He says, slowly, that there is an island in Grand Lake called Glover Island. And Glover is the largest island on the island of Newfoundland. And on Glover there is a pond. And on that pond there is a smaller island. I want, he says, to paddle up Grand Lake and portage over Glover Island. Get to that pond and cross to the island and spend a night. He says there’s only one other island in the world with a lake holding an island, and a pond on that island with an island in that pond, and that place is Sumatra. And if you took a globe and put a finger on Newfoundland and another finger on Sumatra you’d see they’re pretty much on opposite sides of the earth.
Winter’s excerpt is one of my favourite pieces of fiction about Newfoundland. I love the incantatory rhythm and the sense of the island’s isolation and its intricate and absurd relationship with the rest of the world. There’s the poetic complexity of islands within islands, the bracing sense of authority in the voice. Also, the gleeful audacity: there isn’t a scrap of truth in the whole paragraph. But it did make me wonder if there is an island on the other side of the world where someone might be writing something equally as wonderful and might that place be weirdly exotic, as Newfoundland is, and hard to get to and not too tarted up yet. But this place, exactly on the opposite side of the world, were you to put your fingers on the globe, might be warm instead of cold and have beautiful beaches and glorious surf and vineyards and might I go there, I wondered, and investigate and possibly get a tan in the middle of March and see strange animals and smell the mildly intoxicating perfume of the eucalyptus forests, the fuggy fumes released by a hot sun.
After a time, Barbara reads aloud to me the infamous story of Alexander Pearce and the escape from the Tasmanian prison of Sarah Island. In 1822, eight convicts escaped together, first stealing a boat to get off the island and then hacking their way through the forest toward Hobart. Gradually, they ran out of food and began to murder and eat each other until there were only two convicts left, Pearce and Greenhill. The two convicts watched each other over a bonfire all night long, waiting for the other to fall asleep so he could be murdered and eaten.
The last survivor was Alexander Pearce, “a pockmarked Irish shoe-thief.” Pearce returned to captivity, exhausted and half-starved, and gave a full account of the escape. At first, authorities thought he was making the story up to cover for the convicts thought to be still at large. But after a second escape attempt, from which Pearce returned voluntarily, authorities found a piece of human flesh in his pocket. Pearce admitted that he had developed a taste for it. One of his fellow convicts had advised him that the upper part of the arm was the best-tasting flesh.
I look out over the starkly beautiful beach, after the story of Pearce and Greenhill, and it strikes me: we are at the very end of the earth.
Despite all the differences between Newfoundland and Tasmania, there are also compelling similarities. The most tragic similarity is that both of the islands’ aboriginal populations were decimated as a result of European settlement. We are also both islands off the coast of a continent; we are both ridiculed by our respective mother countries. Newfoundlanders are lazy and stupid and Tasmanians are inbred, the story goes. The joke is that the Tasmanians are so inbred that they’re born with two heads. In the Salamanca Place market, in Hobart, they sell T-shirts with two necks, just as you can find miniature models of Newfie outhouses with two floors in some joke shops around St. John’s.
Most importantly, both islands have gone through a burst of astonishing literary production in the last twenty years that has caught the attention of the world. Just as Newfoundland author Wayne Johnston put the province on the literary map with his novel The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, so Richard Flanagan made the world aware of the rich cultural heritage of Tasmania with his novel Gould’s Book of Fish.
When I meet with Pete Hay, a Tasmanian poet and the author of Vandiemonian Essays, he talks to me about the importance of Richard Flanagan’s work. “There has been a great deal of repression when it comes to stories and histories here, faked genealogies and changed names to hide convict pasts,” he tells me. “Even the name of the island was changed from Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania. But for some reason, Flanagan’s family had no embargo on those stories. Richard Flanagan’s novels, Death of a River Guide and Gould’s Book of Fish, breathed a new openness into the past and people began to search for the truth and feel proud of their stories.”
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