Very down under

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.

That blankness and remoteness have made it a favourite place to escape into; there are (predictably) sightings of Lord Lucan there. As an Australian joke of ten years back had it, ‘What’s blonde, has big tits and lives in Tasmania? A: Salman Rushdie.’ It is a place, too, where much of its history has been erased; the Aboriginals long dead, the Tasmanian tiger assumed to be extinct. Much of its history must be pursued through fugitive sightings, like those natives who recently insist that they have seen a live Tasmanian tiger (it often turns out to be a brindled greyhound).