One of the things which drew Nicholas Shakespeare to Tas- mania was that it was one of the few remote places that Bruce Chatwin, whom he’d spent seven years writing a biography about, had never been to. But Shakespeare has written a wonderfully Chatwinesque book about a place, in which individual historical narratives are woven in with the writer’s own research and encounters. Shakespeare doesn’t have the faint smugness of Chatwin, and the book, though containing a good deal of his own family history, is much more self-effacing; but it is just as inquisitive, and has the same energetic enjoyment of fantastically abstruse local detail, and a sheer love of story-telling.

Tasmania is a very odd place. As Shakespeare says, the ugly stereotypes which the rest of the world use about Australians are rather the same as the stereotypes Australians use about Tasman- ians. (The subjects of the Tasmanians’ ridicule can only be guessed at.) It gives the impression of being a place with no history; nothing between the suburban gentility, prudery and embarrassingly named bungalows, on the one hand, and the dumb, primeval antiquity of its geography.

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