In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare

Corps’.
    Unfortunately for Sorell, Kemp’s mud stuck. Kemp had exposed what Sorell admitted was ‘the one great error’ of his life. In October 1823, Sorell was recalled.
    Days after the news leaked out, an extraordinary public meeting was held in Hobart. The motion was passed unanimously. An urgent petition was to be sent to George IV entreating him to extend Sorell’s tenure as Governor. It must have astonished Sorell to discover the identity of the committee’s chairman. Starting with an admission that they had had some difficulties in the past, the speaker, Anthony Fenn Kemp, went on to lavish praise on Sorell as a leader who showed ‘steady, calm, decided and experienced Judgment, uniform impartiality and disinterestedness’.
    Too late. In June 1824, Sorell, Mrs Kent and their six children left Van Diemen’s Land on the Guildford . The citizens of Hobart had followed them en masse to the shore. In the words of Sorell’s obituary, ‘each colonist seemed as if he were losing a cherished personal friend.’

XV
    WHENEVER I PEERED INTO TASMANIA’S EARLY HISTORY, EACH TIME I rubbed away the dust I found Kemp staring out. The next episode involving him was one of the goriest ever to take place in Van Diemen’s Land, and it began – innocently enough – with an attempt to pirate his boat.
    Anchored alongside the departing Guildford was a cargo of merino fleeces. Thanks to Potter’s loan, Kemp had bought some of John Macarthur’s merino rams to upgrade his wool as well as a schooner to ferry the wool to his warehouse on the wharf. Two years before, on the evening of March 30, 1822, five convicts were arrested on board as they grappled with the anchor. Their trespass had consequences that have since riveted historians from John West to Robert Hughes, and the story was well-known in Tasmania, though I had never heard of it.
    The attempted pirating of his boat infuriated Kemp, who was never lenient towards those who tried to rob him. A thief caught escaping from his cottage in Collins Street with a gold watch and ‘trinkets’ received 200 lashes and was shackled in leg-irons for a year. In his attitude towards anyone who crossed him Kemp reminded me of the officer in Kafka’s story ‘In the Penal Colony’, who is keen to show off his chosen instrument of punishment, the harrow, and who decides every sentence arbitrarily, without a trial. ‘My guiding principle is this: guilt is never to be doubted.’
    Unfortunately for Kemp, he was no longer on the Bench since Sorell had suspended him. ‘It broke down under me some years ago,’ he complained to a journalist, ‘and has never been since repaired.’ Nonetheless, he was owed a favour by the adjudicating magistrate in the case, his friend the Reverend Robert Knopwood, who had baptised two of his children and shared Kemp’s notion of justice. The punishment that Knopwood handed down on the gang’s leader, Robert Greenhill, and his rumoured lover Matthew Travers, would traumatise them.
    Greenhill, the wiliest of the group, was a 32-year-old sailor from Middlesex transported for stealing his wife’s coat. In Van Diemen’s Land he had worked as a stockman in the bush north of Hobart, and there formed a close friendship with Travers, an Irishman convicted of theft. Shortly before Greenhill ate him, Travers confessed that the two of them had always communicated on every subject, ‘and had entrusted each other with the most guarded secrets’.
    The attempted hijack of a valuable schooner belonging to Hobart’s ‘most respectable merchant’ was a serious crime. Mindful of the role that Kemp had played in clearing his name four years before, Knopwood ordered the men to receive 150 lashes.
    I had read umpteen accounts of floggings, but it was not until I untied a grey folder in Hobart’s Tasmaniana library that I had a notion of what Greenhill