The settlement of Tasmania by Europeans began 200 years ago. Nicholas Shakespeare first went there, having heard of the island's exceptional beauty, and because it was famously remote. He soon decided that this was where he wanted to live. Only later did he discover a cache of letters written by an ancestor as corrupt as he was colourful: Anthony Fenn Kemp, the so-called "Father of Tasmania". On his mother's side, too, Shakespeare found he had unknown Tasmanian relations: a pair of spinsters who had never left their farm except once, in 1947, to buy shoes. Their journal recounted a saga beginning in North Devon in the 1890s with a dashing but profligate ancestor who, having played tennis with the Kaiser, ended his life in disgrace in the Tasmanian bush...