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 - Riverboats by Ian Mudie

Riverboats by Ian Mudie

Melbourne: Sun Books, 1965    (First published Rigby, 1961)

White Australia is a very young country, but already so much of it's pioneering history is being forgotten. A case in point is the story of how the riverboat trade opened up Australia's interior. Riverboats - a minor classic in it's own way - tells some of that story in an entertaining and readable fashion.

Ian Mudie is perhaps best known, along with Rex Ingamells, for being a founder of the Jindyworobak literary group, and he was self-consciously Australian in outlook, as testified by much of his poetic output. He was also a great story-teller and, as this book shows, a great listener to other people's stories. Mudie's father was close friends with W. R. Randall, a pioneer riverman, and Mudie used that connexion to gather material for this book.

Riverboats firstly gives the reader a brief history of the opening of the rivers by steamer, with the second half of the book being a collection of anecdotes that Mudie collected about the boats, and the men that owned and crewed them.

What Mudie makes clear in this book is how vital the riverboat trade was in opening up the pastoral country along the Murray, Darling and Murrumbidgee Rivers. Before the pioneering journey of Randall in the Mary Ann and Cadell in the Lady Augusta in 1853, the settlers in these districts were reliant on supplies coming from the coast via bullock dray, a long and expensive supply route. The arrival of the first steamers instantly reduced the cost of staples like flour, tin and alcohol, and enabled the first towns to develop along the rivers.

The steamers also allowed people to travel quickly and comfortably from the coast inland, which as Mudie writes, meant that many women came to the interior for the first time, changing society for the better. The struggle for the boat owners was to make enough money to stay viable, and they did this in various ways. Some tried to monopolize a certain section of the river, some opened stores that their steamers then serviced, and most ran up the river with stock on spec, to see what they could sell. Quite often they made good profits, but sometimes they didn't do so well. The story of the riverboats is also a story of consolidation, with fewer and fewer companies involved in the trade as time went on. Mudie tells the story of the longest river voyage, by the Jane, which took 37 months to deliver the timber for a new hotel to be built in Bourke. Continually low water in 1886 meant that the Jane, with her heavy load, had to wait and wait before she had enough draught to get through the shallow sections of the Darling. By the time she arrived in Bourke, the railway had made it to the town and the hotel had already been built!

Mudie is scathing in his book about the way that the railways subsidised freight to undercut the river steamers. In the end, the expansion of the railroads, and the increase in motor transport, sounded the death-knell for the river trade. The remaining steamers today are purely a tourist attraction. Mudie's stories about the rivermen show what a hard life it was to work on the river, with constant damage to boats from snags and overhanging trees, and the ever present threat of fire hanging over the boats as well, mostly from their own boilers, but, in the case of the Rodney, from a gang determined to make the owner pay for transporting non-union labour during the Shearer's strike of '94.

The Sun Books copy that I read had some useful maps and wonderful (if small) photographs, and was a wonderful way to while away several hours. Thoroughly recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - My crowded solitude by Jack McLaren

My crowded solitude by Jack McLaren

Melbourne: Sun Books, 1967    (first published 1926)

I came upon this book in a batch of books belonging to one person: in fact this particular batch of books belonging to one person contained two copies of this book (different editions), which piqued my interest. That, and the fact that it was a Sun Book - with their history of publishing lost Australian texts - led me to read it.

This book is the story of Jack McLaren's eight years spent in Cape York establishing a coconut plantation. He found the location himself after some exploration, and landed in 1911 to begin work. The book contains some anecdotes of life in the jungle, but mostly deals with McLaren's relationship with the local Aboriginal tribe, on whose land he created his plantation. The tribe was mostly untouched by white men until McLaren's arrival, apart from occasional dealings with pearlers and other ships.

McLaren's relationship with the tribe goes through ups and downs. It takes him a while to understand the native way of life, and his attempts to get them to work after the manner of Europeans are doomed to failure. The first year he spends on the plantation has him adapting to the Aborigines, and they to him. When in the dry season they move down the coast, he is left alone for fourteen weeks, in which time he realises what it truly means to be lonely. When the tribe comes back not only is McLaren glad to see them, the Aboriginals are happy to be back within reach of white man's flour and tobacco. After that first year, never again does the whole tribe move - as McLaren writes "It did not occur to me that the natives were happier as they were. It did not occur to me that the creating in them of needs and desires hitherto utterly foreign would also create in them the necessity for satisfying those needs and desires, to the consequent destruction of the more or less complacent ease of their existence."

The book not only goes into the politics of McLaren's relationship with the tribe, but also describes some of their customs and beliefs: McLaren was aware enough that many of the explanations he was given for such activities were hiding the real reasons or meanings to the actions, but he was astute enough not to pry further.

McLaren was an inveterate wanderer before he "settled down" on his plantation, and while at first visits from fellow whites were few, he eventually became an object of interest and various anthropologists, ornithologists, missionaries and adventurers came to stay with him for shorter or longer periods. As knowledge of his position became more known, he started to get correspondence from all around the World.

Eventually McLaren's wanderlust got the better of him and he sold up and left, but not before gathering enough material to provide us with this little gem of pioneering days in Queensland.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The unknown great Australian by Max Harris

The unknown great Australian : and other psychobiographical portraits by Max Harris

Melbourne: Sun Books, 1983          ISBN 0725104244

How quickly we forget. Max Harris was, not so long ago, one of those names in the intellectual milieu of Australia who would need no explanation. I wonder if that's still the case. As the whole Angry Penguins and Ern Malley saga has reached it's apotheosis and has declined into the past, the major players - Harris, McAuley and Stewart - have faded almost into nothing.

It took a long time for Harris to regain some sort of equilibrium after being held up to the world as a fool, and by the 1980s his undoubted talent as a critic and bon vivant was back in style and his prose regularly appeared in Australian newspapers and periodicals.

The unknown great Australian is a collection of those essays. Unlike a lot of similar collections, there is a theme of sorts running through each essay: that many people are driven by unknown desires or demons, and the reasons for these drives are not always apparent to outsiders, and sometimes not even to the person themselves.

With this in mind, Harris has looked at several Australian and English lives that illustrate his point. His first essay however, celebrates the life of Bob Cugley, printer of Melbourne and supporter of lost causes. If Harris has done anything consistently throughout his life, it has been to prick the balloons of the self-important and those who take on the mantle of leadership in society. His essay on Cugley is a paen to the ordinary working Australian who actually carry the country and give it soul. Cugley, and people like him, are the true unknown great Australians.

Harris then moves onto the other side of that coin, the unknown parts of the lives of "great" Australians, where he has some balloons to prick, and some interesting observations to make. Whether it's to make the point that some have been raised higher than they should be, such as Leichardt and John Peter Russell, or that some perhaps have not been appreciated enough, such as Doc Evatt and Percy Grainger, Harris extracts an essence from each life looked at to make a point.

Leichardt was not a great explorer, or much of anything really, except in his own mind - Harris points out that very few Australian explorers were cut out for the job - being a policeman seemed to matter more than any bush or scientific experience to the 'society' that chose them.

John Peter Russell, a follower of the Impressionists, is used as a comment on the vagaries of the 'cultural cringe' - and how as an over-reaction by those who should know better mediocrity is pushed above its station, actually furthering the arguments of those who may subscribe to a 'cringe'.

The essay on Doc Evatt is a cautionary tale on how society forgets quickly, and subscribes to a narrative that only tells half the story - an idea Harris would be familiar with - and shows how Doc changed the Labor party - "if Evatt handn't existed, Bob Hawke would probably be teaching school at Carnarvon..."

Harris sees the sexual drive, or lack of it, in many of his subjects as important - he shows how the asexual or impotent have perhaps moved our understanding of sexuality forward more than the majority - insights into Christina Rossetti and Havelock Ellis provide the base for these speculations. He also believes that someone's private sexual peccadillos should not necessarily prejudice the public's view of achievement, vide Grainger and Gladstone: ironically he shows the current (this book was written in the '80s) public morality as much more prudish than the Victorian age.

Drugs were much more of a problem in Victorian society than now as well, and his essay on Francis Thompson comes to the (correct) conclusion that "the drugged mind, it seems, orginates nothing."

He writes interestingly on Errol Flynn, suggesting that what he was looking for in Hollywood was a recreation of Australian mateship. He couldn't manage it, and therefore he began the slippery slope to alcoholism and death. The essay on Adam Lindsay Gordon, on the other hand, suggests that it was Gordon's inability to move on from the mindless horse-racing set that led to his suicide.

There are other essays in this book that I haven't touched on here, all interesting, all written with Harris' usual brio. A good read.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Australia's last explorer: Ernest Giles by Geoffrey Dutton

Australia's last explorer: Ernest Giles by Geoffrey Dutton

Adelaide: Rigby, 1974                                                            ISBN 0851797091

(First published 1970 by Faber and Faber)

"Of all the great unexplored regions of the world, none subjected explorers to more consistent humiliation than Central and Western Australia. An area the size of the whole of Western Europe lured these fly-tormented men on from waterhole to water soak with promises of an inland sea, of great rivers, of plains where millions of sheep and cattle could run,but in most cases nothing more was achieved than a connection between existing settlements. Unlike North America, Australia was settled around its edges, a nibbling, heartless approach to living that has persisted to the present day. Most modern Australians have never been inland except as tourists, insulated from the shocks of dust and distance. The myth of the outback is the heart of the country's identity, while the citydwellers look outwards to the sea. There is no Chicago, Kansas City or Dallas in the middle of Australia, only a small town called Alice Springs, and five hundred miles in any direction much the same emptiness that engulfed the first explorers. West of Alice Springs, despite all the excitements of mineral discoveries, there is still a thousand miles of red emptiness."

So begins Australia's last explorer. From the first lines we know that, in the tale here written of the explorations of Giles, that we will be subjected to stories of heat, thirst, and bare survival, without the great pot of exploration gold of a great new discovery. As Giles wrote of his greatest journey, from the line of the Overland Telegraph to Perth and back, crossing the Nullabor Plain and both the Great Victoria and Gibson Deserts; "I have travelled during the expedition 2,500 miles, and unfortunately no areas of country available for settlement were found. The explorer does not make the country, he must take it as he finds it; and though to the discoverer of the finest regions the greatest applause is awarded, yet it should be borne in mind that the difficulties of travelling such a country cannot be nearly so great as those which confront the less fortunate traveller who finds himself surrounded by heartless deserts. Still, the successful penetration of such a region has its value, both in a commercial and scientific sense, as it points out to the future emigrant or settler those portions of our continent which he should most religiously shun."

This quote gives us some insight into the character of Ernest Giles - realistic in his appraisal of what he had achieved, at ease with what he had achieved, stoic, and an experienced bushman. Like many of our country's greatest explorers, Giles was English born, emigrating just before the great Victorian Gold Rush, which he joined without success. He ended up at Melbourne working for the Post Office, but city life was not for him, and he ended up working up and down the Darling River for various station owners, work that included looking for new grazing land. He became more and more interested in finding out what lay to the west of the great Overland Telegraph line, and having secured some funding from Baron Von Mueller, he set out on his first expedition in 1872, starting at Chambers Pillar in Central Australia.

This expedition traversed much of the Finke River, and came to grief when Giles tried to cross Lake Amadeus in an attempt to get to the Olgas, which he could see on the horizon. He was eventually driven back by lack of both water and the desire of his companions to continue.  He soon tried again, this time travelling south of Lake Amadeus. He was shattered to find that Forrest, who was the first to travel from West to East, had reached the Olgas before him and so Giles wasn't the first to set foot there. This second expedition almost brought his downfall, as he and one of his party, Gibson, ventured too far out into the desert that was to bear Gibson's name, Giles' horse died and Gibson got lost on the return and was never seen again - Giles barely made it back to base camp alive. The irony was that when he and Gibson decided to return to the base camp they were only 30 miles from permanent water that would have enabled them to continue West.

Still determined to get to the West, and to make a meaningful discovery, Giles re-equipped himself with Camels, and some new companions, and finally completed the epic trek to the coast of the Indian Ocean. He then marched back again. For his troubles, he got a rousing round of receptions in both Perth and Adelaide, but he never received the package of land that he so desired. He ended up in the Western Australian Goldfields - eventually dying in Coolgardie.

Dutton, mostly using Giles own books, the most famous of which is Australia twice traversed, not only describes the explorations, but delves into Giles' character - inclined to versify and see the best in a situation, he named many of his discoveries for classical characters or for whatever took his fancy at the time - Vale of Tempe, Glen Thirsty, Tarn of Auber and Champ de Mars give some idea of the turn of his mind. Given his classical education and seeming gentle nature, it seems odd that he had no fellow feeling for Aboriginal Australians, continually denigrating their artistic achievements and their degeneracy. He had several run-ins with local tribes, mostly after his camels had drunk the local water supply dry. While, like other explorers, he failed to have the wit to rely on Aboriginals to find food and water in places that he found barren, he is partly excused by the fact that many of the places he traversed were in fact avoided by the local inhabitants as wasteland. It's not made clear in his writings, but it seems that Giles killed several natives in the course of his explorations.

One thing that struck me particularly was how recent these explorations were - we tend to think of the ground-breaking journeys across our continent as happening in the dim reaches of the past, but Tietkens, Giles second-in-command for some of his expeditions, died in 1933, four years after the birth of my father-in-law and four years before the birth of my father....

Dutton has made a good job with this short book, taking the reader into the life-and-death trials of one of Australia's last, and perhaps forgotten, explorers. I for one will be following this up by reading Giles' own works.

I've mentioned in another review that Dutton was one of the founders of Sun Books: he was a poet in his own right, and a big man in the Australian literary scene of the 60s and 70s (this book is dedicated to Randolph Stow). This book was published by another great little imprint emanating from Australia in the 70s - Seal Books. Somewhat in the same vein as Sun, but more concerned with Australian history and folklore, it was yet another imprint that helped Australia find out more about itself. I've been lucky enough to inherit quite a little collection of these titles....there will be more reviewed on this blog as time moves on.

Recommended.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The gold robbers by Celeste de Chabrillan

The gold robbers by Madame Celeste de Chabrillan, translated from the French by Lucy & Caroline Moorehead

Melbourne: Sun Books, 1970                                                          ISBN 0725101024

This is an interesting book on so many levels - as the first novel about the Victorian Gold Rush it is interesting on a historical level; given it was written by the wife of the French Consul to Melbourne it sheds an interesting light on Continental views of both the British and their colonial cousins in the mid 1800s, and the story itself is a rollicking read in the nature of the "penny dreadfuls" that started to appear at this time.

First, to the story. The Iwans family decide to emigrate to Australia as Dr. Iwans is struggling to provide for his family in England. The first section of the story describes the sea-voyage on the Marco Polo, where the Iwans family adopt baby Bijou, whose mother has died on the voyage. Upon arrival in Melbourne, Dr. Iwans is horrified at the high cost of living, and ends up in St. Kilda, which at that stage is a separate town from Melbourne itself. Eventually he manages to get a nice practice going, and when he helps the rich Mr. Fulton after a fall, Life begins to look good.

Mr. Fulton is an interesting character - very wealthy, a loner with a mysterious past. He falls for one of Iwans' daughers, Melida, who doesn't return his love. Meanwhile, Dr. Iwans is tending a young man by the name of Joanne, whom he nurses back to health.

Joanne's story now takes up the narrative - he left his native Belgium for Australia, and was robbed and assaulted by his travelling companion Max. Joanne makes his way to Ballarat, where he meets and falls in love with Louisa. Meanwhile Max has left prison and teamed up with another criminal called "The Cutter". They too make it to Ballarat, where they murder Joanne's friend for his gold dust, and begin a career doing the same to other miners in Ballarat. Eventually Joanne spies Max, who, with the Cutter, flees the town for Bendigo. Max then develops a plan to rob the gold escort, which he does with the Cutter, murdering most of the escort, and then killing the Cutter in cold blood so he doesn't have to share the money.

Joanne meanwhile has sent his fiancee to Melbourne as he was fearful of Max's vengeance. When he eventually arrives back in Melbourne with pockets full of gold, it is only to find that Louisa has died of fever. He sinks into despair, which is where Dr. Iwans comes in.

Then the big twist of the plot - Joanne sees Mr. Fulton, and realised that he is in fact Max. Max, realising the game is up, kidnaps Melida and tries to escape with her. She is eventually returned to her family, but has been "dishonoured" by Max. He, for the first time, realises that he is actually in love with Melida, and so cannot bring himself to leave Melbourne. He is eventually discovered and hanged for his crimes. Meanwhile, the Iwans and Joanne have decided to return to England. There is more tragedy on the way home, but once back in England life becomes better.

This book was praised by no less a personage than Dumas, and was quite successful in its day. The description of life in the colonies is irredeemably harsh, with only death and misfortune to be expected. The descriptions of both Melbourne and Ballarat are full of life and give the modern reader an insight into what life must have been like in these frontier towns at the height of the early gold rush, where everyone was armed to the teeth and death was around every corner. 

Celeste de Chabrillan may have written this novel with thoughts of vengeance in her mind. One of Paris' celebrated courtesans, she wrote of her life before marriage in a celebrated book, which had preceded her to Melbourne, which meant that she was never accepted into Melbourne 'society'. The gold robbers does not contain any high society types in it, and I'm sure Chabrillan was making the point that those that considered themselves such in Melbourne at the time were deceiving themselves.

This edition was published under the Sun Books imprimatur - my copy being one of the few early Sun Books left, in my experience, without a cracked binding and loose pages. Sun Books, created by Brian Stonier, Geoff Dutton and Max Harris, was one of the great little Australian publishers that existed in the glory years of publishing in this country, and is not mourned enough, in my opinion. They published both new books and ferreted out old stuff such as The gold robbers, and had it translated (by the wife and daughter of Alan Moorehead) and published in English for the first time. Hopefully we are seeing a renaissance of this type of promotion of literature by and to do with Australia in the Text Classics series.

If you have an interest in Australian history, the gold rush, or even if you just like a good melodrama, The gold diggers is worth hunting out.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell