Kemp was volatile, underhanded and universally despised. He was also incredibly lucky, always in hot water, but never burned. As Shakespeare riffles through the archives, he develops a sneaking fondness for this man, who, for completely selfish reasons, established the first white settlement on Tasmania.
"A monster and a rogue he may have been, and yet there was something satisfying about the repeated pattern of his life -- one minute facing catastrophe, the next getting off scot free," Shakespeare writes.
Kemp was no Washington. True, he agitated incessantly for Tasmania's administrative independence, but his vision for the future included a law to annul all former laws -- "nothing like a clear stage, and plenty of elbow room," he said -- and a law requiring all citizens to eat 907g of meat daily, "so as to encourage the consumption and raise the price of livestock."
The transformation of Kemp from rascal to revered statesman parallels the equally remarkable transformation of Van Diemen's Land, a byword for hell on earth, to Tasmania, a second Eden. Along the way the Aboriginal population, estimated at 3,000 to 5,000, was reduced in numbers, by 1875, to precisely one.
Or was it? Shakespeare inquires, productively, into the racial politics of Tasmania and discovers a subtle social code at work, not unlike that applied to Creoles in New Orleans. Mixed-race Tasmanians abound, but until the 1970s they referred to themselves as Islanders or half-castes. Everyone knew, but no one talked.
Shakespeare should have spent more time chatting with the locals and feasting his eyes on the world around him. Less time spent in the archives, and carefully polishing each of his lapidary sentences, might have served his purpose better. When at a loss, he could have cracked open a cold one with the Keg on Legs, shed a few inhibitions and let his imagination loose. No matter what he wrote, the Tasmanians would have believed him.
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