Beam me Down Under

In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

(Harvill, Pounds 20)

A FRIEND from Melbourne gave me some advice when I told her I was reviewing this book. "We might call it Tassie," she said, "But don't forget the mania bit."

Mainland Australians rarely do. They treat Tassie as the English treat Wales and the Welsh: a place for their hillwalking and adventure holidays and a people they can make jokes about - mostly of the inbreeding/sheepshagging school. Nicholas Shakespeare recounts seeing a T-shirt on sale in Hobart with a spare hole for an extra head. (He points out austerely that there is a "lower rate of congenital malformation than the Australian average".) But there is a darker side to the barroom jibes. Men with two heads belong in a storybook land of tigers and devils, of trees and plants from the mythical continent of Gondwana-land, the land of the " Tasmaniacs". It's also a land that breeds scapegoats. Shakespeare quotes Bernard Lloyd's astute observation that "Australians project all the things they loathe about themselves - their racism, their homophobia, their parochialism - onto the ' Albania of the Antipodes'". It is also where their deepest canyons of Anglo-Australian shame are located and, perhaps, contained: the worst convict prisons, the worst Aboriginal genocide, the worst serialkilling spree and, had it not been for the desperate opposition of protesters at Gordon River in 1982, the worst act of environmental damage.

Shakespeare fetched up here on a course of biographer's rehab - it was one of the few places he couldn't find Bruce Chatwin, whose tracks he had been following around the world for seven years. The cold turkey wasn't too successful.

He soon discovered a hamlet of Chatwins living on the island.

He also found himself back in the libraries and newspaper libraries discovering his own family's yet more intimate and extraordinary Tasmanian connections.

The first half of the book is mostly taken up with the tale of his ancestor Anthony Fenn Kemp, a rollicking and swindling early-19th- century adventurer.

Those qualifications proved ideal in the early days of Van Dieman's Land, and Kemp became a wealthy merchant, Judge Advocate and, eventually, the self-declared "Father of Tasmania".

SHAKESPEARE weaves Tasmania's history with his attempts to discover more about Kemp, and he has a thoroughly good time of it. The narrative is part Peter Carey, part Gothic novel, with plenty of drunkenness, torture, villainy and cannibalism to be aghast at. In Tasmania is a fine travel book, too: like Scotty from Star Trek, Shakespeare has the knack of beaming the reader down into this otherworldly-place within an effortless-sentence or two. He then unearths a second spooky branch of the family tree: a great-uncle who fled financial ruin in Victorian Devon to settle in Tasmania. He ends his days isolated, apparently alcoholic and without a satisfactory legacy to leave his literary great-nephew.

It is no great surprise that Shakespeare's attention wanders to the sad, obscure and contentious fate of the Tasmanian tiger and the Tasmanian aborigine.

In Tasmania has an awful lot poured into it - history, genealogy, biography, autobiography, politics, travelogue - which is maybe why Shakespeare-ended up with such a baggy title. What's missing is a sense of the modern Tasmania.

For a state that only ended segregated bars in 1967 and legalised homosexuality 20 years later, it is now more progressive than the mainland and has undergone a tourism boom thanks to a sprouting of funky eco-lodges and boutique hotels.

In fact, when I tried to visit last January I was told the island was "full". I hope Shakespeare isn't in a second state of post- publication burnout, because a smaller, tighter book on the new Tasmania would be something to look forward to.

.Mark Jones is editorial director of High Life magazine.

(c)2004. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.