Usually simple tasks had a soothing effect on me, but I was finding it harder and harder to execute them in my normal, focused way. There was an anxiety gnawing at my heart—mother lost, me here. There was no place left to breathe. There were no longer wildernesses, only zoos. There was no longer an easy freedom, only guarded institutions.
The next morning when Arthur and Travis got up, they were greeted by the unusual sight of me cooking breakfast. The house was freezing cold and I realized we’d run out of oil. I’d called the oil company and they said they’d send someone over, but it was almost eleven and I was still waiting for the delivery.
“It’s cold,” said Travis.
“Fucking freezing,” said Arthur.
“Have some coffee,” I suggested. “Maybe you can put your feet in it.”
I poured the coffee into mugs and handed them around. “Thinking of Texas?” I said to Travis.
“No,” he said. “You know where I’d like to be right now?”
“Where?”
“Australia.”
“Why?” asked Arthur.
“Because it’s summer. My dad went there once.”
“Vacation?” I asked. Vacations seemed a bit bourgeois for Travis.
“My father sells crop-dusting equipment. He went out there January two years ago. He said it was hot as hell.” Travis sipped his coffee. “He said he hit a kangaroo out on the highway. He said people went hunting after the kangaroos. I sure would like to do that.”
“I could never hunt kangaroo,” I said.
“Why not?” asked Travis.
“They’re too cute,” I said. “But I’ve always wanted to go to Australia.”
“Why?” asked Arthur.
“Because of the bushrangers,” I said. “A country of convicts and criminals appeals to me.”
“Bushrangers?” said Travis.
“Outlaws. You know, Ned Kelly, John Donahue, Michael Burke,” I said. “I took a course in Australian history when I was in college. Their heroes are bushrangers. How can you not love that?”
Australia in my mind had become an idealized America, what America might have been if we as Americans were more self-reliant, more free. In Australia (or so it seemed to me) one’s capacity to succeed was equal to one’s ability to exist outside of society, rather than in America, where one’s self-sufficient qualities were put to the test building yet another society. My bushranger heroes were largely Irish and Scottish, victims of the English. Their transport to Australia was a diaspora of Celtic pickpockets, forgers, and cattle rustlers.
“Who’s your favorite?” asked Travis.
“My favorite what?”
Travis looked at me, amused that I’d already lost track of the conversation. “Your favorite bushranger.”
“Oh,” I said, “that.” I pondered for a moment. “My favorite bushranger would be Alexander Pearce.”
“What did he do?” asked Arthur.
“He stole six pairs of shoes.” I sipped my coffee. “It was his first crime. He got seven years’ transportation, but he never saw his home again.”
“Where was home?” asked Travis.
“County Monaghan, Ireland.”
“God, you have a good memory,” said Arthur.
“For certain things,” I said.
I pictured Pearce on the deck of the Castle Forbes, slicing through the low waves and dense, wet air. Hell’s Gate suddenly appeared, rising out of the water—a mountain peak whose roots reached far below the churning surface of the sea. Pearce saw the basalt flutes of Tasmania rising out of the ocean, the sharp edges of rock cutting the sky. He knew he had sailed not only to the edge of the world, but to the edge of human knowledge itself. And what monsters inhabited this hell? What rules governed this island with its woolly-headed natives and ambitious, bitter overseers, beaten down by heat and famine, hostile Indians and savage convicts, seeing always the golden skies of Mother England over the edge of horizon, the sunny warmth of her smile.
But watch as the ship slips into the antipodean realm. Her bow rises and falls, her masts soar majestically upward and sails are flung to right and left. How easy to picture this ship as bearing all that is civilized England to this misted, far-flung island. How easy to dream that belowdecks lay bundles of silk and velvet, vellum-bound books, fragrant cheeses, heady wines, sweating hams, carved ivory combs, corset baleen, hooked woolen rugs, and pots of ink and quills with which to inscribe on sheaf after sheaf of ivory paper the progress of the New World back into the Old…
But the ship is bearing convicts and its boards are slick with the sweat and shit of four hundred condemned men. Some are children, barely sixteen, some are hardened criminals, some are women, all are exiles from civilization sent to this prison that needs no bars, because this is Van Dieman’s Land, Tasmania, prized for her resilient timber and not much else. Here, the interior is a mystery known only to the natives, who are tight-lipped or silly with drink, and in either state are not trustworthy. And why would they tell? Their only refuge is the white man’s fear. In those small pockets of dark, primordial soil, an aborigine can still wander in peace. In the interior’s twisting ravines and sheer cliffs, frothing rivers and barren plains, things are as they’ve always been. These places are death for the white man, who knows too much to know how to survive, whose brain is so cluttered with muskets and profits and buttons that when faced with starvation and a buck kangaroo, the white man will stand berating the animal for not offering itself up with a prized buttery sauce and glass of heated rum.
This is Alexander Pearce’s Tasmania. It is 1819. Pearce is thirty years old.
Alexander Pearce is to work off his time, four years down from the seven if he buckles under and performs well. He does not. While on assignment to various locals, he manages to steal, drink, abscond, and escape. In one six-month period in 1821, the record shows him to have received 150 lashes. He is unrepentant. His behavior does not improve. During this period he escapes into the bush and learns—from some helpful natives—how to survive in the wilderness for close to three months. Of his many transgressions it is forgery (a two-pound money order) and absconding from service that finally get him sent to Macquarie Harbor, a penal colony on the distant western coast of the island reserved for hardened criminals and the hopelessly degenerate. And if Pearce wasn’t when he first arrived, he certainly is now.
Macquarie is a singular place. Its iron bars are the miles of shark-infested beach and the hostile, mysterious natives that roam the interior. One in ten men escape and nearly all are recorded as having “perished in the woods.” The food—what there is of it—is intentionally pickled and rebelliously rotten. All the men have scurvy, lice, and sores. Few have teeth. Lashings are routine and the sight of a man with his back looking like an ox liver, his shoes overflowed with blood, is commonplace. Fresh meat is the stuff of dreams. And so the men leave, not so concerned with what lies ahead but propelled with what is at their backs, leaping into oblivion and probably not caring. Starving. Drowning. Lying down exhausted, never to rise. Picked off by the native Tasmanians, whose spear-hurling will not save them from extinction. As the convicts draw their rasping final breaths, I would say that they all feel that dying a free man is overrated.
Only one man escapes Macquarie twice, and he is Alexander Pearce.
Who knows how much planning went into this venture? I suspect the escape was spontaneous. On the morning of September 22, 1822, Pearce is working felling trees when out of the corner of his eye—near the sector of his brain where thoughts of escape lurk endlessly—he sees a boat floating in Kelly Basin. Tantalizing. Languid. Waves lapping seductively at her sides—you are never at the horizon, you are always on the horizon…