“No,” says the woman on the other side. It takes me a beat to realize it’s Barbara.

Then she says, “Just kidding.”

We take a tour boat around the harbour and circle the Isle of the Dead. The tour guide directs our attention to Point Puer, where child convicts were incarcerated. The guide shows us the bathing spot on the shore where these children were forced to jump into the icy Antarctic waters each day, summer and winter, for a constitutional bath.

Strange business, this convict tourism, I realize—how to take hold of such a grisly past How to make it palatable to tourists Upon paying an admission fee for the museum, each tourist is given a playing card that matches up, at the end of the tour, with a real convict. I am given the king of hearts and when I open the wooden slot that shows my convict’s name and particulars I find my own name—Moore. My convict is a William Moore, who was trained, during his incarceration in Port Arthur, as a blacksmith. He was transported from Ireland for stealing a plug of tobacco. It is an eerie coincidence; what are the chances

Later, at the airport in Launceston, I run into a man who recounts his own convict ancestry with a robust conviviality. When I tell him I am from Newfoundland, he is delighted.

“Your ancestors must be convicts too,” he says. When I say I don’t think so, he looks disgruntled.

“Well,” he says,”I guess your ancestors might have been fishing admirals. There were a very few of those as well.” And he gives his newspaper a little snap and turns away from me.

But the truth is convicts were not transported to Newfoundland. As historian Gerry Bannister explains in The Rule of The Admirals: Laws, Custom and Naval Government in Newfoundland, 1699—1832, there was a pivotal case concerning a group of over one hundred Irish convicts who had arrived in Bay Bulls and Petty Harbour in July 1789. They were starving and sick from the transatlantic voyage and they made their way into St. John’s with plans to burn the city to the ground. The authorities insisted they be sent back to Ireland, and Ireland refused to take them. But the Newfoundland authorities eventually won out, citing a law that stated that Newfoundland was not a British settlement; in fact, settlement in Newfoundland was illegal. Another law clearly stated convicts had to be transported to British settlements.

I had tried to get in touch with Richard Flanagan before I arrived in Tasmania but he was in the throes of completing a new novel and not available for an interview. When I do finally run into him it’s at a private party to which Pete Hay has invited Barbara and me. Hay says Flanagan will be performing. I have an idea what Flanagan looks like because I’ve seen the portrait of him by the Tasmanian painter Geoff Dyer. Dyer had won the Archibald prize, an Australian award for portraiture, a few years before. He’d painted Flanagan with his eyes too close together, as though he were turning into a fish. The fish eyes are a reference to Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. It turns out Flanagan’s eyes are actually as blue as the flame of a blowtorch and he’s rugged looking, fit, energetic, and very welcoming.

It’s election night in Tasmania and Flanagan is performing stand-up comedy, political satire about the election results as they pour in from around the island. Most of the writers I’ve been talking to are members of the Green Party, which got its start in Tasmania in 1972 when the government was planning to flood Lake Pedder for a hydroelectric project. The gist of the comedy is very local. I’m in the back of the bar and I can’t really see over the crowd—they’re roaring with laughter—and though I’m missing the show, I get to talk to the Tasmanian writer David Owen about sharks. It’s noisy and we have to shout in each other’s ears.