Free In Tasmania by Nicholas Shakespeare

Tamar to a settlement in a state of anarchy. He had been away two months longer than anticipated. Stepping ashore, he was greeted by naked, shoeless men who needed ‘every species of provision’. Paterson sought out Kemp who admitted that in order to ward off famine and mutiny he had been obliged to distribute guns to the convicts to hunt kangaroo, and at least ten of these prisoners had stayed out in the bush, harassing the settlers. Paterson wrote prophetically: ‘It is much to be dreaded that they will become a desperate and dangerous banditti.’ Nor had Kemp succeeded in cultivating crops. Rather, he seemed to have added to his fortune by selling kangaroo flesh to the government store at three times the official rate. In charge for seven months and eleven days, he told Paterson that he now wanted to leave. Complaining of ‘extreme ill health’, he requested permission to take his wife and nine-month-old son George to Sydney. The placid Paterson agreed, but warned Kemp that the new Governor, William Bligh, was a different kind of man from the Governor who had preceded him.
    This was Bligh of the Bounty , the man who 17 years earlier had been set adrift in a boat by Mr Christian and his fellow mutineers. Now he had arrived in Sydney with the express intention of stamping out the rum trade. He was not favourably disposed towards Kemp’s return – he considered Rum Corps officers to be ‘tremendous buggers’ – and was suspicious of his reasons. As it turned out, he had excellent cause. On a scorching evening five months later, on what is now ironically Australia Day, the Rum Corps mutinied and it no longer surprised me to discover who marched up the drive at their head, sword drawn, into Government House.
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    I wondered briefly whether this was Kemp finally exercising his republican ardour; but it transpired – of course – that his rebellion had been prompted by liquor and corruption. Major Johnston, acting Rum Corps Commander in Paterson’s absence, conceived a desire to unseat Bligh, a plan that was largely formulated when Johnston and Kemp were drunk. ‘What do you think he told me?’ Kemp railed. ‘Yes! Told the oldest merchant in the colony – that he came here to protect the poor . That is not the Governor WE want!!!’ And so it was that the mutineers barged into the Governor’s residence around supper time and after a couple of hours stumbling around the house, frightening Bligh’s recently widowed daughter and an Irish parson who was there to comfort her, discovered Bligh hiding in a room upstairs. One of Kemp’s soldiers noticed a bedcover twitching, prodded it with his musket, and struck a boot. There was the Governor, covered in spiderwebs and with his shirt hanging out.
    By 8.30 p.m. the mutiny was successful, the only casualty being Kemp’s friend Laycock, who fell through a manhole, landing on his ‘principal joint’. As a reward for his part in unseating Bligh, Johnston gave Kemp 24 cows, 4,000 acres of land, and appointed him Judge Advocate. A lampoon described him as ‘a grinning tobacco boy’ whose prolific learning was praised to the skies. For the next seven months he ruled as the supreme legal officer in an area the size of Western Europe, a position of extraordinary power. For seven months there was no court of appeal after Kemp – except to God. With tremendous relish, he transported former adversaries like William Gore, chief of the constabulary, to seven years on the Coal River. ‘Take him away, take him off; take him away, take him away.’
    Kemp’s duties also expanded to performing all the marriages in the colony. I discovered from a copy of the Tasmanian Times dated November 4, 1868, a terrible story. One morning, with eleven services to conduct, through a combination of impatience and drink he married the wrong couples. ‘The Parson-Captain, when subsequently applied