Wild Island Read Free Page A

lean ribs. The new snake ear trumpet, a Christmas gift from the old country.
    Booth was thin by nature, but also because he spent his days tramping up and down his ‘little kingdom’ as he called it in letters home. Two peninsulas, each over twenty miles square, hanging one below the other by two narrow necks. The lower one, Tasman, was really the penal station, and the upper one, Forestier, was kept unpopulated as a barrier, except for a whaling station, and Captain
    Spotswood’s early land grant at the north end. In practice, both peninsulas fell to Booth’s care. Some days he covered sixty miles on foot and by boat, hopping from promontory to promontory, sorting out problems at the boat-builders, outstations, jetties, coal mines—and his newest scheme, four miles of convict-powered railway from Port Arthur to Norfolk Bay, now half finished.
    He walked about (like God in the Garden, he thought) because his position did not entitle him to a government-issue horse. Last winter he had bought one for himself, a biddable elderly nag named Jack, but his request for a forage allowance had been refused. Useful to ride quickly around the sprawling settlement, but the longer bush tracks were not as yet in a condition to allow riding.
    For Booth, the long walks were the best part of his work. He tramped joyfully through dense, silent eucalypt forests where the sun fell in dazzling shafts through the canopy; and across sublime beaches and rocky headlands where gull rookeries pocked the tussocky ground and whitened the rocks with guano. In four years he’d come to love it all. Sometimes, hiking alone, he burst into song out of the fullness of his content. But occasionally now he felt his age. Lizzie was seventeen.
    ‘Where was Birch found?’
    ‘Floating in the shallows at Point Puer,’ said Casey. ‘Your chest is sound, but don’t overdo things. Not that you’ll take any notice.’
    Birch and Jones, two young overseers from the boys’ prison at Point Puer, had bolted on the eighteenth of December, an exquisite summer’s day giving no warning of the sou’westerly that blew up in the night. Their curious escape engine washed up the following day—a raft with a clever outrigger and a well-equipped tool box lashed aboard. (How had they got away with that?) It was now down below the steps of Booth’s cottage in the side-yard where he kept his collection of such things. Rafts, coracles, dugouts, leaky tubs: all inventive, eccentric. Made of pilfered scraps kept in dangerous secrecy and fashioned into the shapes of imagined freedom.
    But why did they do it? Birch and Jones, for instance. They were overseers, well fed and housed, far better off than they would have been as apprentices with a hard master. Jones had been an excellent mechanical. Both were cheerful and content enough, it seemed. It irritated Booth, this waste of men, good brains. But some spirit seemed to seize them . . . He had felt it himself, of course. Had imagined living Crusoe-like on one of the little offshore islands, but with ‘a good-tempered member of the fair sex to share my fate’, as he’d written to his sister. Was Lizzie good-tempered? Not always. She was no Mrs Crusoe, certainly.
    ‘I’ll take breakfast with you,’ said Casey, ‘since Power is cossetting you and has made a kedgeree which it is your Christian duty to share. We’ll do the inquest this morning as soon as I’ve had a closer look at the body. I shall want you there.’
    Booth suppressed irritation. Casey behaved as though the MO outranked the Commandant. He was a civil appointment, twenty-seven, high-handed, from Dublin via Liverpool, where he had survived the cholera. Too brilliant for this place, that was the trouble. He had a hungry intelligence with nothing to feed on here. There were a thousand prospective patients—felons, military and civilian officers, wives and children—but the colony was mostly in rude health. Casey’s daily lot was toothaches and common