Travel: Having spent seven years writing his acclaimed biography of Bruce Chatwin, a travel writer whose books on the exotic include In Patagonia, Nicholas Shakespeare was "burned out", and sought some restorative exoticism of his own.
"One of the attractions of Tasmania was that Chatwin, who specialised in the remote, had never been there."
In Tasmania is a study of the human impact on a beautiful, remote island. It is not quite the Ultima Thule of the Southern hemisphere, but to Nicholas Shakespeare at first it must have felt like it. "It is like outer space on earth and invoked by those at the 'centre' to stand for all that is far-flung, strange and unverifiable."
The Aborigines called it Trowenna. When Abel Tasman, a Dutch navigator, discovered it in 1642 he thought it was part of the Australian mainland. However, for the past 9,000 years, since the end of the Ice Age, Van Diemen's Land, as the Dutch named it, has been isolated by 140 miles of sea.
The size of Ireland, it is an island of "exceptional natural beauty, fertile soil and temperate climate", Shakespeare writes, "with the purest air in the world as well as some of the cleanest rainwater".
But its history is appallingly brutal. From the beginning of the 19th century, the British used this paradise as a hellish penal colony for 76,000 convicts. It was renamed Tasmania in 1856. By 1876, the Aboriginal population was generally exterminated, though Shakespeare has found traces of a few survivors. The Australians nicknamed the inhabitants Tasmaniacs.
In prose of admirable colour and clarity, Shakespeare presents a comprehensive account of Tasmania's past and its wonderfully preserved landscapes. During the first three years he lived on the island, he also conducted a genealogical investigation of his family's local connections. He was lucky as well as assiduous, for he found he was descended from settlers whose bizarre stories make his book much more revealing than ordinary travel books.
His mother's father, Stuart Petre Brodie Mais, was a prolific but unsuccessful author who died "bankrupt and heartbroken", Shakespeare relates. "He was the first writer I ever met, and the reason why I never wanted to become a writer myself." Shakespeare overcame that inhibition, as a London literary editor and the author of some excellent novels.
In 1965, Mais published Round the World Cruise Holiday, dedicated to his grandchildren, especially Nicholas, "who will one day, we hope, follow in our footsteps round the world". "It occurred to me that my grandfather's wish had come true," Shakespeare comments. "My father being a diplomat, I had been brought up in France, Cambodia, Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, Peru and Morocco." With that background, he was able to adjust without much difficulty to an island not far from the South Pole, 13,000 miles from England.
His great-great-great-grandfather, William Potter, and great-great-great-great- uncle, Anthony Fenn Kemp, in 1815 were partners in England as "Kemp & Potter, brandy and tobacco merchants". Kemp, according to Shakespeare, was "roistering, opportunistic, peripatetic, corrupt". When he ran out of money, Kemp migrated to New South Wales and beyond, to become "The Father of Tasmania".
Shakespeare's great-great-uncle, Petre Hordern, also dissipated an inherited English fortune and escaped from humiliation in his native land by hiding in Tasmania. Anthony Trollope had been "astonished by the size and quality of Tasmania's strawberries, mulberries and cherries", Shakespeare writes, and "proposed that Tasmania ought to make jam for the world". Hordern, a reformed drunkard and gambler, established an orchard in his obscure refuge, but it was a failure. Of Shakespeare's ancestral exiles in Tasmania, only Kemp had the determination and ingenuity to prosper, eventually owning extensive property in Hobart, the capital, and in the countryside, where he raised sheep.
Furthermore, Shakespeare had the good fortune to meet Hordern's grand-daughters, Ivy and Maud, elderly maiden ladies who told about living in secluded rural stasis. Thanks to a misplaced telephone call, Shakespeare even made the surprising acquaintance of an unrelated Tasmanian by the name of N. Shakespeare.
The population of Tasmania is now only about half a million; 39 per cent of the island is a World Heritage Centre, with proportionately the largest Green vote in any general election anywhere in the world. It is no longer the habitat of many of those ferocious, small carnivores known as Tasmanian Devils. Though much of the book is meticulously objective, all the way from Cape Grim to Oyster Bay, the overall impression is magically dreamlike.
It seemed inevitable that Nicholas Shakespeare, at the age of 42, and his wife, Gillian, should decide to sink their savings into a beach house in "the most beautiful place I had seen on earth". On our tormented planet in the present era, how enviable.
Patrick Skene Catling is a writer and critic
In Tasmania, By Nicholas Shakespeare, Harvill, 374pp. £20