In the second installment of his column, Double Take, ANDREW RAMADGE looks at two interconnected Australian works: Jonathan auf der Heide’s film ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ (2009) and The Drones’ third album ‘Gala Mill’ (2009).

“God forgive you, Alexander.”

Macquarie Harbour is an enormous inlet on the western coast of Tasmania where the Indian Ocean cuts more than 30kilometres into the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. Inside the entrance – a shallow mouth just 120 metres across called Hell’s Gates – lays Sarah Island, home to Tasmania’s oldest penal settlement. Van Diemen’s Land begins with a slow-moving shot of the journey into the harbour as seen from the side of a boat. Then it cuts to a close-up of a man chewing through gristly and colourless meat.

Jonathan auf der Heide’s film is part of an attempt in recent decades to reclaim the story of Alexander Pearce, the 19th-century convict turned cannibal, from the realm of ghost stories and the grotesque. In 1822, Pearce escaped from Sarah Island with seven other men – none of whom returned. His legend first began spreading by word-of-mouth and the pages of the Hobart Town Gazette, where reports based on his confessions and trial painted him as a man “laden with the weight of human blood, and believed to have banqueted on human flesh”.

In the early 1870s, Marcus Clarke fictionalised Pearce in his serial For The Term Of His Natural Life as the convict Gabbett, a sadistic giant “less a man than a demon”, who could shake off 20 sailors in a fight and delighted in “crossing the cuts” while flogging other men. He bolted twice before, the other convicts say, and each time returned alone. In the 1927 film adaptation of the story, he was portrayed as a hulking ogre with wild hair and clumsy features.

By contrast, the Pearce of Van Diemen’s Land is a balding and baby-faced redhead, played by Oscar Redding, who begins the story as a minor character so unobtrusive he’s almost invisible. It takes more than half-an-hour before he is revealed as a player of any significance, when he gives a hesitant and unhappy nod to fellow escapee Greenhill’s plan to begin killing members of the group for food. He seems to become a villain purely by osmosis – by soaking up the evil of the events around him until he too turns menacing.

Auf der Heide decides to humanise Pearce by focusing solely on the group’s journey through the Tasmanian wilderness and highlighting just how monotonous it was – consisting of little more than walking, swimming and starving. He doesn’t even show most of the killings. The movie’s only real drama unfolds within the characters themselves – and, in a way, that makes it even more horrifying. For if the Pearce of Van Diemen’s Land can go from mild mannered convict to murderous cannibal in less than two hours of screen time, then perhaps anyone can, given the wrong set of circumstances.

The film follows Pearce until his final paranoid stand-off with Greenhill – two men, one axe – and its bloody result. By that time, he is shown to have become truly feral. The last scene shows him cutting and eating raw flesh just moments after Greenhill’s body stops convulsing. “I’ve looked up to God looking down,” Pearce says to no one. “He dances with an axe in his hand.”

In reality, Pearce continued on alone and made it to the outskirts of civilisation in the east where he was sheltered by farmers and other outlaws. He was arrested with two bushrangers in January 1823, almost four months after his escape, near the town of Jericho, north of Hobart. His story of what occurred was not believed by authorities, who thought he was trying to fool them into giving up chase for the rest of the group, and he was sent back to Macquarie Harbour.

Ten months later he fled again, this time with a young convict named Thomas Cox. The escape didn’t last long. Five days after disappearing Pearce was found and taken back to Sarah Island, where he confessed to murdering Cox after an argument and eating parts of his body. He led authorities back to the scene, where the man’s body lay “cut right through the middle, the head off, the privates torn off, all the flesh off the calves of the legs, back of the thighs and loins (and) the thick part of the arms”.

Pearce was shipped to Hobart and hanged in July 1824.

In the imagination of The Drones, the final chapter of Pearce’s story takes place the night before his death. On ‘Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce’, from the band’s third album Gala Mill – a record obsessed with the darker moments of Australian history and convict mythology – songwriter Gareth Liddiard dreams up a final conversation that took place between Pearce and the hangman while waiting for the inevitable. “Tell me, how are you coping now that it’s time to go?” says one to the other.

Liddiard, a lyrical sadist, makes the humanisation of Pearce more terrible in his own novel way by bringing the story’s questions of mortality and murder back from the wilderness into the heart of civilisation. “No person can tell what he will do when driven by hunger,” Pearce famously said. Well then, replies the symbolic figure of the executioner, while knotting his noose, “can you tell what you will do out of routine? The punchline of Liddiard’s joke is that perhaps there is not so much difference at all between Pearce the escapee and the man he may have been had he stayed behind.

“He was a cunt too,” Liddiard once told M+N, while explaining why he chose to compare the two figures. “They both kill people, they’re both predators, whether or not either of them realised that.” But, in his song, it’s the executioner who comes off second best. “Your chaplain, he loves you death row boys more than he loves me/He abandons you to prayer, turns so he won’t see,” says the hangman to Pearce, excised from forgiveness for the crimes of his career and, as it happened, a place in the annals of history as well.

Two-and-a-half weeks after his hanging, the Hobart Town Gazette ran the full story of Pearce’s escapes and murders as he detailed them in his final confession to the priest Philip Conolly. It ended with an appeal for the public to pray for his soul.

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Andrew Ramadge is a Sydney-based journalist and long-time 'M+N' contributor. His column appears monthly.