowering attraction and affinity, drew me to her. For me it was certainly “love at first sight”!' Soon afterwards, he wrote to Miss Sorell. ‘I could not help looking at you every instant and envying everyone on whom you vouchsafed a word or smile; so much so that some young lady, Miss Swan I think, declared that she would never dance opposite Mr Arnold again … for his eyes were always turned towards – you can guess whom.'

Forty years on, the memory of Kemp's granddaughter – her dark eyes with an expression ‘full of meaning', a short upper lip ‘shaped like a cupid's bow', her firm figure – still had the power to make Arnold catch his breath: ‘O my own Julia, I shall never forget how beautiful and capturing you were that night; nor what a rage I was in, at finding you had gone home without me.' On her leaving the party, Arnold agreed to dance an insufferable quadrille with a Mrs Chapman, and it may have been she who filled him in on the ‘alarming' reputation of the young woman with whom he had been conversing.

The 24-year-old Julia had days earlier broken off her engagement with a Lieutenant Elliott of the 99th (‘he had been ordered away, & I do not think she either expected or wished to see him again'). She had been engaged to at least two other men, including Chester Eardley-Wilmot, the son of the last Governor, who lent her novels and went riding with her on a white pony. Not only that, but there were rumours concerning Julia and the late Governor himself – rumours, later proven false, that had contributed to the latter's premature death from ‘complete exhaustion of the frame'.

Julia Sorell

Arnold admitted to his children: ‘Your mother was no unknown person at the time … among women she had her detractors.' According to her enemies, Julia was alleged to have seduced Sir John Eardley-Wilmot one night at Government House, where she sometimes played scenes from Shakespeare. (In one scene, reported by her daughter, she stood on a pedestal and gave an indelibly inert performance of Hermione in
The Winter's Tale
– ‘till at the words, “Music! Awake her! Strike!” she kindled into life.') The affable, courteous Eardley-Wilmot had come to Hobart without his wife and was well known to the diarist George Boyes for his ‘fondness for the younger part of the fair sex'. When young girls visited Government House, he occasionally put his arm around their necks. ‘They seemed to enjoy these little familiarities amazingly.'

One evening Julia Sorell was overheard to say that if she were a man she would have as many women as she liked without marrying.

Eardley-Wilmot answered: ‘Why, you are a perfect devil.'

‘And if I am, Sir John, you are another.'

What on earth had passed between them to justify this exchange became the subject of hot debate, especially among a group of local clergy opposed to the Lieutenant Governor, who, in the kind of language used by Kemp against Sorell 30 years before, put it about that Eardley-Wilmot was living ‘in scarcely concealed concubinage' with Kemp's granddaughter – a very young woman whose mother's conduct had been ‘only too notorious'.

By April 1845, the story circulated to the ears even of Julia's dimwitted father, who called on the Lieutenant Governor and told him that he had heard that Eardley-Wilmot had taken Julia up to New Norfolk, where they had spent the night. Eardley-Wilmot denied the rumours – they were ‘the grossest falsehoods that ever oppressed an English gentleman' and had been ‘invented and circulated by my opponents' – but he could not prevent their spreading to the Melbourne correspondent of the
Naval and Military Gazette
, who commented: ‘No people of any standing will now enter Government House except on business; no ladies can.'

This was too much for William Gladstone, Secretary of State for the Colonies. In a letter marked ‘secret', he wrote to the Lieutenant Governor, suspending him without recommendation for another government post until these rumours about his private life were disposed of. The letter broke Eardley-Wilmot. He collapsed and died in the house of his private secretary in Hobart.

The discovery of Julia's ‘undisciplined' past did nothing to dampen the ardour of Thomas Arnold, whose favourite Sand novel was
Jacques
– about a man of democratic ideals who embarks on a fantastically ill-advised marriage with a vain, vituperative and air-headed young woman not unlike Julia. He wrote to her of the only rumour in Hobart that mattered to him – which was that ‘I neither look at, nor speak to, or think of, any other person than Julia Sorell.'

From that night she was continually in his thoughts. ‘I schemed to get invited to the same houses to which she was asked; and she put no obstacles in my way.' Among his papers at Balliol College, I read letter after letter that he wrote to Julia from Launceston and Swansea and Campbell Town – wherever he had to ride on his bay Harry to inspect a school. ‘Dearest darling love I wish I could give you this very minute as many kisses as there are days in the year and 365 times that.' One night in March 1850, he slept on the edge of Kemp's property at Green Ponds. There was a problem at the school – the local clergyman had driven away all Roman Catholic children, and he wrote to Julia: ‘The parson's foot has been in the broth and spoiled it.' She read nothing extraordinary in the observation. Dazzled by his father's reputation, she perceived Arnold as her ticket-of-leave from the military and settler society, ‘which was all the colonies could give her'. But buried in Arnold's innocent line about Catholicism was a sympathy that would grow to give her untold ‘grief and indignation'. One man who nurtured it was Kemp.

Arnold's host at Green Ponds was a pious friend of Kemp's who talked about how Kemp ribbed him unmercifully. Arnold flirted with the idea of introducing himself to Julia's grandfather: ‘This morning I felt strongly tempted to call at Mount Vernon as I passed, but I remembered that if I did so it would probably cause a day's delay in my return to you, so I refrained.' He wrote: ‘Oh Julia, you may believe how I thought of you as I passed the house, but indeed I do little else at present, sleeping or waking. You told me, I think, that you used often to stay there when you were a child. I wondered which of the windows was that of the room which used to be the little Julia's? The little creature with her tempers and perversities, how well I can fancy her.'

He had been reading ‘the scene of the night interview in
Romeo and Juliet
and never felt its beauty so much as now. Oh, that I could speak to thee with the tongue of Shakespeare and the imagination of Milton, yet all would come short of what I feel for thou.'

In fact, a poem does survive, written after he had married her:

Thoughts of Julia crammed his mind as he rode south from Perth through the bush. ‘The fresh bracing air and the sweet smells of the forest were most exhilarating. Smooth lawny glades chequered with light and shade spread themselves between the trees in all directions, and the clumps of the silver wattle relieved sometimes by the darker green of the native cherry were most beautiful. I have felt a growing affection for the land that gave you birth; its hills and plains have been invested to my eyes with a colouring only love can give. The beauty which we think is in nature comes generally from our own hearts; we do not see it when we are unhappy.' He was shortly to be so.

In the same month, Arnold asked Julia to marry him. ‘Seeing how completely in love I was she resolved to accept me, chiefly because I was my father's son.'

A ‘dear military friend' passing through Hobart took one look at his fiancée and tried to persuade Arnold to break off the engagement forthwith, candidly arguing – amongst other things – that she was not ‘well-adapted' to be the wife of a poor man like Arnold. But it was no good: Arnold loved her, he said, ‘better than life'.

They were married on Dr Arnold's birthday at St David's Cathedral, Hobart, in June 1850. Arnold wrote: ‘I know that in my eyes a thing so beautiful has rarely been seen.' He swiftly discovered that his wife was not simply beautiful, but financially extravagant, prone to passionate outbursts of temper and liked to ‘nag, nag, nag him till he almost lost his senses'. She burst into tears at their wedding reception, and when five years later Arnold converted to Catholicism at St Joseph's, the pioneer Catholic church in Hobart, she arrived with a basket of stones and hurled them one by one through the stained-glass window, saying that ‘the earth had crumbled under her'. She was without any religious convictions, she told her husband. She was one of those unhappy people whom God had abandoned. She had one belief only, and she clung to it with an ‘imperial will' right to her death: very few families had been ‘cursed' with an upbringing such as hers.

Arnold well understood what she meant when, on the eve of his unexpected conversion, he and his wife were invited by the head of her family to a New Year's Eve party at Mount Vernon. Anthony Fenn Kemp was ringing in not merely another year, but a momentous moment in the island's history: the granting by Queen Victoria of his long-fought-for new constitution, including a bicameral Parliament comprising a Legislative Council and House of Assembly. The Queen had also agreed to legalise the colony's new name. From January 1, 1856, Van Diemen's Land was set to manage its own affairs under a ‘more euphonious' title: Tasmania.