The Devil Beneath the Stones
Written: May 28 '02 (Updated May 28 '02)
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Tasmania |
In celebration of the new Epinions policy permitting reprints that have appeared on other sites (so long as we violate no copyrights other than our own) I'm happy to post this 1999 article ...
When I called my American business partner from a payphone in Hobart, I was on hold only for a moment. "Finally!" she said. "I've always wanted to tell a client: 'I'm sorry, I have to get off the phone. I have a call from Tasmania.'"
The word "Tasmania" brought out her most American vowels. The second 'a' skittered all over her two-octave range, like a rabbit darting back and forth in the glare of headlights, reluctant to get off the road. The word implied not so much anything exotic, but simply an unimaginable distance. She would have used the same tones to say "Antarctica" or "Saturn." But among places that speak English, have reliable phones, and can be reached by commercial airlines at a reasonable cost, Tasmania simply meant "the end of the earth," the remotest place imaginable.
To the developed world, Tasmania is off the end of the earth, all but forgotten. Of course, the same can be said of Australia itself; just ask anyone on the street in London, Tokyo or New York to name five famous Australians, and watch them squirm. In the soundbites of which widespread opinion is made, Australia is a place where nothing much happens. Common appellations such as "Oz" and "the lucky country" suggest an exotic but stable paradise, while the nation's early history as a penal colony produced subsequent generations of a free middle-class eager to appear as bland as possible, since blandness is read worldwide, often incorrectly, as meaning "law-abiding." The nation's very eagerness to erase the "convict stain" helped to create an unusually staid culture where even pub-brawls are predictable and not especially newsworthy.
As the world regards Australia, so mainland Australia regards its island state. Mention Tasmania to a mainland Australian, and you may hear "beautiful" but you will probably also hear "provincial" and "backward," not to mention "cold." You may also hear the word "devil," sometimes with an ominous metaphorical tone, as in: "Ah yes, Tasmania. There are devils there."
The most obvious of the devils is Sarcophilus harissii. Commonly called the "Tasmanian devil," Sarcophilus is the island's most distinctive mammal, a marsupial the size of a large rabbit with a face that is part dog, part rodent. Being nocturnal, it is most commonly seen as roadkill, but rural Tasmanians often hear them screaming in the night. Like most Australians, I never saw one alive in the wild, but got the usual stories about their viciousness -- jaws large enough to crush a lamb's skull, etcetera. Paintings, taxidermy, and even photography always present the Tasmanian devil with fangs bared, growl practically audible. For anyone in the mood to be frightened, the Tasmanian devil offers a year-round Halloween.
But Tasmania is full of devils, and the one that awakens children with its screams may be the least of them. I doubt that Dante's frozen Satan would enjoy Tasmania, but it is ideal territory for mystery and intimations of evil -- a land of multiple, efficient, insidious devils of a more Protestant vein. In our secular age, of course, the word "devil" has lost most of its horror. "Devilry" is almost a synonym for "salacious fun", something that children can be trusted to do while still turning out all right. "The devil is in the details," said Ambrose Bierce, but this devil is hardly Satan, or even evil, but just a nuisance, the sort of thing that British doggedness has always gotten past.
On the surface, satanic imagery is now so safe that it can be a logo. Tasmania's monopolized tabloids, the Mercury and the Tasmanian, both sport the shape of the island state, colored bright red, on every issue, and the same image appears on every newsagent's awning. Anyone with the imagination to see camels in clouds can see the face of the devil in the shape of Tasmania on the map. The island is a rough inverted triangle -- a stern face -- while the northern coast has a slight v-shaped indentation, suggesting a furrowed brow. The shaggy south end of the island, formed of endless bays and promontories, could easily be read as a beard. Most damning, small islands are strung off the northwest and northeast corners, pointing upward. Horns.
Where geography failed to create the perfect devil, the lords of Tasmanian journalism repaired it. In the red logo of the Tasmania's press, the "horns" are perfect. The north-south oval of King Island in the northwest is placed directly opposite the Furneaux Group of islands in the northeast, forming two dotted promontories rising straight north from the island's upper corners. Sadly, King Island is actually much further north and west than the red logo would indicate. On an accurate map, one horn has broken off and is floating away toward Adelaide. Not to worry, the graphics departments of Tasmania have simply moved King Island, gluing the horn back into place, and their symmetrical version is so ubiquitous in Tasmania that many people doubtless believe it's the geographical truth. Even my Australian-made HEMA map of Tasmania places King Island in the precise location on the page that best creates the image of two horns. It takes a moment to notice that King Island is in an inset, placed there by the mapmakers, while the Furneaux group, the eastern horn, is in its true location.
The red logo of Tasmania-as-devil, so carefully refined by the Tasmanian press, reminds me of the way neglected minorities appropriate the worst things that can be said of them. Only blacks can call themselves "n*gger." Only gays can call themselves "f*g" or "queer." Only Tasmanians can proudly announce their island's satanic qualities, and even exaggerate them. Like those minority epithets, the satanic image of Tasmania is often used in fun, a "bit of devilry," and the island's Christian population probably sees it this way. Yet it is impossible not to connect this image to the unimaginable pain, humiliation, and evil that fill Tasmania's short modern history, as taught in Australia and picked up in snatches by visitors.
Under its former name, "Van Diemen's Land," Tasmania was a penal colony of last resort, where a prisoner deemed too intractable to live on the mainland was sent For the Term of His Natural Life -- the title of Marcus Clarke's popular book about such a prisoner. From the central penal colony at Port Arthur, the penal authorities of Van Diemen's Land exiled its own "worst cases" to their own islands, including Maria Island in the east (the devil's left earring) and tiny Sarah Island in the untamed west (a loose rock inside his right ear).
As prisoners gradually finished their terms, they settled as free men and women, gradually forming an agrarian class. To expedite this settlement, the authorities exterminated the island's Aboriginals in one of the fastest and most systematic of the world's many colonial genocides. The slaughter was made even more gruesome by the bizarre coddling of its last known survivors. Once Aboriginals were rare enough to make no credible claims, the few who remained were dressed up in English clothes, taught to be Christians, and treated with an appalling condescension that continues in the memorial to the "last Aboriginal", who died at the turn of the 20th century.
But all that happened in "Van Diemen's Land." The name "Tasmania" was invented later as a marketing term, an act of erasure, presenting the island as a safe place for free settlers. The name refers to Abel Tasman, the 17th Century explorer who -- in a feat of endearing haplessness -- found and mapped Tasmania without finding the nearby Australian mainland. Tasman died long before the British decided to use their new southern realm as a dumping ground for criminals. Unstained by penal history, the Renaissance figure of Tasman was the perfect floodlamp to chase away the dark shadows of Van Diemen's Land, making it a safe place for cottages, hedgerows, and Devonshire teas.
Just as most college freshmen read Dante's Inferno as sadomasochistic pornography, most tourists enjoy a legitimized titillation, quite erotic for some, as guides regale them with stories of flogging, humiliation, solitary confinement, hard labor, and brave but futile escapes. Most of the penal institutions are in ruins, their reality comfortably absent and open to idle imaginings. Rainforest has retaken Sarah Island to the point that there is no way to grasp how it looked in colonial days -- illustrations are far more informative than the experience of being there.
Of all the penal colonies, only the central one at Port Arthur is substantially intact. Unlike Sarah Island, Port Arthur remains far too vivid to be tamed. It has sprouted all the souvenir shops and mock-titillations that you would expect, enough to satisfy any Australian Kitsch Commission. Still, Port Arthur is a vast and ominous place. It is the most sacred site in the perilous dance with history that constitutes Tasmanian tourism, and that forms Tasmania's image to the world.
For some satanic reason, it was here that Tasmania's shelved and polished horrors broke out of their glass museum cases and burst into the present. In 1996, a young man opened fire on a crowd at Port Arthur's tourist complex, not just killing 35 people but systematically mutilating them with the force of multiple bullets. The body count does not begin to describe the crime. The young man fired repeatedly into already dead bodies, brutalizing them beyond recognition. Evil -- a concept so out of fashion -- was the only word that even began to encompass it.
The Port Arthur Massacre is the most intensely reported event ever to occur in Tasmania. For mainland Australia, it was a nuclear explosion in the national self-image. Even in North America, where random gun violence is common, the massacre was news. In Australia, nothing remotely like this had ever happened before. A conservative government responded with strict gun control laws that could never have been proposed the previous day. Port Arthur remains a site of eruption, a modern horror stamped directly over (relatively) ancient ones, a palimpsest of human evil.
The only response to horror is respectful silence. Memorials to the Nazi holocaust are almost always toured quietly, children hushed as much as possible. But when a huge horror engulfs a small island, silence becomes a way of life. Tasmania's conservatism and cultural blandness were already a joke in mainland Australia, but they were an understandable adaptation to living on the bloodied ground of "Van Diemen's Land." That scream in the night could be Sarcophilus harissii, but it could also be the scream of a tortured prisoner or a dying Aboriginal, echoing through time. In such a place, you learn to move slowly, deliberately, cautiously, so as not to disturb the nameless evil all around you. Fast-moving mainland ideas like gay rights or environmentalism struck stony resistance in Tasmania, where slowness and resistance to change ran deep. Those campaigns threatened to turn over rocks, to reveal still more evil. Tasmania had been livable only because rocks were not overturned here, even if, as a price, the people had become a bit rocklike themselves.
Tourism has resumed, and visitors now see a small plaque honoring the victims of the massacre. The smallness of the plaque is a kind of silence, honoring the fact that this event is, in the Australian consciousness and especially the Tasmanian one, simply too large and recent to be memorialized.
Gay rights and environmentalism have both arrived, largely stamped upon Tasmania by Federal authority backed by the force of still more unfavorable press. A gay activist in Europe who knows nothing about Tasmania probably does know that the island recently legalized homosexuality -- the last Australian state to do so. An American environmental activist who wouldn't know an Antarctic Beech from a Huon Pine probably received bulletins on the battle to save the Gordon River. Despite some local support, and the worthiness of these causes, both battles relied heavily on "air power" -- constant bombardments of worldwide visitors and media. They changed the law, turned over some rocks, revealed more evils -- but most of the rocks, especially the human ones, still haven't moved.
As in mythology, though, rocks can give birth to people. The children of the old Tasmanians, in the natural rebellion of youth, speak openly of things once concealed. And other people keep arriving in Tasmania, washing over the rocks, both human and mineral, grinding slowly away at them.
Hobart, Tasmania's capital, is admired from the mainland as a gem of historic preservation. The conservative Tasmanians of the 1940s would have been happy to raze the magnificent colonial buildings and put up Stalinist blocks, just as their peers were doing in Brisbane and Sydney, but Hobart had no economy to support such "revitalization." Their magnificent natural port -- physically the equal of Sydney's -- was on the wrong side of the island, convenient only for the Antarctic market, so it sprouted no shipping terminals, only the modest weathered docks of fisheries. Timber, mining, and small-scale farms never created the economic booms in which architecture typically bursts the bounds of reflection and becomes truly hideous. So the colonial buildings -- buildings full of thought, remembrance, honesty in the face of evil -- still stand, and tourism is finally rewarding Hobart for keeping them.
On Saturday, at Hobart's Salamanca place, an open-air market brings out all parts of Tasmanian society, including a permissive and even promiscuous subculture that is largely invisible elsewhere. Mainland Australians say that to go to Tasmania is to go back 20 years, but I would have to say 30 is more correct. Here in 1999, spread out on blankets in the park, vaguely selling something or other, were hippies, replicas of my parents' generation as they looked and behaved in about 1969. The clothes and scents and hairstyles and candles for sale were the same, and so was the mood -- a mix of erotic exuberance and sincerity in activism. As my parents protested the war in Vietnam, these young people were protesting events in East Timor, but their anger coexisted with their joy. A young man lay shirtless on the hood of a car, sandalled feet spread on the ground, eyes locked with a young woman who stood between his legs, gazing down at him. Crystals in several colors were placed symmetrically around his torso, a pleasing arrangement credibly suggestive of the sacred. As the woman fell forward with unbearably sensuous slowness, the crystals were still, as calm as the young man's bliss.
Bliss in the land of the devil? Bliss after so many massacres? The pillars of society disapprove but have learned to tolerate. They understand money, and money now lies in tourism. They remain determined, though, to retain their rocklike qualities as long as possible. During my stay, the Mercury discovered that the Federal subsidies reducing fares on the ferry to the mainland -- intended to encourage tourism to Tasmania -- were actually sending more Tasmanians to holiday on the mainland than vice versa. An editorial in the same issue lashed out at Tasmanians for spending their precious dollars off the island. I tried to imagine a country where editorial boards would scold their customers in such a paternalistic way, and expect this scolding to have any effect. Of course, it is the same country where everything possible (a cassette tape? a stapler?) is labeled "Made in Tasmania," products of a defiant band of local microindustries. Even the hippies in Salamanca Place probably admire Tasmanian isolationism, since it sets itself up against the global corporatism that is the new enemy of the left. Isolation, pierced only by tourism, seems to the consensus among all the walks of life at Hobart's Saturday fair.
Tasmanian tourism authorities have a marked preference for rigidly guided tours. Some national parks, for example, can be hiked in only one direction, just like the Vatican Museum. Inevitably, though, tourists will wander off of marked paths, spread new ideas, and try to burrow into that old rockpile that Father told us never to disturb. The old white Tasmanians are almost Aboriginal in their resignation to tourism. Like the Aboriginal custodians of Uluru -- the sacred giant rock in Australia's outback -- they permit the desecration of their holy places, and the gradual wearing away of their identity that results, only for much-needed cash. It is the classic contract with the Devil, with the added stipulation that all maps must be revised to reflect His image.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Dec - Feb
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Urbanist
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