In Tasmania Read Online Free PDF Page B

island was enjoying a rediscovery as an Arcadia rather than an Alcatraz. The ‘hated stain’ was being cleaned up on several levels, and, encouraged by terrorism, SARS, and improved transport and communications, not to mention cheap property, visitors were crossing Bass Strait in record numbers.
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    â€˜Fitzroy’s crack’ could also suck you down into the human equivalent of Mount Wellington’s dolerite core.
    In a place as obsessed with history as Tasmania the present quickly leads back to the past. Talking to Bill Penfold, a telephone engineer who had written a book on Hobart’s New Town district, I had to ask him to repeat himself when he mentioned that his grandfather had been a convict at Port Arthur, a prison of secondary punishment on the tip of the Tasman peninsula.
    â€˜Your great-grandfather, surely?’ I said.
    But no. His grandfather William Pinfold was a convict from Northamptonshire who had stolen jewellery from a post office – ‘and probably a thousand other things’. He was sent to Norfolk Island in 1847 and then to Port Arthur, where he was one of 12,000 male convicts who reoffended between 1832 and 1853. ‘He was released and wound up hop-picking, and was listed as a butcher in New Norfolk, a place called Plenty where he stole a sheep and was sent back to Port Arthur for four years.’ In 1850 he married an Irish milkmaid. William’s father was born in 1872, and in 1930 the family changed their name to Penfold. ‘It was because of the winery,’ he said, ‘but also something to do with convicts. People were very reluctant to admit they were descended from convicts, and then in the last 20 years convicts have become the in thing.’
    When he was incarcerated at Port Arthur, Penfold’s grandfather would have known the commandant of the ‘Silent Prison’ [or Model Prison]. A friend of my mother’s sent me from Wiltshire this bleak paragraph that she had transcribed from her grandmother’s diary: ‘At Hobarton [Hobart] among other duties my father had military control of the Silent Prison on the convict station, a terrible institution which has long since been given up on account of the number of convicts who went out of their minds. My mother often described to us how sad a sight it was to see the convicts taking exercise in perfect silence and knowing that except to their jailers some of them had not been allowed to speak to anyone for years. Once as she passed she stuck a piece of sweet scented verbena into the hands of one of these silent prisoners & heard that afterwards the poor fellow was on his knees weeping over it in his cell.’
    As the state prepared to mark the 200th anniversary of its settlement by Europeans, there were signs that Tasmania itself was beginning to emerge from a long, traumatic period of silence in which certain topics could not be discussed.
    Until very recently the past was regarded as discreditable, to be put ‘out of sight and out of mind’ according to Lloyd Robson in the first part of his two-volume history of Tasmania. Many growing up here in the 1950s felt, like Conrad, that ‘Tasmania possesses too much history’. Pete Hay is another writer who believes that Tasmania has never made an authentic accommodation with its past: ‘That past has the stature of a dark family secret.’
    The name-change to Tasmania a century before had been a deliberate attempt to wipe clean that slate. Van Diemen’s Land, wrote Trollope in 1873, had ‘a sound which had become connected all over the world with rascaldom’ it seemed ‘to carry a taunt in men’s ears’ and was ‘harsh with the crack of the jailer’s whip’. And yet pages scissored from records in the Hobart archives suggested that shame about the past had endured. The state archivist Ian Pearce says that his relatives glossed over a convict ancestor who was spoken of many times as