Freedom to write was at the first step a freedom to think, to conceive of oneself as a free being, a thought over a century in forming. I was born less than a mile from the plantation my great-great-grandfather was sent to work on as a convict labourer. It may be as a species we are defined by our ability to forget, yet freedom exists only in the space of memory. And with it, memory was to be extirpated, enforced by silence. And this extermination, as many noted then and later, extended to others – the Tasmanian emu, the Tasmanian tiger – as if it were necessary that some universe of wonder had to be obliterated to cloak the crime. With Conradian exactitude, the war was called at the time a war of extermination. To this day most Tasmanians are the descendants of the survivors of this twin trauma. My island’s founding stigmata has a second wound: the near successful genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population. My forebears were transported as convicts from Ireland, frequently in the same ships and similar conditions to those which had transported Africans into American slavery, now plying the same trade with a different coloured cargo and a new destination where many of the same practices and even administrators of Caribbean slave colonies were deployed. Though there were major differences, the literature of the era abounds with comparisons between the convict society of Van Diemen’s Land and the slave societies of the Americas. It is strange to have as my subject the freedom to write, coming from an island that, for a quarter of its modern history, was a slave society. The Booker Prize–winning author on the need to write against the dogmas of conformity
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