The Road to McCarthy (29 page)

Meagher was assigned the area around Campbell Town and Ross, two central inland towns north of Hobart and west of Swansea and the Freycinet Peninsula. Today Campbell Town straddles the main north-south Launceston-Hobart road, which was built by convict labor. As I approach it from the east I crest a ridge and see the little town on the flatlands below, the sinister mountains of the west looming on the far horizon. There’s a working sawmill, a few rough-and-ready single-story wooden houses and a cluster of unkempt goats. It’s all pleasingly ramshackle till you reach the main street, which is far more proper. The Campbell Town Inn is an elegant sandstone building dating from 1840. The big attraction is the bridge, which was constructed by the transportees in 1838 from bricks they manufactured on site. It was designed to cope with horse traffic but has never required major repairs, even though it now takes 1.2 million vehicles a year, at least according to the statistics. That’s a hell of a lot of cars for such an empty island. I must only have seen about twenty or thirty of them since I got here. I wonder where they’re hiding all the others?

There’s a tiny museum where, as is now traditional, I am the only visitor. This was once a predominantly Gaelic-speaking area. “The early log splitters—mainly Irish—would come down into town and go on wild drunken sprees,” it says on the wall, “usually accompanied by their
women.” There’s something very ominous-sounding in that final phrase, though I can’t quite put my finger on it. One woman, it appears, was so drunk that she had to be “carried to Bridge Street Jail in a sedan box.” For some reason Meagher didn’t like it here and after a few days moved south to Ross. I decide to follow his example.

Unlike Campbell Town, Ross is now bypassed. tasmania’s finest heritage village, claims the sign. It certainly looks picture-book pretty as I drive in along an avenue of autumnal yellow trees. Behind them are discreet rows of nineteenth-century houses built in timber or mellow, beautifully weathered sandstone. I park outside the Tasmanian Scottish Center and take a few minutes to admire its impressive stock of Scottish sweeties, Edinburgh Rock and Irn Bru. In the window is a cardboard cutout of a man in a kilt with an orange beard and mad staring eyes. I can’t be sure, but I think he may have been at my reading in Rocky Sullivan’s.

A map in the Campbell Town museum showed Meagher’s house standing at the junction of Bond and High Streets in Ross. You’d think it’d be the kind of thing a heritage village would make a fuss about, but there don’t seem to be any signs or plaques. I stroll round to the junction of the two streets and find a pair of simple cottages. One of them has broken windows. Ravaged-looking toys litter the porch. It looks derelict, but maybe the kids just play rough. Unless he lived in one of the 1960s brick bungalows across the street, one or the other of them must have been his home, but nothing’s marked, and there’s no one to ask because there isn’t a soul in sight. Maybe they’ve all nipped up to Campbell Town for the afternoon to drive back and forth across the bridge and keep the statistics up to scratch.

In the heart of downtown Ross I go into a shop to buy the picnic I’ve been planning for weeks. I’m expecting to be served by one of those slick twenty-first-century tourism operatives with anxious smiles that you find everywhere these days, but instead I get a nineteenth-century shepherd with tree-trunk arms and a
Cold Comfort Farm
haircut. I select a straightforward meat pie from the lengthy pie menu. Instead of wrapping it up, Cold Comfort seizes a plastic squirty bottle of tomato ketchup. He’s about to inject the red stuff into my pie like a builder squirting insulation into a wall when I spot what he’s up to and ask him to desist. He’s clearly alarmed
by my eccentricity, and by the time I leave town word will be out that there’s a weird pie-eater on the loose.

Pies are a cornerstone of Australian life. Gastronomy may be the new national pastime, but away from the epicurean heartlands you’ll still find plenty of people whose idea of a seven-course meal is a six-pack and a pie.

I put the pie into the car, fasten its seat belt and drive the few miles south to Tunbridge.

Meagher had been given
strict instructions by the supervising magistrate that his area of liberty ended at Blackman’s River, beyond which he could not pass. The other Young Irelanders had all been allotted different districts to prevent any possibility of their meeting up and plotting further mischief. Meagher, however, realized that his colleague Kevin O’Doherty had been allotted an adjacent district that had as its boundary the same Blackman’s River. The village of Tunbridge straddled the river. Meagher arranged for the landlord of a local pub to set up a table on the very center of the bridge over the river along with two chairs, one either side of the boundary. Each Monday he and O’Doherty would meet there for lunch, each sitting just inside his own district. As well as poking fun at the British officials, this gave Meagher the chance to be Tasmania’s first Irish nationalist restaurant reviewer:

“To be sure, the passage through the air, for upwards of five hundred yards or so, condensed the steam of the potatoes and solidified the gravy somewhat; but the inn was not to blame for that. The Home Office spoiled the cooking.”

It seems only right to commemorate this flamboyant stunt while I’m in the area.

Tunbridge is bypassed by the main road and I find the bridge straight away. There’s nothing to mark it out as the scene of a major historical practical joke, but there is a sign identifying the river. The bridge is clearly the Victorian original, with five stone balustrades so you can calculate precisely where the table would have been placed. I put the pie on the wall, exactly at the center, and begin to unwrap it. As I’m doing so an old man crosses the
bridge pushing a wheelbarrow full of pig shit. He winks and smiles and gives a cheery “G’day” as he passes.

I bite into the pie in a conscious act of communion with the men whose story has brought me to the other side of the world. The pastry’s fine—but God in heaven, what’s this stuff inside it? Meagher’s congealed gravy had nothing on this evil black slurry. It reeks of something deeply unpleasant, a carrion stench that makes me gag even as I swallow. I daren’t take a second mouthful, because there’s a serious risk that as it’s on its way down the first one might be on its way back up. What a stinker! What a rotter! I can’t eat it, and I’m certainly not letting it back in the car. I check that no one’s watching, then drop it into the river, where it lands with a sickening plop. I’m instantly overwhelmed by guilt and regret. I may just have poisoned Tasmania’s pristine river system. The fumes could also taint the air and kill the rainforest. Too late now. The pie is caught between two stones on the riverbed, like a sealed nuclear container waiting to surprise a future generation. I feel ashamed. I’m going to get out of here before anyone realizes what I’ve done. As I walk back to the car I remember the old man with the wheelbarrow. Perhaps he was smiling and winking because he’s the guy who puts the filling in the pies.

Leaving Hobart
is becoming a habit. I’m heading south this time, crossing a causeway called Pitt Bluff. There’s shimmering water on either side. Gum trees rise above the hilltops, silhouetted against the skyline as they are in early colonial paintings. I’m feeling rather sad and blue. This may just be the potent combination of homesickness and traveling alone that always makes its presence felt at some point in a trip; but I can’t help feeling that it’s something to do with the landscape. And it’s not as if I’m still in the wilderness. I just passed a garden center and now I’m in an incongruous hamlet of dour redbrick bungalows, none of which seems to have quite enough windows. There’s an obsessive neatness about them which looks deeply peculiar in this environment. A few have ornamental flamingos and garden gnomes. The homes look as if they were modeled on England in the 1950s, and tell of a nostalgia for the life the ten-quid tourists
left behind. There are fields and cows and more gum trees now, and another bungalow all on its own at the top of a paddock. I think I know why I’m feeling blue. It’s because it’s just like home, except it’s not.

To the European eye something is slightly wrong. All the elements are here—houses, trees, birds, fields, churches—but things have been rearranged and re-emphasized, as if in a dream. Sometimes you can wake from a dream that isn’t a nightmare feeling, if not disturbed, then possessed by a sense of disquiet. I think that’s what’s happening here. I’m experiencing familiar things, but not as I know they should be.

It’s getting wilder the farther we get from Hobart, and I can’t get a clear reception on the radio anymore. The last thing I heard was an ad for Serious Chainsaws. I don’t think you have your logs delivered round here. Pickup trucks and four-wheel drives with roo bars look as if they belong, in a way they don’t when you see them in England with women with streaked blond hair parking on double yellow lines to drop off tiny kids in Just William school uniforms outside expensive prep schools run by child mo-lesters with no educational qualifications. The solid brick bungalows have given way to more ramshackle clapperboard-and-corrugated efforts where nothing is for ornament and everything is for function: an ancient pickup truck, a pile of logs, pieces of dead machinery. Many have hand-painted signs outside. “Cockatiels for Sale,” says one, whatever they are. “Chicky Poo—$2.50 a LARGE bag!” Work shirts and dungarees are drying on a porch behind a wire mesh fence on which is fixed the legend “LeAVe THe DOg ALone!!!” I’m more than happy to comply.

At the end of the Forestier Peninsula I stop to admire the sea views over Pirate’s Bay. There’s one of those official Tourist Attraction signs pointing to the Tessellated Pavement. I haven’t a clue what it is, but I know I’ve got to go. This is what tourists do all over the world. You see a sign for something you’ve never heard of and probably wouldn’t cross the road to see at home, and, bang, you’re there. And then people tell you about other things you ought to go and see. Once you’re in a small obscure area that the rest of the world knows nothing about someone will say, “Our big attraction is Satan’s Drain. You really should go.” So you do. And you develop an interest in geological features and sea levels and all sorts of other stuff you’ve never
cared about before; and then you go and see the Perpendicular Forest, where someone tells you about the Pointy-Headed Sparrow, and so it goes on until you’ve seen everything, and are really none the wiser.

The Tessellated Pavement is a sort of tiny version of the Giant’s Causeway, paving stone and loaf-of-bread-shaped rocks sitting at the water’s edge. There’s just one other sightseer, a man in a car coat and gray shoes who walks off without a word when I turn up and spoil his day. Like the attraction itself, the information on the sign is geological, and I can’t pretend I understand. What exactly occurred when the “Tectonic plates separated”? What would have happened if you’d been standing on them at the time? I suppose you’d have been tessellated too. How can they be sure the plates separated anyway? Was someone there taking notes? I mean, are we really expected to believe that rivers and mountains were formed by glaciers? You never see it happening on the news. Geologists? Bunch of fantasists. Sometimes you come to a place like the Tessellated Pavement, and you have to say that God seems like a much more plausible explanation.

It’s starting to drizzle and the mist’s coming down as I get back to the car and cross from the Forestier to the Tasman Peninsula, still heading south. Fields are hemmed in by forest whose treetops are shrouded in cloud, which makes for a somber, brooding atmosphere. If you’d been sent here from a Victorian city, with little previous experience of fields or trees, it must have come as a terrible shock, especially on top of a fourteen-year sentence. First the boat journey, then Nature; then being flogged half to death for stealing a turnip. You can see how it would change your outlook on life.

The Good Onya Café is the last bastion of no-nonsense matey Aussieness before the theme of crime and punishment takes over; first the Convict Country Bakery, then a bar called Escapes. Maybe there’ll be a restaurant called Banged Up. And then a sign next to a brick wall with a barred window says welcome to port arthur. I park next to a maroon four-wheel drive with a bumper sticker that says eat potatoes and love longer. I’m in a spooky remote place with people who think that potatoes are an aphrodisiac. It’s hard not to feel a shudder of apprehension.

After the closure
of Macquarie Harbor and Sarah Island in 1830, the new destination for convict recidivists was Port Arthur. Colonel George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land, had a vision of a penal system that in the wake of the Industrial Revolution would be like a machine “grinding rogues to free.” With this in mind he experimented with a new, supposedly scientific approach to punishment that would work hand in hand with traditional methods like a bloody good hiding. Advancement and progress through the system was a possibility; increasingly harsh punishment for those who reoffended was an inevitability. The site was chosen for both its accessibility and its inaccessibility. Port Arthur is at the very foot of the Tasman Peninsula. It’s a short and straightforward journey by boat across Storm Bay from Hobart, which is how both prisoners and supplies got here. To escape on foot, however, was a near impossibility. To leave the Tasman Peninsula the escapee would have to cross Eaglehawk Neck, a tiny strip of land less than a hundred yards wide just south of the Tessellated Pavement. The Neck was guarded by a tethered line of eighteen vicious dogs through which any escapee would have to pass. More dogs were placed on platforms projecting into the water, to discourage swimmers and waders. Slaughterhouse waste was put into the water to attract sharks, just to be on the safe side. Despite this there were regular escape attempts. The guards at Eagle-hawk Neck looked forward to them. “It takes on the aspect of a hunt,” wrote one.