The Road to McCarthy (27 page)

Though I don’t gamble myself, I’ve always found it exciting to watch reckless cardsharps in glamorous clothes standing at green baize tables displaying more courage and élan than I’ll ever have. But as I walked out of the elevator into the heart of Saturday night the four card tables and two roulette wheels had no takers. Instead rows and rows of people as badly dressed as me were standing round the bars, staring at the gambling games on the TV screens like the broken-spirited miners of Queenstown, only with more aftershave. Fat men, thin women, shrill girls and punky boys with gelled hair were pouring their hard-earned into the machines until they were sure it wasn’t coming back. How depressing that, of all the choices available to them tonight, they had decided to do this with their lives.

And so had I.

I needed to get out, so I took a walk to an oriental noodle place I’d spotted up the street. I got there at five past nine. It closed at nine. Purveyors of ethnic food in Australia don’t seem to have latched on to the British idea that they’re supposed to work eighteen-hour days for the convenience of the locals. So now I’m hiding back in my room watching the Detective. I must be homesick, because there’s no other reason for watching it. He’s interviewing a suspect now, but giving the impression he’s thinking of something else while he’s doing it. You can forget the postmistress though. I reckon the clever money’s got to be on the pub landlord. He’s hiding something, mark my word. I bet it turns out that he never was in the Parachute Regiment in the first place. They never are, are they? It usually turns out they were only using that as a cover story to hide the fact they’d been doing time for sexually assaulting a hot-dog vendor or a circus clown or something. Next thing you know, they’re killing people with chests of drawers.

Room service has arrived: Thai chicken caesar salad with nan bread. This fusion-combination fast food is getting out of hand. It started when they put pineapple on pizzas, but where will it end? Sweet and sour Cajun blackened bar-b-q Thai chicken tikka masala caesar salad pizza fajitas? Deep-fried sweet and …. wait, the ads are on. I missed the ending. They must have revealed the killer while I was signing for the food. That’s nearly an hour of my life squandered; more if you add on the trip to the restaurant that was closed. When I’m on my deathbed I’ll remember this night and think, What a waste of a life. I could have had two more hours.

I’m woken in the night by high-spirited screaming and shouting in the corridor outside my room, which is traditional in Australian hotels on weekend nights, especially if there’s a big sports event on, which there always is.

I wake at eight
, open the curtains and immediately feel bad for writing unkind things about the casino last night. I arrived in the dark, unaware that the view from my window is possibly the most spectacular I’ve enjoyed from any hotel in the world. The whole harbor is spread out before
me, sunshine glinting off the water to dazzle the early-morning sailors on the yachts heading out the Derwent Estuary towards Storm Bay. As I watch, a seaplane lands at the water’s edge sixteen floors below. I’m glad I came to the Casino. It offers an extreme mix of sublime natural beauty and darkness of the human soul that perfectly encapsulates the Tasmanian experience, with the added advantage of room service.

In the corridor a maid is clearing up last night’s trays and empties of sparkling wine. “Lovely morning,” I say.

“Well…. yeah. It’s okay, I suppose,” she says, looking at me as if I’ve still got the electrodes taped to my forehead. In the lift on the way down to breakfast a couple in their thirties gets in at the tenth floor. They have authentic rural Australian haircuts—mullet for him, Suzi Quatro for her—that are still glistening wet from the shower. As the doors slide shut, the tiny space is filled with the heady scent of complimentary unguents and herbal shampoos, with an underlying but unmistakable fragrance of yesterday’s forty-proof alcohol. The three of us are halfway to the ground floor when he turns grimly to the well-scrubbed long-suffering beauty and says, “Gee, I only had a few drinks last night, and I’m still off me fakken head.”

She smiles indulgently, because she knows that this is his way of saying he loves her.

Patsy Cline is singing
“Crazy” on the radio as I cross the harbor bridge and head northeast towards Louisville and the ferry to Maria Island, where Smith O’Brien was confined. “Ah, mate,” says the DJ, with what may be a genuine tear in his eye, “I wish she was still alive.”

The journey, though less eerie than the drive to Strahan, is once again devastatingly beautiful: pasture, woodland, hills and rivers dotted with wood-frame houses and stone churches. Break-me-neck Hill is my favorite place name so far. It’s certainly better than the Legs ‘N’ Breasts Chicken Shop, a cringeingly blokish nudge-nudge choice of name that makes you fear the Tits ‘N’ Ass Pie Shop can’t be far behind.

There’s nearly an hour to wait for the ferry as I leave the car in a near-deserted car park that probably holds upwards of a hundred vehicles in
high season. Two birds straight out of a children’s coloring book, with bright red heads, yellow midriffs and green tail feathers, are sitting in a tree outside the café/bar/ticket office. As I walk past admiring them, their profiles go red yellow green, like two sets of traffic lights.

I get my ticket and settle at a table looking out across the white-topped water to the mountains of the island. This morning’s paper says that a new survey shows that many butter-substitute olive oil and vegetable spreads are far more harmful than butter, and some should come with a health warning attached. Another report says that too much vitamin C messes up your genes and gives you cancer. I feel strangely comforted, as I did when I heard that the guy who invented jogging had died while he was out jogging.

I share the small boat with a dozen overexcited schoolboys and their hairy-kneed teacher, a khaki-clad outward-bounder of indeterminate sex. The skipper operates the steering wheel with his feet while reading the paper. It’s an enjoyable crossing, choppy enough to make you wonder how rough the four-month crossing from Cobh might have been. O’Brien was right about the view. Looking back to the mountains across the deep blue water, it would be easy to believe you were in the west of Ireland. As we come ashore at a jetty by a white sandy bay there’s a sudden flurry of rain. A perfect rainbow, a dense ground-to-ground canopy connecting the beach to the forested mountainside, envelops the island.

As the schoolboys head off along the track I go into the former commissariat stores, now an unmanned information center near the jetty. The island isn’t yet part of the tourist mainstream, and only has 13,000 visitors each year. There’s a visitors’ book, which I open at random at what I presume must be the record of a school visit like today’s. “Totally awesome,” wrote one kid, though opinion was divided on the merits of the place. “Neat.” “Cool.” “Okay.” “Boring island.” “Too many walks.” “Sorta okay and sorta sucks.” “Never seen so much kangaroo shit in my life. Fantastic.”

When O’Brien, Meagher and the others arrived at Hobart they were offered terms under which they could enjoy a high degree of liberty within the confines of Van Diemen’s Land. Earl Grey, the secretary of state for colonial affairs, had ordered that they “should be punished for their crimes, but with consideration of their superior rank in society …. for such men banishment
and forfeiture of property and station is an extremely heavy infliction and probably punishment enough.” Attitudes within the government had clearly mellowed since that first heady rush for hanging, drawing and quartering. Nor was forced labor—the fate of most convicts—on the agenda for the Irish politicals. The deal offered was that each man would be assigned a separate district in which he was free to move. They would report once a month to the authorities, be home by nine at night, and not leave their district nor have contact with each other. In return, they had to give a promise not to escape—their “parole.” After some negotiations, all agreed to these terms except O’Brien, who was ordered to be confined on Maria Island. The others were free, within certain boundaries, to socialize, ride horses and go to the pub.

The island today is a national park. Endangered species of wallaby, kangaroo and Cape Barren geese have been introduced and seals, dolphins and whales flourish in the protected offshore waters. The old convict settlement is at Darlington, a ten-minute walk from the jetty. The schoolboys have vanished and I seem to have the island to myself. As I approach the settlement, the hairs are standing on the back of my neck in a thrill of anticipation. Having stumbled across this story in Cobh and read so much about it since, it has taken on the feel of a folk-tale or legend. And now, after all these miles, here’s the real thing. This place feels impossibly remote even today; it’s hard to conceive how far removed from their own world the prisoners must have felt.

In contrast to the ruins of Sarah Island, Darlington is pretty much intact, a cluster of cottages and bunkhouses in which the schoolboys and the Khaki Hermaphrodite are installing themselves for an overnight stay. O’Brien’s white-painted cottage is the middle one of three, where he lived flanked by the assistant superintendent and the Catholic chaplain. He may have had terrific sea views, but when he arrived he didn’t even know how to light his own fire.

“If Maria were placed near the coast of Ireland I should be quite contented to make it my abode so long as I was surrounded by my children,” he wrote. “I find myself much less fitted for the life of a Robinson Crusoe than I believed myself to be.”

I walk inside into a two-roomed cottage with a fireplace on each side. The attic where he wrote a secret diary has been exposed. At the back is a small garden. O’Brien was allowed to move within a 200-yard radius of the cottage, but was kept apart from the other prisoners. Sir William Dennison, the governor of Tasmania who regarded penal reform as “maudlin sentimentality,” wrote that O’Brien expected to be “the center of attraction to a wondering and admiring multitude. He finds that at Maria Island he is not known nor cared for, and he is bitterly disappointed.”

The cottage is stark and simple, and serves as a moving record of O’Brien’s time here. There are details I haven’t previously come across, including mocking quotes from the London press at the time of his conviction. The
Times
derided him as a fool “of unsound intellect…. who wanted to be Smith the First, King of Munster.”
Punch
said: “The courage of Mr. Smith O’Brien in slinking among the cabbages in Widow McCormack’s garden may be questioned; but it must be remembered that the hero, if he crept out of the way of the bullets, betrayed no fear of the slugs.” That’ll teach him to go round suggesting that Catholics and Protestants should go to the same schools, a belief that also upset his fiercely loyalist mother, who wrote to Maria Island warning him against “the deceitful delusion of Popery …. those cunningly devised fables.” I suppose it’s unlikely to be still there now, but I find myself wishing I’d tried to find the widow’s cabbage patch when I was last in Ireland.

One detail catches my eye. A letter home has two sets of writing to the page, one across the other at right angles, exactly as Louie had written the letter about poor Bert that I read at Vince’s house in Cobh. It must have been common practice. It’s a precise, very human detail that links O’Brien and her together in the same era, and the same fate of separation by the seas. There’s also evidence that O’Brien’s solitude drove him to that most extreme refuge of the truly desperate: poetry.

Outside with a banana and a bar of chocolate, I sit on a stone looking down towards the sea and try to piece together the locations of the most farcical, and most notorious, incident of O’Brien’s sojourn on Maria.

The superintendent of the island, Mr. Lapham, came from Kildare. He and O’Brien seem to have had a cordial relationship from the start, and Lapham gradually relaxed the terms of his famous prisoner’s confinement, even going so far as to allow him to speak with some of the officers and their families. The Lapham family house was close to O’Brien’s cottage—I’m sitting next to it as I eat—and he shared an interest in botany with the superintendent’s youngest daughter, Susan. He was soon to wish that he hadn’t. On July 18 he was with Miss Lapham in her garden, not knowing they were being watched by three men with a telescope. Constable William Rogerson takes up the story:

O’Brien’s cloaks weren’t doing him a lot of favors; it isn’t clear whether this was the same one that let him down at Thurles railway station. The constable certainly seems to have been in possession of a top-notch telescope. One of his colleagues took a turn next. “I saw O’Brien’s trousers
open in front and I saw Miss Susan’s hand in his trousers. I could see the button [!] on his trousers and I saw Miss Lapham take her hand from his trousers ….”

Considering the nature of the alleged offense it seems strange no action was taken against O’Brien. It’s possible the allegations were covered up from Lapham, though his wife certainly knew. O’Brien dismissed them as “the reports of a mischief-maker, who states that he saw with a telescope doings that he could not have seen had he been within ten yards.” Whatever the truth of the matter, surveillance of O’Brien was stepped up. In Hobart, Meagher, acting in collaboration with an Irish doctor called McCarthy and with support from Irish nationalists in New York, organized a ship to rescue O’Brien, who had never given his parole not to escape. Like many of O’Brien’s grand gestures, the attempt ended in farce. O’Brien was apprehended splashing about in the water by one of the constables who had manned the telescope during the alleged groping of Miss Lapham. Shortly afterwards O’Brien was told he was to be transferred to the feared penal colony of Port Arthur, south of Hobart. In a letter to his sister he wrote: “I have been told that Port Arthur is as near a realization of Hell upon earth as can be found in any part of the British Dominions.”