Book Review - True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

 True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

St. Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2001 (first published 2000)    ISBN 0702232637

I've never been a great Peter Carey fan (prior to this book I had only read Oscar and Lucinda, and found it only vaguely enjoyable), but I do remember when True History of the Kelly Gang came out primarily because an acquaintance of mine began to talk about Ned Kelly's wife - when I pulled them up on that, they protested that indeed he did have a wife as it was in Carey's book!..... beware anything that's title mentions it's true...

I can see now, after reading the book, why my acquaintance might have been fooled if they had approached the book with no context. Carey has set out the novel as if it was a transcription of various manuscript papers held in the State Library of Victoria, written by Kelly himself to explain his life to his daughter, interspersed with newspaper clippings and other material.

Kelly did famously dictate a self-justifying treatise when he held the town of Jerilderie to ransom during his bushranging days, known as the Jerilderie Letter. Carey has studied this letter and has tried to replicate the style of Kelly's voice, as well as trying to get into his mindset via what he had written in that missive, so that he can create a fiction that re-creates not only Kelly, but his milieu.

That milieu is one of poor Irish selectors. I won't get into a history lesson here, but Carey evokes well the absolute poverty that many people of convict origins had to suffer on their poor parcels of land, constantly walking the line between starvation and criminality in their quest to survive. He very much paints Ned Kelly as not only someone who suffered, but someone who was of the opinion that it was the system that made him suffer, rather than anything else. Carey's Kelly feels very Irish, but also very Australian in the sense that he will not take a backward step and will fight what he sees as injustice.

It's a truism in Australia that depending on your view of our society, you see Kelly as either a vicious murderer, or a champion of the little people against the toffs who run the joint. Carey views Kelly as a complex character, but definitely veers towards the champion of the people narrative. His crimes, as described in the novel, were all committed for noble reasons, with the murders at Stringybark Creek very much portrayed as self-defence.

Which is not to imply that Carey has written a hagiography: Carey develops Kelly's unmistakeable megalomania, which increases as the story moves along. In the novel Kelly is ruled by his mother, who is also portrayed as a strong woman who took what she wanted from the world. His relationship with her is portrayed as complex: Kelly constantly seeks affirmation from her, and is gutted at the moments when she seems to reject him (Ellen is psychologically wounded by her experiences with men and poverty, and periodically lashes out at her children).

The climax of the novel is when Kelly has to choose between his pregnant wife and his mother - choosing the latter will doom him, but that is the decision he makes, and his (fictional) writings are all to try to explain why he did so.

It's a brave decision for an Australian author (Carey was born not far from my hometown, but was living in New York when he wrote this book) to write about perhaps the most famous Australian story. He has done so with considerable verve and narrative flair, but I think the message behind the story (the repression of the masses by the system and the English) is perhaps overdone - Ned is portrayed as nobler than he was, and the police and the "squattocracy" perhaps more villainous than they were.

That stated, True History of the Kelly Gang is a good read as a story, and as an insight into early settlement of Australia. It won the Booker Prize in 2001, which is accolade enough. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Good-Bye Dolly Gray by Rayne Kruger

 Good-Bye Dolly Gray: the Story of the Boer War by Rayne Kruger

London: Pan Books, 1974 (first published 1959)    ISBN 03300238612

Apart from (even in?) South Africa, how many of the combatant nations remember the Boer War of 1899-1902? My hometown has a magnificent memorial in the main street commemorating the 250 Victorians who died fighting in South Africa, but I'm sure most passers-by these days assume the memorial is to World War One if indeed they notice it at all.

The Boer War was the progenitor of many things: blockhouses and barbed wire entanglements, concentration camps, armoured trains, mounted infantry, and not least the participation of most of the Empire. Kruger's book, originally published when some combatants were still alive, is a good "traditional" narrative history of the conflict, covering the military and the political quite well, the social less so.

"The Boers said the war was for liberty. The British said it was for equality. The majority of the inhabitants, who were not white at all, gained neither liberty or equality." This quote from the final pages of the book is pithy, and is not far from the truth. The Great Trek, undertaken the generation previous to that fighting this war, was undertaken so that the Boers could maintain their independence from the British, who had taken the Cape Colony and Natal for their own. The Orange Free State and Transvaal were in nearly all senses independent states, which both sides found acceptable.

That is, until gold was discovered in the Transvaal. The rush brought many foreigners (Uitlanders) to the state, mainly British. Fearing loss of control, the Transvaal government restricted the franchise of non-Boers. The Uitlanders complained to the Crown. The British had long harboured a desire to unite their colonies with the Boer republics to create a South African state. They thought that supporting the Uitlanders in their claim for representation may be a way to achieve such an outcome via the franchise and demographic takeover. So, like many other wars and revolutions throughout history, the fundamental cause of the Boer War was essentially about taxation without representation.

Militarily, the British Empire was always going to win a long drawn-out struggle. The best the Boers could hope for was to make Britain pay such a price that they would make terms. Eventually this is basically what happened in 1902, when the Boers recognised the suzerainty of the English and South Africa became a reality, but the Boers maintained their culture and language and eventually gained political preponderance over the new territory via their own demographic takeover. The War spilled much blood and spent much treasure to only reach a position that could realistically have been negotiated.

The opposing military forces could not have been more different in 1899. The initial British force, under General Buller (whose reputation suffered an irretrievable collapse during this conflict owing to his caution and tactical blunders) might have been wearing khaki and carrying modern Lee Metford rifles, but were old-fashioned in other ways. Their huge columns, with baggage trains consisting of thousands of carts drawn by oxen, officers that ensured that they brought with them champagne, baths and other luxuries, were no match for the Boers. Boer mobile commandos, who lived off the land (supported by many residents), were incredibly mobile owing to their horsed infantry that travelled without impedimenta, and were tactically supple as everyone had a say in how battle was commenced and fought.

Unfortunately the unique structure of the Boer fighting force also became a weakness as the war developed. With no fixed military structure, Boers came and went from the battle-ground as they pleased, and each commando could decide to engage how it chose to, whether that supported Boer strategy or not.

The British eventually dominated the battlefield through combining two seemingly opposing principles, which they fused into a strategy which eventually brought the Boers to the negotiating table. The first was to create units that copied the Boer way of fighting: mobile columns of mounted infantry, lightly equipped, that could cover distance quickly to bring the enemy to heel. The second was the construction of thousands of blockhouses - small forts that linked together into a military fence across the country. By using the mobile columns to push the commandos onto the lines of blockhouses, the British eventually wore down the Boer forces so much that their will to continue fighting began to fail. The Boers had hoped since the start of the war that their cousins who lived in Cape Colony and Natal would rise in rebellion and support them. This support did not materialise even after the Boers "invaded" the Cape and caused much trouble there. This fact also helped seal the fate of the Boers.

The British, while eventually "winning", also paid a heavy price. As many wars have, the Boer War brought down a government, and also a way of governing. The many failures of both politics and military during the war led to the British public losing faith in the rule of the upper classes. The Liberals took over politics, and the British officer class, where commissions were bought rather than earned, was dismantled after the war by Kitchener, who was the modernising leader of the forces in South Africa.

Kruger's book lists a catalogue of military blunders, with the British consistently underestimating the capabilities of the Boers, and the Boers suffering from too much or too little caution, often failing to press home their advantage or fruitlessly attacking points that were too strong. Early in the war the Boers laid siege to Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberly. They failed to take any of these places, and if they had the war may have taken a different turn.

By the same token, if Buller had moved more decisively and had more tactical nous, the Boers may not have won their early victories and in fact might have suffered defeats that may have led to them putting down their rifles much earlier than they did.

Kruger spends a few chapters on the political aspects of the war, particularly in England, but glosses over the politics of the participation of the Empire in the war, as well as the politics of the Cape Colony and Natal during the conflict. While he describes the concentration camps, again it is a side-issue in this book to the descriptions of the military activity.

If you want to get a grip on the military progression of the Boer War, Good-Bye Dolly Gray (the title comes from a well-known song from the era) is not the worst place to start.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham

The Scramble for Africa: 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

London: Abacus, 1992 (first published 1991)    ISBN 0349104492

If ever there was an over-used phrase, it is "Tour de Force". I've probably over-used it myself over the years, along with everybody else. However, if any book truly deserved to have that phrase applied to it, it is surely this one.

Most of us of a certain age think we know the story of colonial Africa: Livingstone, Stanley and Brazza, Rhodes and the Boer War, and of course the horrors of the Congo. The fact that is most impressed on my mind after finishing this book is how quickly it all happened: Brazza helped discover the Congo for Europeans and lived to present a report on the horrors of the concession system there, while Lugard, who won Uganda for the British lived to see the outbreak of the Second World War.

So what did happen in those forty-odd years? Interestingly, most of the time is was not the activity of countries willingly expanding their empires, but (mostly) people chasing the almighty dollar that dragged Europe into the heart of Africa. Many of the colonies mentioned in Pakenham's book began as concessions for business interests, who were trying (and often failing) to make money from the land.

Until the advent of the Europeans, the main way money was generated in Central Africa was via the slave trade. While the Europeans ostensibly abhorred the trade and tried to stop it, in practice they often collaborated with the (mostly Arab) traders and turned a blind eye to the practice. In fact many of the companies effectively enslaved their workers while subjecting them to horrible punishments.

The attempt to abolish the slave trade was one step in brining to Africa Livingstone's three "Cs": Civilization, Christianity, and Commerce. "Civilization" was brought to the natives in the form of commissioners and troops to keep them in line, and sometimes education up to primary school level, but always suppression of native rights (and rites). "Christianity" came along and worked hand-in-glove with the civilizers, and often turned a blind eye to the excesses and atrocities that took place. "Commerce" mean that the Africans were expected to work for virtually nothing, getting "paid" in cheap consumer goods and useless fripperies.

Nothing that occurred during these years was good for the native populations of land taken over by Europe. And in fact not much good came from Africa for many Europeans. The enormous amounts of money expended on the colonies by the European powers was not expended on lifting their own poor out of misery, and many of the administrators and troops sent to Africa suffered long periods of isolation, usually disease and sometimes death. The only winners in the end were the businessmen, who usually found a way to at least get their money back, by selling out to their governments.

The question that this raises is why did governments condone, support and then take on these colonies? It is a good question to ask, and several answers can be attempted.

For England, the key to all its moves in Africa was - India. Strategically, England needed ports and way-stations to enable their Fleet - both naval and merchant - to traverse between India and "home". Hence their early occupation of Cape Colony and Natal. Once the Suez Canal was built it became strategically necessary for England to control Egypt as well. Then they needed to control the Nile, and so were drawn into the Sudan.

Further south, Rhodes's creation of his own state north of the Boer Republics meant that these intransigent people became a thorn in the side of British dominance, especially when it was becoming clear back in Europe that Germany was no longer a dependable friend of England. The fact that many inhabitants of the Cape were Boers added to the mix, and the result was the second Boer War (Pakenham also describes the First Boer War in detail).

For Germany and for France, Britain was the reason they made their moves in Africa, for the most part. France in particular tried to thwart British expansion in West Africa, often without a clear idea of strategic intent: the expedition to take Fashoda being a classic case-in-point.

Then there was Leopold II of Belgium. He wanted an empire because, well just because he wanted one, and he could afford to buy his own. The Congo became his personal fiefdom, a money-making exercise, and a catalogue of horrors that inspired Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The story of the exposure of the abuses that occurred in The Congo is a model of all the abuses that happened elsewhere as well - slaughter, dispossession, exploitation, cruelty, all in the name of personal and imperial aggrandisement.

Pakenham has written a gripping and readable story in this book, but it is by no means the complete story of Europeans in Africa: the Portuguese are hardly mentioned and Africa north of the Sahara is not a major part of the work. The focus is on Central Africa: the Niger and Congo, through to Uganda, Ethiopia and the south, with the Mahdi, Gordon and Kitchener thrown in for good measure.

The pathos of the story - the inevitable destruction of the local populations and ways of life - is well-related by Pakenham. The people that drove history forward in Africa: Stanley, Rhodes, Kruger, Brazza, Cetshwayo, Goldie, Jameson, Lugard, Morel, Menelik II, Mwanga, Carl Peters, Tippu Tip, and those in Europe that pulled the strings - Gladstone, Leopold, Salisbury, Chamberlain, Grey, Bismark, Delcasse are all delineated well and seem to speak with their own voice in the book.

The final chapter briefly covers the dissolution of these empires over an even shorter period (about 12 years) than it took to acquire them. The book (in the edition I read) has useful apparatus - good maps, a useful timeline and bibliography, as well as photographs of most of the leading players.

It's now over thirty years since this book was written, but if you want a (relatively) comprehensive overview of how Europe "ate" Africa, this book is well-worth reading.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Wings of the Kite-Hawk by Nicolas Rothwell

 Wings of the Kite-Hawk: a Journey into the Heart of Australia by Nicolas Rothwell

Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009* (first published 2003)               ISBN 9781863954457

Recently, in a book of essays by Tim Parks, I read of his contention that all great literature is trying to come to terms with death, and that all great writers tend to return to one great over-arching theme throughout their works, however varied they may seem to be on the surface.

If that is the case, then Wings of the Kite-Hawk is great literature, and Nicolas Rothwell is a great writer. Many years ago I read his book Quicksilver and felt I didn't really grasp what he was getting at, but after reading Wings of the Kite-Hawk I feel that I have moved closer to what Rothwell is trying to express in his writing.

Rothwell enters the desert country of Australia on a search for meaning: "... the desert always gives those who search in its emptiness the dream, at least, of their desires." Rothwell's dream is to reconcile his life with the never changing rhythms of the desert. He wishes the desert to enter him (as all those who have spent time there wish).

Particularly, as an emigrant to Australia, he tries to find his way into the country through his fellow emigrants, the explorers. Through long meditations on the lives and explorations of Leichhardt, Sturt, Strehlow and Giles, Rothwell muses on life, on dreams of success and the reality of failure, and on the certainty of death - "[y]ou're much closer to death out here than in the city; you can feel it bending humanity to its will." 

The four explorers Rothwell chooses to focus on had a desire for death haunting their lives: Leichhardt, that strange visionary who has haunted the minds of white Australia for over a century and a half, actually did meet his demise in the back country - a demise that one feels he was actively seeking.

Sturt's voyage to the Inland Sea - a romantic folly that ennobled those that undertook it - was a doomed voyage that seemed made for the times. What was Sturt seeking? It surely wasn't an actual sea, which it seems he knew wasn't there: in leaving his wife and child, what was he doing? Rothwell speculates - "[w]here was he bound? Like every noble or beautiful thing, to the kingdom of death - that kingdom he longed to see with his own eyes, to endure, and to return from, with golden words upon his lips." He of course did return, unsuccessful, and with no golden words for recompense.

Strehlow was an explorer of culture rather than land, famously working his way through the traditions of the Aranda people. He eventually saw himself as the keeper of their traditions and (in)famously collected and photographed many sacred objects and events. He spent his life amongst the Aranda, but in the end completely failed to understand the culture he felt he was a part of. Rothwell describes in his recollection of the sale of the Strehlow Collection how Strehlow's efforts to preserve a people and their culture led only to fracture and decay. 

Rothwell himself as represented in Wings of the Kite-Hawk mainly interacts with white residents of the Outback, all the while understanding that it is the Aboriginal people who fully understand the country and its dreaming. In the cast of characters that cross his path, it is those who have absorbed some of the ancient learning that connect most with the spirit of the country which, for Rothwell, is embodied in the Kite-Hawk.

These birds permeate the story of Rothwell's journey: from being a sign of good fortune to a presager of death when his colleague Esterline hits and kills a Kite-Hawk with his car and bewails the bird's and his own demise (when he perished in the desert soon after killing the bird).

I think it is in the story of Giles that Rothwell finds a character most in tune with his own quest. Late to the country, Giles never gets to make a discovery that others would recognise as great or useful "...for in its last phases exploration, like life, becomes a retreat, a silence, a turning in."

In the end, despite his hopes, Rothwell does not find the answer to his quest in the lives and deaths of the explorers as he had hoped. Like him, they traversed across the country rather than into it. It is rather the encounters that Rothwell has on his journeys with those that have embedded themselves into the desert that show him the way. Enlightenment and peace will come if you let them, but not if you chase them.

A deservedly praised book: history, philosophy and a life-lesson. Highly recommended.

* The 2009 edition of this book has new foreword by Pico Iyer and preface by Rothwell that both shed light on what Rothwell was hoping to achieve with this book

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - A Concise History of Australia by Stuart Macintyre

 A Concise History of Australia by Stuart Macintyre

Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2016 (4th edition)        ISBN 9781107562431

About a third of the text in this book covers events in my lifetime, which I guess says two things - one, that I am getting old, and two, that this book is a "front-forward" history. Macintyre is a well-known Australian historian, who was part of the famous "History Wars" that occurred in this country early this century.

This book, part of a series of concise histories commissioned by Cambridge University Press, breezes through thousands of years of Aboriginal occupation of the country before covering the history of the European conquest, colonization and development of the country.

This book is mostly a political history - it glosses over the social - I felt as a reader that I didn't get a sense of how people were living on a day-to-day basis. For instance, the central role of sport in the social make-up of the country is hardly mentioned, and the churches are more often mentioned as sources of division than of inclusion and provision of welfare.

As a political history, it seems to me that Macintyre's personal politics are on display too much in what is meant to be a general history for the average reader. One comes away from this book feeling that there is and has been nothing good produced by the conservative side of politics, or by business interests, and that the left, and the working class, have been nothing but noble in their pursuits.

This bias cruels the history in a few ways: Macintyre gives too much emphasis on events and movements that were peripheral to mainstream Australia, such as the Unemployed Workers Movement and the New Guard in the Depression. He also fails to explain why the conservatives have been so successful throughout Australia's political history if they were such a reprehensible group of people - is he suggesting that Australia's polity is irredeemably stupid? Or could it be that the majority of people, for the majority of the time have on the whole preferred what the right has to offer them? This seems to be a conclusion that Macintyre cannot accept.

Generally speaking, Macintyre's history paints Australia as a plaything of Empire (Britain or the USA) or of greedy elites, either Liberal or Labor. He seems to belittle the hard work of those everyday people who actually built the country that we know today, and who sacrificed themselves in so many ways to create a better life for their successors. While he details the many mis-steps that have been made along the way, he does not describe the successes in as much detail.

If I was someone who knew nothing of Australian history and I had only read this book, I would look around at today's Australia and wonder how we got to where we are, given what Macintyre has described. This is not a history that can be read as a stand-alone tome. Alternative views must be sought to get a rounded view of the singular history of this country.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Frontier by Henry Reynolds

 Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land by Henry Reynolds

Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996 (first published 1987)       ISBN 1864481919

Henry Reynolds has been working in the field of Aboriginal History for a long time, and was a force in the push to gain recognition for Aboriginal land rights in Australia. His book The Other Side of the Frontier was one of the first histories to investigate interactions between Aboriginal Australians and the first settlers. Frontier, the book under review, is a look at not only the settlers view, but a dive into how it came to be that Aboriginal rights to land had (at the time of its publication) never been recognised here.

It's mainstream knowledge now that the colonization and settlement of Australia by the British came at the expense of the blood of Aboriginals, and that land was expropriated from them in the process. However, when Reynolds began publishing, the opinion held generally in the wider Australian polity was that Aboriginals didn't have a concept of land ownership, and that any loss of life was due to regrettable incidents of misunderstanding.

Reynolds clearly shows from the European perspective that the early settlers knew quite clearly that Aboriginals did have a concept of ownership of the land, and that they were prepared to fight for their right to continue to live on and utilise their tribal territories. Many of those early settlers and Government officials also knew that the settlers were in many cases killing the inhabitants of land they were taking up rather than acknowledging that it was they that were stealing.

Reynolds shows how notions such as the "noble savage" and "Social Darwinism" were used as a post facto justification of dispossession and murder. He also explains how the British idea that property was sacred under law and was seen as inalienably arrogated to the owner - totally counter to Aboriginal ideas - led to Aboriginals being sidelined in their own land.

Some people tried to ameliorate the situation, and indeed tried to ensure that the original inhabitants of Australia could have rights to access and continue to own the land that was theirs, but were stymied time and time again essentially by the land greed of the settlers.

What is surprising to the reader of this work in 2025 is that for a large period of White Australia's history much of this had been "forgotten" in the official narrative of settlement and colonization of the country. Reynolds shows that the concept of "terra nullius" was not ever espoused by the first settlers - in fact there was very little official documentation of land rights, and what little there was recognised Aboriginal rights to use land, at least for traditional activities. He points out that other colonial jurisdictions had worked through the implications of settlement in law, but Australia for many reasons never did.

Of course it was not long after this work was published that Australia finally did acknowledge the concept of continuing Native Title to land, and there has been much development in that area since.

This book is pretty easy to read - it is a polemic in some senses, but rooted in sources, although I found the way the notes were printed in this edition somewhat hard to follow. There is a good bibliography.

Many other historians have built on Reynold's legacy - while Frontier might have been seen as ground-breaking in its day, much of what is discussed in this book is now a commonplace of discussion in the history of this country.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Blood, Class and Nostalgia by Christopher Hitchens

 Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies by Christopher Hitchens

London: Vintage, 1991 (first published 1990)       ISBN 0099878003

This is a fascinating book of inter-connected essays about the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain. It's a highly personal view and written as a polemic, but when that view belongs to, and the polemic is written by, Christopher Hitchens, you know it's going to be well worth reading.

While we might (up until Trump's second coming anyway) take for granted the very close geo-political ties between Britain and America, there was never a guarantee that those ties would ever form or be enduring. One look at American history shows us why - America threw off the British yoke in the 1770s, and fought them again in the early 1800s; and through most of the 19th century England did what it could to thwart American expansion across the continent. Britain also supported, for its own reasons, the Confederacy in the Civil War.  Given that history, it was not given that both America and Britain would forge such close ties in the 20th century.

The theme that runs through the essays, which roam from Rudyard Kipling to nuclear warfare, is the idea expressed by Harold Macmillan, and noted at the beginning of this book, that Britain, on losing their status as a first rank power would play Greece to America's Rome ("We...are Greeks in this American Empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans - great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius."). Hitchens goes on to explain that in his view this is not an entirely correct explanation of what was happening.

There was actually something much more subtle going on. Britain, clinging on the the vestiges of its empire, was coming to the realisation that it would have to let go, and formed the view that America was the obvious successor, and so if it could guide and direct them in how to have, hold and run an empire, they could be an indispensable partner - providing intellectual heft and skill to ensure that America's power and treasure could be spent wisely. So rather than Britain's Greece to the Rome of the USA, what was envisaged was the Roman centre moving across the Atlantic, but with Britain still very much part of the infrastructure.  

Unfortunately, as Hitchens points out, what sounds good in theory doesn't always work out in practice. There were many in Britain who didn't like this idea, and tried to cling on to bits of the Empire, until they couldn't, and then essentially ran to the US cap in hand to get help. This put America in a stronger position, and also reinforced the idea that was held by some in power that they were being used in a way that they didn't like or want. 

While we are bombarded at the moment with news about Trump cutting ties with Europe and other places with his trade policy, he is in some ways merely the latest iteration of American exceptionalism and isolationism. Hitchens explains that, between the wars, there was a significant part of the American polity that didn't like Britain (for example those of Irish descent), and certainly didn't want America to "take up the white man's burden", or begin its own empire building.

World War Two changed the dynamic of the relationship between Britain and the USA. Britain during the war did assist the USA greatly in the spheres of atomic weaponry, and in spycraft and intelligence gathering in general. These lessons were gratefully received, and while America was later on grudging in the way it shared nuclear information, the genuine camaraderie between intelligence services was often a major fixative in the "special relationship" during the Cold War years.

So from enemies, to a connection that led to semi-serious discussions of a political merger between the two states, Hitchens chronicles the demise of the "special relationship" to something that doesn't really have much power anymore, beyond nostalgia and what he calls kitsch. While Britain still feels the bond, America it seems sees Britain as one among many powers that they deal with, just easier to talk to because they speak the same language.

Blood, Class and Nostalgia is well worth reading not only for Hitchens insight into the relationship between Britain and the US, but also for the interesting bits of information he imparts. From Kipling's correspondence with Teddy Roosevelt, to Churchill's conversation with Mark Twain, there are many fascinating insights into how major figures have crossed paths during the last century or so, and what they thought of the "special relationship".

A good read. 

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

 

Book Review - The Rush that Never Ended by Geoffrey Blainey

 The Rush that Never Ended : a History of Australian Mining by Geoffrey Blainey

Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978 (3rd edition)     ISBN 0522841457

When the first edition of this book was published in 1961, export of iron ore from Australia was only just beginning, after the lifting of a ban imposed in 1938. The Rush that Never Ended was the first comprehensive history of Australian mining, which, given the place mining held in the formation and development of colonial Australia, is actually quite astounding. Since this third edition was published in 1978 mining in this country has moved to another level, but Blainey's book is still a worthwhile read, full of interesting facts about the development of the industry.

Blainey explains quite simply the differing rushes for metals throughout our white history... he doesn't quite call it out as greed, but essentially greed is the reason behind all the different phases of our mining history. Gold was "discovered" once the Crown no longer automatically owned what a prospector found, and all the metals were discovered as and when they became valuable and payable commodities - famously Lang Hancock knew about the huge Hamersley iron deposit but kept it secret from 1952 until 1961 when export markets finally opened up for that commodity.

Blainey starts at the beginning with the first and most precious metal sought by prospectors, gold. He clearly maps the incredible effect the gold finds, first in New South Wales and then in Victoria, had on the young colony: the population exploded, and huge economic effort went in to developing the industry. The romantic image of a prospector making it rich by panning some creek or digging up some quartz with a shovel has stuck in our collective memory, but in the history of gold mining in Australia, that era was quickly over, to be replaced by capital and large workforces. 

This change was more painful than it had to be - mining law was skewed to support individual prospectors: mining leases were too small to be developed properly for deep mining. Once this was changed the drawback became the lack of experience of the miners in deep-lead mining. In fact a certain scorn for science and geology was the bugbear for Australian mining for a lot longer than it should have been.

After gold, the most-sought mineral was copper, which was being mined early on in South Australia. Blainey well describes the discovery and development of Broken Hill, with its massive lodes of silver and lead and the share frenzy that accompanied the discovery. To mine on such scale massive capital inflows are required - the various frenzies, scams and massive windfalls that washed over people who invested in mines are covered comprehensively by Blainey - money is just as important as metal in the ground for a successful mine.

As the gold-fields close to "civilization" were mined out, prospectors moved farther afield to try and make their fortune, Blainey describes the move north to the Queensland tropics, west to the bonanza of Kalgoorlie and surrounds, and all the trials and tribulations that went with prospecting in jungles and deserts. Again some people made a fortune, but most barely got by, and usually ended up working for a big company and hoping that they might make a bundle speculating in shares...most people didn't.

Let's not forget Tasmania - perhaps Australia's largest mine up until the 1970s, Mount Lyell and surrounds were a story of triumph over nature and finance to unleash a huge cache of wealth for savvy investors.

With a good bibliography and index, The Rush that Never Ended is a fine introduction to one of Australia's founding, and greatest industries.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Son of the Morning Star by Evan S. Connell

 Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Evan S. Connell

London: Picador, 1986 (first published 1984)                                       ISBN 0330293400

I wish I had read this book twenty years ago. Twenty years ago (give or take a few years), I had the fortune to visit the valley of the Little Bighorn, and walk over the battleground where Custer and so many of the Seventh Cavalry lost their lives that fateful June day in 1876. Evan Connell has written the most wonderful account not only of that day, but of Custer, the West as it came to be up to the battle, the white American mindset, and of the Indians, what happened to them up to and after the battle, and what now remains - the legacy of violence, misunderstanding and dispossession that continue to this day.

Connell was better-known as a novelist before this book was published, and he has used a novelist's mind to create this book, with its tangents, loose ends, unknowns and climaxes. While it covers much familiar territory to those of us with an interest in the battle and the American West more generally, it does so in new and different ways. The book begins with a description of Reno's fight on the bluff from the viewpoint of the soldiers, before segueing into the history of Reno himself, and on to Benteen, before taking a step back in time to see how the fates led Custer and co. to their destiny on June 25.

Connell investigates the "facts" that surround Custer and so many of the men and women associated with this story: sometimes the stories that cloud around these people obscure whatever truth there may have been to find (names in particular, not only of the Indians, but so many of the white participants seem to have varied names, names that changed or have been half-remembered... a kaleidoscope of faces that can't be pinned to a particular). He is not afraid to vent his opinion about some of the histories that have been written of those times, and can be scathing of those whom he thought had exaggerated in search of fame or a dollar.

Some surprising facts pop up throughout the text. One that struck me particularly is that the last living witness to the battle died the same year my wife was born. What seems like ancient history is only just out of reach really. The fog of battle is often impossible to pierce, yet it seems fairly certain that Custer was shot from long range and died "with a smile on his face". While it is pure speculation on my part, Connell describes a character in Custer, that may have been smiling because he knew his name would go down in history. There is no doubt that he was incredibly vain, self-centred and reckless, and it seems he deliberately disobeyed the orders given to him by Terry to wait for the main force to join him before attacking the Indians, most probably so that he could take all the glory for himself.

His wife burnished his legend (she died only in 1933) so that he seemed - until revisionists such as Connell appeared on the scene - like a god, a genius at battle, a wonderful leader to his men, as well as kind to animals, and the greatest Indian fighter of the US Army. That he was none of those things Connell makes clear. He was personally brave, of that there is no doubt, and he was assiduous in trying to work his good fortune in battle into promotions and appointments (it seems plausible that he was thinking of running for President at the time of Little Bighorn).

To his men Custer was a hard-driving martinet, not afraid to use the lash, or to punish them for minor misdemeanours, all the while working hard to minimize his own transgressions, which were not infrequent or insignificant. His leadership against Indians in battle was at best one-dimensional, which is what got him into so much trouble in June 1876. He should have been more circumspect and waited for Terry (although Connell seems to think that even the addition of Terry's men wouldn't have led to a US victory).

Connell spends as much ink on the Indian side of the story as he does on Custer. The Indians had a well-deserved reputation for savagery, which was partly due to their warrior culture, but mostly a response to unrelenting harassment by the white invaders. That they were invaders is without doubt, as it was the US Government itself that gave the lands around the Black Hills to the Sioux "for ever" eight years before the battle. Connell writes that even then, just before Little Bighorn, Indians were willing to negotiate, but the Army did not allow time for that to happen. In so many ways, the disaster was of white man's making...

Son of the Morning Star is very well-written, taking the reader on a journey into the West, and giving as many sides of the story as is possible, even to the point of four or five differing versions of the same story - although unlike an academic tome Connell is quick to let the reader know which version he favours. The book deserves the accolades it received, it is a hinge between "old fashioned" Custer history and the newer more nuanced writing, and is just a wonderful read! 

(This Picador edition suffers from the maps being almost illegible - the Bibliography is good, but the index is terrible.)

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Crimea by Orlando Figes

 Crimea: the Last Crusade by Orlando Figes

London: Penguin, 2011 (first published 2010)    ISBN 9780141013503

Within ten kilometres of my home I can travel down Raglan Street, Cardigan Street and Malakoff Street on my way to either Redan or Sebastopol. If I like, I can drive a couple of hours west to Panmure, or if I chose to drive north-west I can have a coffee in St. Arnaud. If I drive south-east for an hour or so to Melbourne I can travel down Inkerman Street and Alma Road to the suburb of Balaclava. That all these names are linked to the Crimean War tells me not only the time period when these suburbs and streets were coming into being, but what a huge effect this conflict had on the public opinion of Britain and her empire at the time.

And yet who has heard of that war these days? Given the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is timely to revisit this period in history, for it can inform the bystander of some of the issues that underlie today's conflict. Thankfully, we can read this well-written book by that great student and historian of recent Russian history, Orlando Figes.

Figes not only writes about the tragedy of the fighting, but of the deeper religious, colonial and territorial claims that drove this war, as well as writing an interesting and useful chapter on the legacy of the war (and yes, a couple of the places listed above get a mention).

As Figes writes in his introduction "each power entered the Crimean War with its own motives." The Turks were fighting to hold on to their European empire. The British were fighting ostensibly to save the Turks from Russian aggression, but actually to try to contain Russia (whose expansion they feared), and garner more trade with Turkey. Napoleon III fought for the glory of France, and also perhaps to create a Europe of nation-states that would look to him as an elder statesman. 

And what of Russia? Well, as Figes states "As for the Tsar, Nicholas I, the man more than anyone responsible for the Crimean War, he was partly driven by inflated pride and arrogance, a result of having been tsar for twenty-seven years, partly by his sense of how a great power such as Russia should behave towards its weaker neighbours, and partly by a gross miscalculation about how the other powers would respond to his actions..." sounds kind of familiar, doesn't it...

Ostensibly the War began when Russia took umbrage at how the Turks were treating Christians in the Holy Land. This led the Tsar not only to bully Turkey, but to invade the Danubian delta, with an idea to "free" the Slav Christians from the Muslim yoke. His actions raised the ire of both Britain and France. Britain had long been concerned that Russia's access to the Black Sea was a strategic arrow pointed at the heart of British trade and power in the East. France was concerned not only for the continuation of Catholic Austria (with her quarrelsome Orthodox subjects), but also for the rights of Catholics in Palestine. Their concern for the plight of Turkey came a very poor last in this race of self-interest. And so both the British and the French sailed to the Crimea, where with their superior technology and better-trained armies they quickly put the port of Sevastopol to siege, and almost as quickly they began to lose huge amounts of soldiery to disease and cold. The viciousness of the fighting, both in the field at the Alma, Balaklava and Inkerman, and during the siege, is well-covered by Figes with apposite quotes from journals and newspaper reports from the time.

Figes also covers the politics of the War, especially in England, where newspaper reports for the first time played a big part in how the public reacted to and indeed shaped the policy of the Government. There were many aspects of the Crimean War that made it the first modern war - newspaper reporting, modern rifles (both the French and the English had them and the Russians did not, which turned the tide of many of the battles), and the development of modern logistics, which were needed for the British and French to continue the siege.

The siege of Sevastopol perhaps doesn't seem as present to English-speaking peoples who think about the Crimean War as the Charge of the Light Brigade or Florence Nightingale, but to the Russians, it is a sacred event and memory - similar in scope to the Australian view of Gallipoli. Figes points out in his epilogue how the partition of the USSR in 1991, which meant that the Crimea and Sevastopol were no longer part of Russia, was traumatic for the Russian people and for Putin, unbearable.

Yet for Alexander II, who succeeded his brother during the War, once Sevastopol had fallen there was little point in continuing a war he knew he could not win. While the English war party, led by Palmerston, wished not only to continue the War but to expand it, the English public, horrified at the loss of life, felt that the taking of Sevastopol meant victory was at hand and that the troops could come home. Napoleon similarly was looking for a way out, which the fall of Sevastopol gave him.

And so the peace conference, which included Austria as well as the four belligerents, tried to give something to everyone. Britain came out of it with a Black Sea that was Russian-fleet-free, France came out of it with the Austrian and Turkish empires intact, and a commitment to assistance in Italy, the Austrians  gained an assurance that their own Orthodox subjects would not be stirred to revolt by the Russians, and the Russians could save face through the assurance that Orthodox rights in the Holy Land would be upheld by the Ottoman Empire. For the Ottomans, despite being the victim of the Russian attack that began the war, very little good came from the "victory". Their territorial integrity was restored for the moment, but they were subject to many restrictions on how they could govern, mostly concerning giving freedoms to their Christian subjects. These freedoms, and the imposition of western "aid" and "trade", led to a backlash from more traditional parts of society, while the Christians continued to mobilize for independence, with the acquiescence, if not actual assistance, of most of Christian Europe

No-one knows how many died during the War, but estimates range up to 800,000 soldiers and civilians. Many of these people died horribly from wounds, disease or the cold. A lot of the deaths could have been prevented with proper hygiene and medical attention, which was sadly lacking in both the British and Russian armies. Figes records the advances made by those armies during the War, along with the quirks that siege warfare brought to the Crimea (if you had the money, you could buy French Champagne from Fortnum and Mason's at Balaklava, along with any other luxuries you might require).

That Figes manages to weave such stories through his narrative while still enlightening us about grand strategy and battles both on the field and back "home" is one of the strengths of this book. I can't think of a better way to get up to speed on a period of history that needs further exploration in these current times. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Before I Forget by Geoffrey Blainey

 Before I Forget: an Early Memoir by Geoffrey Blainey

Penguin Books, 2020 (first published 2019)   ISBN 9781760899103

What a delightful book: sometimes a book "drops into your lap" without you ever intending to hunt it out or read it, but when it does, and when you do, it leaves you happy. Before I Forget is a beautifully written book describing the early years of one of Australia's finest historians from his own viewpoint.

The son of a Methodist preacher, Geoffrey Blainey spent his early years in a variety of Victorian towns, including Leongatha, Ballarat, and Geelong. These formative years seeded Blainey's love of history, and for the reader, we find out other things as well: he loved football, both playing the game, and supporting the Geelong Football Club, and he was adventurous, travelling and exploring as much as he could. His description of early hitch-hiking trips up and down the east coast of the country are wonderful evocations of the countryside during the late Forties. He was also clever - he won a scholarship to the prestigious Wesley College and his experiences there under the influence of good teachers and fellow students helped turn him into a writer and historian.

As for becoming the world-renowned historian, well, he sort of fell into it. Studying history at Melbourne University, he did well, and was active in student life as editor of  the student newspaper Farrago, but had no plans at that stage to enter academia (astonishingly, Blainey did not even formally take his degree until after he was employed as a lecturer at the University!), feeling rather that he should take up writing or journalism full-time. But how to do that in early 1950s Australia, when even a "best-seller" didn't bring in enough money to keep hearth and home together?

Blainey found a way of  managing to do just that - by being paid a salary to write a book! He fell into doing it by being recommended by one of his university teachers to write the history of the Mt Lyell mining concern, where he was paid a stipend while living on-site. His description of how he went about writing the book, and how he met the locals gives the reader not only an idea of Blainey's working methods, but also an idea of what a personable man he is. He devotes further pages to his other early books, up to and including the book that did the most to launch him as a historian, The Tyranny of Distance. It is a credit to not only his historical work, but to his writing style that many of his books are still in print.

As well as describing his writings, and the people he met through them (which included most of the big names of mining in Australia and indeed the world in the 1950s, and the last of the "old-time" prospectors), he gives us a wonderful little vignette of his journey in 1966 through China and across the USSR, a lone and carefree traveller through the Cultural Revolution and Communism - I have been meaning to read the book he wrote about that journey for a long time; I must hunt it out.

This memoir stops when Blainey has reached his forties, and focuses mostly on his childhood, education and professional life: the reason for this - as he writes in the preface - is that this was enough to make a good-sized book. Here's hoping there is another volume to come.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia by David Day

 Andrew Fisher: Prime Minister of Australia by David Day

Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2008           ISBN 9780732276102

This is both a necessary and disappointing book. Necessary, as it is to date the only full-length biography of Andrew Fisher, Australia's first Labor Prime Minister and the first socialist leader in history to be elected with a majority government; and disappointing, as I felt as a reader little wiser as to the inner workings of Fisher's mind or his governments when I finished the book.

Most Australians - if they know anything at all about Fisher -  will recall his famous statement that Australia would support Britain in World War One "to the last man and the last shilling" (which, I discovered in the book, was delivered in Colac, Victoria, not far from my home). The War was in many ways the undoing of Fisher and his hopes for Labor, with the necessity to provide men and treasure ham-stringing government initiatives and dividing the party.

Fisher came from a Scottish mining family, with a father who was politically active, so it's no surprise to learn that he was an active organiser in Ayrshire before he emigrated (with his brother) to Queensland. He quickly found work in the mines there, and almost as quickly began moving in socialist circles. A stint in the Queensland Parliament saw him a minister in the first Labor government in the world, Anderson Dawson's short-lived Queensland Government in 1899.

Fisher was elected to the Federal Parliament in the first Australian election in 1901, running on a platform that mainly consisted of championing White Australia. Day is quite embarrassed about this fact and tries to skim over it as much as he can during the book - he may have been better served to explain a little more than he does how the fear of miscegenation and of takeover by Asian races had a hold on the population as a whole and that Fisher was giving the people what they wanted, as well as obviously believing it himself as well. His support of the White Australia policy, and especial fear of Japan's expansion into a poorly populated Australia, remained with him for his whole political career, even after Australia and Japan fought side-by-side in World War One.

As for his socialism Fisher understood, perhaps better than some of his comrades, the need to tread carefully and not scare the general populace. Once he became Prime Minister, he was especially careful to not overspend, to ensure Australia's defence, and attempt to develop the North as well as enshrine pensions, arbitration, and other more socialist policies. He came to be seen as a "safe pair of hands" as Prime Minister.

Perhaps his greatest achievement was to begin to move Australia along the path to being Australia. It is easy to forget that when he took the reins of power the country was barely ten years old, the Premiers of each State still wielded enormous power, and weren't prepared to give it up to the Commonwealth without a fight. Fisher realised early that the Federal Government needed more fiscal power than that provided for in the Constitution, and his unceasing and unsuccessful referendum campaigns took up much of his time.

Day skims the surface of much of this history: it seems that Fisher did not leave much behind him, no diary or copies of his letters, so it would have been hard for Day to get to Fisher's thoughts at times, but I do wonder whether he could have mined the papers of Fisher's contemporaries more to provide more context. Day began his career as a historian of war, and this comes out in the book with a focus on the Dardanelles Campaign, of which Fisher had little knowledge and even less say. Less pages on this and more on the machinations of the Labor Party and Billy Hughes in particular, may have helped flesh out not only Fisher's life in politics, but the milieu he worked in.

Day paints Fisher as a man of high principle and a man of the people, a worker running a worker's government. While this was no doubt the case, it strikes one on reading the book that Fisher was a canny Scot when it came to money, and a proud one when it came to his position as Prime Minister. As was noted by the Sun newspaper, Fisher had "a Scotsman's regard for a profitable contract."

In the end it was Fisher's health that was his undoing, rather than the machinations of Hughes or the conservatives: he left at a time of his own choosing, to become High Commissioner in London. What could have been another high point of his career turned out to be but a highly-paid sinecure, as Hughes' megalomania didn't allow Fisher any freedom of movement, and his own declining health reduced his ability to be effective. His fall into dementia in his last years was a sad end to an amazing life.

There is no doubt that Australians should know more about Andrew Fisher. David Day in this book has begun that process, but I feel the definitive biography is yet to be written.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - My Country all gone the White Men have Stolen it by Fred Cahir

My Country all gone the White Men have Stolen it : the Invasion of Wadawurrung Country 1800-1870 by Fed Cahir

Ballarat: Australian History Matters, 2019            ISBN 9780646801780

This book is, as far as I know, the first attempt to provide a history (from the white man's point-of-view) of the contact between the colonial settlers of Victoria, and the members of the Wadawurrung tribe of Aboriginals, whose traditional lands ran from approximately Airey's Inlet to Learmonth, and east to Bacchus Marsh, including the areas now occupied by the cities and towns of Ballarat, Geelong, Ballan, Meredith, and Beaufort.

And a fascinating book it is. Cahir has searched through the archives to find reports of interactions with the Wadawurrung, from the earliest explorers, through to the height of the gold rush and after. The story is not a happy one for the Wadawurrung, nor for many of the white people who interacted with them, with dispossession and early death awaiting the Wadawurrung, and, depending on the person, guilt, anger or violence awaiting the whites.

The way any particular white person or family treated the Wadawurrung seemed to determine the way the Wadawurrung treated them. For squatters who aggressively kept them off their selections, the Wadawurrung may have responded with violence, but for those who understood that the land actually belonged to the Wadawurrung, and who treated them as fellow human beings, the partnership could be mutually beneficial - many Wadawurrung proved excellent pastoral workers, and the rations and care that those particular whites gave to the Wadawurrung helped them cope with the loss of their traditional hunting grounds, and the increasing scarcity of traditional food sources.

The other theme that runs through the extensive quotes from the primary sources that Cahir provides is that of cultural mis-communication, springing from the totally different social and legal frameworks that the Wadawurrung and the White (British) worked under. The Wadawurrung lived a traditional Aboriginal life of mutual obligation and kinship, and Cahir shows us through his quotations that they attempted to bring the early white settlers into this system, letting the settlers use the land, and offering assistance to them, but expecting reciprocity - that the settlers would give them food, clothing and equipment in exchange, and that they would give equally to the whole tribe. This idea clashed with the British concept that only those who "worked" got rewarded with "pay". Many correspondents Cahir quotes fail to understand why the Wadawurrung they interacted with were upset when only the men were given food if they had worked, rather than the whole clan.

The Wadawurrung did to some extent participate in the White economy, providing game for food, possum-skin rugs for warmth, and corroborees for entertainment. They soon moved beyond bartering to requiring to be paid cash for these items, although much work that they did on the stations was still for rations rather than money.

The discovery of gold changed Victoria hugely in a short time, and was not good for the Wadawurrung. By 1850, there was some kind of working arrangement between at least some of the squatters and the Wadawurrung, where the squatters provided food, and allowed some small depredation to their flocks, in the knowledge that the Wadawurrung could be called upon to help with herding and shearing. The Wadawurrung knew which squatters to avoid, and who were more friendly. The early violent interactions between Black and White - of which there had been a few - had ceased to occur in any way that could be considered a war over land. In fact there was beginning to be a push for the government to allocate land for Wadawurrung use, with the more enlightened settlers realising that they had stolen the land, and owed the Wadawurrung something more that they were being given.

After 1851, much of that was forgotten.  The influx of hundreds of thousands of gold-seekers in a very short time changed the face of Victoria forever. The towns that sprang up on the goldfields were dens of vice, which had a huge effect on Wadawurrung culture, and on the health of individual Wadawurrung people. It's fair to state that the moral and intellectual character of many of those on the goldfields was not high, and the mistreatment of the native inhabitants of the country was often appalling. The depredations that gold seeking made to the environment also took a heavy toll on the Wadawurrung, with many of their traditional camping grounds overtaken by prospectors.

The final destruction of any capacity to live in their traditional way, coupled with the temptations of alcohol and a sedentary life, had a deleterious effect on the Wadawurrung, with birthrates plummeting and death rates rising. From being an integral part of the country and economy of pastoral Victoria, the Wadawurrung became a quaint afterthought in goldrush Victoria. Cahir documents the continued lack of action from Government to assist the Wadawurrung to adapt and thrive in the new reality, despite advice from many whites on ways to help.

What is missing from this book, as Cahir notes in the introduction, is the unalloyed voice of the Wadawurrung themselves. Even when we "hear" them in the text, it is via their white interlocutors and reflected through the prejudices and proclivities of the writer, rather than being the true voice of the Wadawurrung. Cahir has skillfully dissected the white voices to try and get to some of the thoughts of the Wadawurrung, which I think is summed up in the title of the book. The British came, and took the Wadawurrung's land, and, from the quotations provided, Cahir shows that most of the settlers knew very well that they were taking land that belonged to someone else.

This is an important addition to the history of Aboriginal/White interaction in Victoria, and should be read by every person who lives on Wadawurrung land.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Water Dreamers by Michael Cathcart

The Water Dreamers : the remarkable history of our dry continent by Michael Cathcart

Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009            ISBN 9781921520648

This is a book with a very interesting premise, which in some ways doesn't quite live up to the claim of the title, but is still well worth reading.

Much more and much less than a history of White Australia's interaction with water in Australia, Cathcart has also written about how the British (and others) took possession of the country through their imaginings of what it might be, and how those imaginings have been rebuffed by the country itself.

Starting with the arrival of the First Fleet, Cathcart shows how a people used to copious rain and riverflows struggled with the erratic nature of Australia's rainfall and water catchments. He delves further into the literature of early Australia than others have to show that some of the received knowledge  that we thought we knew about what early White Australia thought of water and the interior may not be actually what we think we know.

Apart from Sturt, most early explorers soon realised that there was no great river, lake or sea in the centre of the continent. This did not stop them from over-estimating the carrying capacity of the water that was available, encouraging pastoralists to venture too far inland, and destroying many watercourses in their search for reliable water.

Cathcart chronicles two differing schools of thought that developed regarding the "Dead Heart", or "Red Heart", depending on the view taken. The centre of Australia was either a place of despair and death with no possibility of permanent settlement, or a potential food bowl and living place for millions, after man's hand was run over the countryside to provide it with water.

Cathcart chronicles much of the work and literature of the "water boosters" as he calls them, including the strange "Lemurian" literature, a kind of pulp fiction that spoke of lost tribes and ancient seas around which the "Dead Heart" was once civilized. Ever one for facts rather than fantasy, he pops the bubbles of those who would generate a history of the continent through their words, rather than from the actuality of water, or lack of it. As he writes in his introduction his book "is an investigation that returns again and again to one overwhelming fact. In Australia, the success or failure of settlement has been largely determined by rainfall."

As still happens all too often in this country, those that talk sense, such as Griffith Taylor, were hounded until he left. Taylor's commentary, that much of Australia is too dry to settle in the way that politicians hoped to, still holds up today. Cathcart pricks the "populate or perish" bubble as well - why would the "teeming Asian hordes" want to take a desert country - they are hardly going to parachute into the Western Desert and invade from the inside out...

The book finishes with a short section on the current policy of trading water rights, which, as Cathcart points out, has its own problems as a vehicle to rehabilitate our depleted rivers and wetlands.

With copious footnotes and bibliography, The Water Dreamers is an interesting viewpoint of Australia's history, and worth reading.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Secret River by Kate Grenville

The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2005                         ISBN 1920885757

I kept reading this book waiting for it to "take off": it never did. I picked it up as I'd never read Kate Grenville - an award-winning writer - and the blurb seemed interesting.

Unfortunately for this book Grenville has a barrow to push, and it has affected both the story and the story telling. The book is obviously about the early destructive relations between settlers and Aboriginal Australians. The vehicle for telling the story is William Thornhill, a waterman of the Thames who is transported to New South Wales for theft. He gets his ticket-of-leave, is assigned to his wife and together they go into business in Sydney, he working for a boatman running the Hawkesbury River trade, and she as a publican. Thornhill is intrigued by the River, and soon selects one hundred acres on the River to set up his own farm.

The book then revolves around the relations of the Thornhills (and other settlers) with the local tribe, with misunderstandings leading to thefts, spearings and a terrible massacre. The massacre is the central point of the story, with the book ending decades later showing Thornhill a wealthy and successful man, sitting on his verandah searching for the Blacks that are no longer there, and contemplating his past and future.

The problem with the work is that Grenville is so set on describing the history of the treatment of the Aboriginals that she neglects to develop any of the characters. Even Thornhill himself rarely moves beyond being a cardboard cut-out, moved hither and yon by thoughts and feelings that are not clear to this reader. Portrayed as whip-smart early on, later in the work he is too dim to decipher obvious communication from the Natives. At the climax of the book, when the Aboriginals orchestrate a co-ordinated attack on the settlers farms, and Thornhill takes his speared neighbour to the hospital in Windsor, he then spends some hours in the pub while insurrection mounts and a vigilante band is formed - would he not be desperate to return to his wife and children, alone on the farm? It's unfortunate that most of the action in the book is similarly forced and woodenly written.

In some ways this book puts me in mind of the early Mad Max movies. The story is brutal, obvious and fast-moving, the landscape is beautiful, but the characters are merely figures acting in a landscape.

I think that, at approximately 350 pages, Grenville has made a bit of an error with the length of her book: it's either too long, or too short. To develop her characters more, she should have looked to Xavier Herbert. Her characters (apart from the Aborigines) are in some ways Dickensian creations, as were Herbert's, but she hasn't given them the space to fully bloom into their potential. If Grenville went down the Herbert route with her book it may have been twice as long, but would have had more to recommend it as a truly rollicking read of colonial times, while still keeping her central message intact.

If, on the other hand, Grenville cut the story back to the bone she could still get the message across by looking for inspiration from someone like Randolph Stow. She then could have produced - like he did - a polished gem of a work, where the lack of character development adds to rather than detracts from the story.

But, she didn't do either of these things, and we are left with a middle-of-the-road novel that gives us a moral, but fails to provide us with much more enjoyment than a history book. Much of the character writing is clunky, although some of the landscape description is good writing.

There is not much to like about this book, but there is little to actively dislike. It has left me flat.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell