Love and freedom in Van Diemen’s Land

Greenhill and Travers’ relationship fits this pattern perfectly. With Travers as his right hand man, Greenhill instigated the escape, drew on his sailor-skills to lead the absconders in the right direction, initiated the cannibalism, and directed who would die until only he, Travers and Pearce were left.

The other form of confederacy portrayed in the film - between the Irish, Gaelic-speaking escapees - collapses before the unshakeable bond between Greenhill and Travers.

Did Greenhill and Travers plan the whole affair so they would be the last men left alive? Certainly, Pearce believed he would have been the next to die, had Travers not been bitten.

Seen this way, the events Auf Der Heide describes are better understood as the story of Greenhill and Travers’ deep bond and their ill-fated defiance of their imprisonment.

Only because, by luck, Pearce survived to tell the tale, did the story become his.

Down the years this story has acquired many meanings.

For the convicts in Tasmania’s remote convict stations it was inspiring for it meant escape was possible. For anti-transportationists it was symbolic of the degradation of the convict system. For contemporary environmentalists it speaks to how ill-adapted Europeans were and are to the Tasmanian wilderness.

Auf Der Heide says Pearce’s tale is about brutality in the midst of beauty, and how ordinary people are driven to commit awful crimes: messages he may also draw from his own conflicted ethnic heritage given the way the motto of Auschwitz - “work makes you free” - is paraphrased in the opening lines of the movie.

For me, Pearce’s tale is not his at all.

It is a story about the bloody sacrifice Greenhill and Travers made to love and freedom, a sacrifice which included the brutal deaths of their comrades and eventually themselves.

But it is also the story of how their shared desire for each other and for escape was dignified by surviving all the horrors it produced.

In Van Diemen’s Land the bond between Greenhill and Travers is the escapees’ final manifestation of humanity as they descend into hell. It is the one thing this party of desperate thieves has left which echoes the beauty around them.

The relationship between these two men held out great promise and created great evil. But in the end its greatest value was that it redeemed them from the horror, meaninglessness and madness that was the world of the convict cannibals.