Dark Emu

Every Australian should read Dark Emu, Black Seeds: agriculture or accident? At the very least, this mind-blowing book should be on the compulsory reading list for all secondary schools. It overturns all of our ignorant assumptions about pre-colonial times in Australia.

The book has received an overwhelmingly positive response on the Goodreads website, with a very high average rating of 4.5 out of 5, far in excess of most other books on this site. Nearly everyone leaving a comment agrees that this well-written, easy-to-read and relatively short book is essential reading for all Australians.

I was privileged to hear the author, Dr Bruce Pascoe, speak at the Melbourne Writers' Festival a few months ago. His emotion was obvious when he referred to archaeologists discovering grindstones proving that the Australian aborigine was grinding seeds more than 30,000 years ago. Being the first bakers of bread is an accolade usually given to the Egyptians around 17,000 BC. But as Pascoe says in his book, it was the Australian aborigines who were ‘the bakers of antiquity. Why don’t our hearts fill with wonder and pride?’ (Read more in the article The world's first baker: Australian indigenous innovation.)

As Pascoe spoke, I wondered whether our community’s entrenched views of Aborigines could be blamed on the first European settlement being beside Sydney Harbour, a heavily-wooded area on thin soils. It was not farming country, as the incoming settlers soon discovered. With sandstone caves providing a natural shelter for the indigenous population there was little need for housing structures. Many of the First Fleet journal keepers referred to the nakedness of the natives, but we forget that the incoming Europeans arrived at the height of summer, a time of year when many of today’s citizens of Sydney would wear no clothes, if they could get away with it. The first but false impression that the Aborigines were hunter-gatherers took firm hold.

Bruce Pascoe is from Victoria but well aware that Captain John Hunter reported in 1788 that ‘the people around Sydney were dependent on their yam gardens’. The word ‘garden’ is telling, its significant implication of permanent settlement having been ignored. Yams, a highly-nutritious form of sweet potato, were cultivated by a resident tribe, not gathered by wandering tribes. And, as Pascoe pointed out, the cattle imported in 1788 had escaped to the Camden region, where they prospered on these yam gardens until 1795, when exploring parties came across the escapee cattle, in prime condition. The area was promptly named as the Cowpastures.

After 1788 it took decades before European explorers found a way across the Blue Mountains and discovered that Aborigines lived in villages and towns and, aside from their yam gardens, they cared for a grain belt across most of inland Australia. His amazing map of this grain belt is produced in the article The world's first baker: Australian indigenous innovation. Today we heard news from the Flinders Ranges that shifted back by 10,000 years our knowledge of Aboriginal occupation of arid inland Australia, to 49,000 years ago. They possessed amazing technologies much earlier than we thought.

The back cover of Bruce Pascoe's book quotes him as saying "If we look at the evidence presented to us by the explorers and explain to our children that Aboriginal people did build houses, did build dams, did sow, irrigate and till the land, did alter the course of rivers, did sew their clothes, and did construct a system of pan-continental government that generated peace and prosperity, then it is likely we will admire and love our land all the more.'

Now that I’ve read Bruce Pascoe’s book I fully accept the startling truths he espouses. The full range of his evidence is presented in chapters headed 'Agriculture', 'Aquaculture', 'Population and Housing', 'Storage and Preservation', 'Fire', 'The Heavens, Language and the Law', 'Australian Agricultural Revolution'.

But it was his closing chapter, 'Accepting History and Creating the Future', which really made me think. I’m sometimes irritated by the strident calls that we should change the day we celebrate as Australia Day because it was ‘Invasion Day’. From my perspective, Australia was always going to be invaded by someone. While the Aboriginal tribes had their own territorial boundaries they were not organised as a group to defend this large continent, whereas all other human societies fought strongly to protect territorial interests. Aborigines just weren't aggressive enough. It never occurred to me, until I read this book, that the age-old Aboriginal society might have evolved to a level of enlightened self-interest, mutual co-operation and steady-state economic welfare operating on a higher plane than existed elsewhere on this planet. In a way, the Aborigines were psychologically unprepared for people who did not play by their advanced rules.

The old ways of Aboriginal society tantalise us with a vision for a different more sustainable future for the world. Thus one of Pascoe’s closing remarks resonated with me: ‘It seems improbable that a country can continue to hide from the actuality of its history in order to validate that fact that having said sorry we refuse to say thanks’.

I tried to see both sides of the settlement story when writing Robert Forrester, First Fleeter but the need to revise the book in the light of Pascoe’s insights has taken on a new urgency. A Second Edition will also include other research which has come to light in the eight years since the Forrester book first went to print. For example, it will consider another interpretation of the 1783 scam; it will correct reference to the non-existent orgy in February 1788; it will show the true position of Robert's 1794 land grant; and it will review new research into his involvement in the Frontier War with the Aborigines pre-1800.

Legacy of Andrew Goodwin & Lydia Munro

Books about Australia’s earliest days of European settlement are becoming thick on the shelves, so it’s rewarding to find one containing a new angle on the accepted version of events.

The Legacy of Andrew Goodwin & Lydia Munro by Patricia Kennedy corrected my understanding of the supposed foundation 'orgy story' of 6 February 1788 and, after meeting the author at an event in Melbourne in May 2016, I wrote a blog post about it. On pages 22-25 of Patricia’s book, the conventional views about Lydia Munro and her rape charge against William Boggis in September 1788 are also challenged, if briefly.

Writing family history is perhaps the most difficult genre for any writer to tackle. In part this is because its story line usually does not begin with a coherent overview but emerges in bits and pieces, as research progresses. Then comes the challenge of deciding on a meaningful structure. Patricia has settled on the structure I used in 2008 when writing about my Dennis forebears from Cornwall, this being to start with the founding couple, move to a chapter on all of their children and then select the child of personal interest to the author and repeat this process down through the generations.  This approach somewhat limits the eventual ‘market’ for the book, but works if the opening chapters appeal to all descendants of the founding couple.

This book should please all Goodwin descendants, as a lengthy chapter covers the Goodwins’ nine children, the first born in Sydney in 1789 and the others born on Norfolk Island. With only two sons and seven daughters, the Goodwin surname, with any number of spelling variations, struggles to survive in subsequent generations. Patricia, researching her husband John’s family, chose to follow the Goodwins’ second child Sarah, born on Norfolk Island in 1791, and then the line Sarah and her husband Benjamin Briscoe created through their son William Briscoe.

The book interested me because my own forebear Robert Forrester came with Andrew Goodwin on the First Fleet vessel Scarborough, and also went to Norfolk Island, but returned to Sydney after 18 months. This meant that my knowledge of the settlers’ enforced move after 1807, from Norfolk Island to the newly-established settlement around Hobart in Van Diemens Land (Tasmania), was rather sketchy.  It was helpful for me to read Patricia’s summary of Collins’ attempt to settle Port Phillip Bay at Sorrento in 1803 and the change of plans dictated by the lack of its supply of fresh water, with Collins moving south to ‘create’ Hobart.

The Goodwin family’s adventures in Tasmania then become a series of ‘Days of Our Lives’ cameos, with multiple marriages, name changes, some divorces, children born to different or unknown fathers, most of whom were fresh convicts arriving from England, activities on the wrong side of the law, drinking problems and stories of gritty, often long-lived women making their choices and enduring everything that life could throw at them. Tracking all of these events through the various name changes was clearly challenging and quite an undertaking.

Should there ever be a Second Edition, some of the detail in the Family Charts, so valuable to readers in following any family history, needs to be slightly amended. While the correct names are there, dates and places do not always match the written text.

Patricia describes her genealogical credentials on the inside back cover of her book, which fulfils all of the requirements for the Alexander Henderson Award offered by the Australian Institute of Genealogical Studies. It contains a ‘pre-Australia’ chapter on Andrew’s and Lydia’s lives in England, a clear table of contents, family charts, some interesting illustrations,  eight pages of appendices, a five page bibliography, twelve pages of endnotes and a seven page index. 

The research effort involved, its cost and the time expended is not for everyone, and descendants of Andrew Goodwin & Lydia Munro should be very grateful for Patricia’s hard work and the clear presentation in her book.

Crossing the Blue Mountains

You don't have to be present at the celebrations to appreciate the significance of this year's bi-centenary of the crossing of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth in the year 1813.

Simply reading about this expedition, and later crossings, makes it possible to refresh one's understanding of the huge impact on Australian history when this natural barrier was breached. Australia's vast interior was opened up and the pastoral industry began. Australia rode on the sheep's back for the next 150 years or so.

I've just refreshed my memory by reading Crossing the Blue Mountains, Journeys Through Two Centuries, by David Foster and Michael Duffy, (Duffy and Snellgrove, Potts Point NSW, 1997). For someone like me, raised in Sydney, with Blue Mountains memories stretching back to my earliest childhood, and primary school projects about the Australian wool industry still stashed somewhere in my house, the book was a fascinating read, a page-turner.

As my friend Shirley Evans has pointed out, the book relies heavily on popularising ten stories from another academic book, Fourteen Journeys over the Blue Mountains of New South Wales 1813-1841, by George Mackaness. I particularly enjoyed the tales by Elizabeth Hawkins and Sophia Stanger, who astonishingly cared for numerous children en route, and the description by Charles Darwin of his journey. His observant, scientific mind was much in evidence.

In the interests of context, I wish I'd read this book before writing my three books about convicts living at the Hawkesbury. Robert Forrester, his friend Paul Bushell and son-in-law Charles Martin never got further than the lower slopes of the heavily-forested hills almost adjoining their farms.

The stories in the book highlight the physical and psychological nature of the barrier - how a range of blue hills less than 4,000 feet high proved such an obstacle - and how the spectacular and baffling terrain still cannot be taken for granted. The journey struck fear into everyone who undertook it prior to the gold rush. Men, women and children suffered privations during 'the crossing', achieved in several stages over three days. Horses and bullocks often could not take another step and had sit-down strikes, while many animals died along the way, given the lack of pasture and fresh water.

Disappointingly, the book contains no account of the trail-blazing journey by Archibald Bell and his aboriginal guides in 1823, establishing the alternate route across the mountains via Kurrajong - Bell's Line of Road. This information would have been invaluable for my book Southwark Luck - because its main character Charles Homer Martin was a sawyer at Kurrajong and had a minor involvement with clearing part of the first track.

Chapter 11 about the Wollemi Pine took me into my sister Jennifer's world, as one of her university friends was Wyn Jones and her former husband Peter Prineas wrote the book Colo Wilderness. I was recently reminded of the original anxiety over the survival of the Wollemi pine when I was charged with the care of a Wollemi pine while house-sitting for a friend in Sydney. The pines are commercially-available now, but still precious.

As a keen walker, but never much of a bushwalker, I was chuffed to be reminded in Chapter 12 of my walks in the Blue Mountains in the 1960s. Particularly memorable was a walk along Narrow Neck and that incredibly scary climb down the cliff face at Taros Ladder, en route to the Ruined Castle. Conquering my fear took a huge effort. Chapter 12's exposition of the nature and benefits of wilderness was convincing, but it reinforced why I never took to bushwalking - the discomforts, the sunburn, the food, the embarrassing toilet arrangements.

All of my Blue Mountains memories feature risk and danger, beginning long before those steel pegs on Taros Ladder. When I was three years old my poor mother was coping with myself, two younger sisters and my father, all of us recovering from whooping cough. The doctor advised a rest cure. At Leura in the winter of 1949 we took a holiday cottage, heated only by one open fire. Intending to be helpful, I pushed the clothes-horse closer to the fire, it tipped over and the family washing went up in flames. Money was scarce and this was a devastating blow for my poor mother. The mountains instantly became a scary place for me.

Fast forward a few years, and I recall the adventurous car trips getting to and from the dusty car races at Bathurst in the early 1950s. We jammed together in a roadster with no seat belts (of course) and a canvas hood. No worries about those bushfires visible from the road - we carried water bottles to douse any inconvenient sparks landing on the canvas roof. Today, in such conditions, the road would be closed to traffic.

Later came the family holidays in a rented cottage next door to two spinster sisters, friends of my grandmother's, who lived beside the golf course at Leura. We dodged the flying golf balls.

The trips across the mountains back to Sydney every month when I lived at Dubbo in the later 1960s were hazardous night-time drives. The road is far less dangerous now, on my journeys to visit my sister Jennifer at her home near Bathurst, but the Victoria Pass descent down to Hartley Vale is as mind-blowing today as it ever was.

And the Blue Mountains remain scary for reasons other than the terrain: the vegetation. As indefatigable bushwalker David Foster wrote on page 212 of this book: Eucalypts are astounding trees. Botanists can’t keep up with them, so rapidly are they evolving. They hybridise freely and are always being reclassified, shining their blue laser beams on the fault lines of Linnaean taxonomy. They are the shocktroops of a warming planet because they like firestorms, which civilized people don’t. And the Blue Mountains is as good a place as any to make the acquaintance of these strange creatures, to get to feel their qualities, their variety. I never feel I possess them, or they me. I hardly dare divine their purposes. Their spirit, their genius, has yet to speak to me. I find them very dangerous.

The traditional view of the Blue Mountains embraces the area surrounding the Great Western Highway and Bell's Line of Road. I believe that the actual area of the Blue Mountains is now regarded as stretching from the Broken Back Range of the Hunter River Valley southwards to an area just north of Goulburn. The book's introduction does provide this definition, but it's easy to miss the few references within the text.

It's even harder to spot the distinction between crossing the Blue Mountains and crossing the Great Divide. The latter is the point beyond Lithgow, at Mount Lambie near Wallerawang, where the rivers such as Cox's River cease flowing eastwards to the coast and begin, like the Fish River to flow westwards into the Macquarie River and onwards to the dry interior.

The book contains a few explanatory maps, and colour photographs of some pertinent geographic features. For a modern reader, more enjoyment would be derived from this book with a greater use of square brackets after the old place names, giving today's geographic name. Alternatively, an increased use of maps, showing all the place names and not just a selection, would help readers trying to retrace these remarkable journeys in their imagination. Nevertheless, the book is a worthwhile read for any history buff.

'A First Fleet Family', by Louis Becke & Walter Jeffery

I've just read this page-turner at one sitting, when I should have been attending to other matters. It was marvellous to turn the pages of this dusty little first edition of 1896, lent to me by a collector.

It set me thinking – did William Dew really keep the journal mentioned in the book’s preface? A quick Google search located countless references to the book, and a more specific search named Dew as a member of Watkin Tench’s company of First Fleet marines. But my catalogue search found nothing to corroborate the existence of Dew’s papers in the National Library of Australia, the Mitchell Library, State Records NSW, the British Library and the Public Record Office at Kew in England – all were silent on the matter. If Dew’s papers exist, where are they? I'd love to know.

With no joy in that direction, I then looked for a review of the book. Thanks to that marvellous Trove website, I found the following:

From Unwin's Colonial Library we have "A First Fleet Family," by Louis Becke and Walter Jeffrey. The book professes to be compiled from the papers of Sergeant William Dew, of the Marines, who accompanied the first vessel despatched for Botany Bay with convicts for passengers. As a story it may be said at once that love plays a strong part throughout, but suffering is the main theme. Yet the interest is sustained from preface to finish.

The review then published long excerpts from the book’s preface before concluding:

With such an introduction the book becomes interesting at once. It is written in the first person, and Sergeant Dew's story bears the impress of actual experience. One gets an idea of the first landing in Port Jackson such as does not come from the reading of historical records in the rough, while the life story of Will Bryant and Mary Broad gives point to the extract we have given from the editor's introduction. We can heartily commend "A First Fleet Family" to the perusal of everybody who takes an interest in the early days, while the inveterate novel reader will not be disappointed of the excitement his soul loves. (Brisbane Courier, Mon 15 Feb 1897, p 6, col d)

It all became clear – this is purely a novel, a romance novel, most of its plot cleverly woven around events involving the Royal Marines during their period of attachment to the First Fleet’s expedition to New South Wales, 1787-1791. Further enlightenment was offered by the following newspaper item:

Mr. Louis Becke, in collaboration with Mr. Walter Jeffery, has been the first to utilize real Australian history for the purposes of romance— paradoxical as that may seem. The authors have been satisfied to take circumstances as they occurred, without even the assignment of fictitious names, dates, and places. The conversation and detailed action set out by them may not have actually occurred, but they are perfectly natural. In the volume entitled 'A First Fleet Family' is given an attractive and apparently faithful account of the deportation to New South Wales of the first batch of convicts, and of their treatment and experiences in that colony; but much of the book is devoted to the story of the wonderful voyage in an open boat of Will Bryant, his wife, their child, and some companion fugitives from Sydney to Coupang, in the Dutch East Indies. That perilous adventure is well known to students of Australian history, and the authors recognised that there was no necessity to throw over it any glamour of imaginative fiction. It held in itself all the essentials of a simple and pathetic story. (South Australian Register, Saturday 14 January 1899, p 4, col g)

During my quick read I'd noticed, but forgiven, certain discrepancies between my own understanding of Sydney's early history and what was in the book. These misgivings were confirmed when I found a description of the book as ‘a narrative novel’, which ‘contains much embellishment of the story of Bryant's boat voyage and that is not history’. (Sydney Morning Herald, Fri 5 Sep 1947, p 16, col d)

Like Kate Grenville's recent novels, it may not be pure 'history' but this book offers just as gripping a read, using the creativity of story-telling to bring Sydney's early history to life. Becke and Jeffery wrote this important book as the nineteenth century’s reading public digested Marcus Clarke's novel For the Term of His Natural Life, wherein the convicts were the victims and the officials were the villains:

To most thoughtful minds "A First Fleet family" will come like a breadth of sunshine after Marcus Clarke's "His Natural Life"; and its value will be found in giving the round of truth of which Clarke's story was but the half. (The Queenslander, Sat 28 Oct 1899, p 855, col d)

Becke and Jeffery's book presented a different image, of everyone struggling to survive and everyone suffering, and pointed to the lack of recognition given to Governor Phillip's regime:

It may appear strange to English readers that while there is more than one statue of Cook in Sydney, it is scarcely known to the majority of the Australian people that Phillip was the man who founded their country and that Cook was never inside the Heads of Port Jackson

The school histories of the colony are beneath notice, and the few men who have written anything of the country's early days, such as Bonwick, Bennett, and Barton, are never read. It is safe to say that not one man in a thousand has the remotest idea of the early history of New South Wales, beyond the fact that a number of convicts were transported there something over a hundred years ago. Great injustice has been done to the early founders of the Colony, by forgetting them; greater injustice still is too often done to them when they are remembered.

For what has hitherto been written and read about the very early days has been, with few exceptions, stories depicting the cruelties of the punishments inflicted upon the convicts. The felons have always been the heroes and the authorities the villains of the piece. Nearly everyone who has written has followed the lead of Marcus Clarke.

The results that his powerful novel, and true enough picture of one side of the case – His Natural Life - has been the only point of view most readers are acquainted with. As a consequence, the men have been mistakenly blamed for the errors of the system, and no allowance has been made for the times in which the events described took place.

A maudlin sympathy with the convicts has become the only impression too many people have of the times; they have no thought for such men as Phillip and King, whose great hearts conquered the prejudices of their times and strove to look upon their duties as less those of gaolers than reformers.(Brisbane Courier, Mon 15 Feb 1897, p 6, col d)

To my mind, more than a century after Becke and Jeffery wrote their book, we still fail to give due recognition to Governor Phillip. We need to reverse this neglect of his sterling character and his amazing achievements against incredible odds.

Thunderbolt

The fascinating character and exploits of the gentleman bushranger Fred Ward, a.k.a. Thunderbolt, born at the Hawkesbury in 1836, have been the subject of many books. Carol Baxter's recent offering Captain Thunderbolt & His Lady, the true story of Frederick Ward & Mary Ann Bugg is a very readable version of the story.

Carol is an excellent researcher, but the mass of detailed historical material about Thunderbolt is a challenge to anyone, and she missed the snippets about his exciting life which are included in my recent book Southwark Luck.

The 1868 timeline on Carol's interesting website thunderboltbushranger.com.au suggests that the 'Whitefoot' anecdote on pages 245-6 of my book could well be true, even if the 'sly grog shop' part of the 1863 escape story was purely a family legend. Theft of the horse 'Whitefoot' was never reported to the police (therefore it does not appear on Carol's website listing primary sources), but Thunderbolt was active in the Bingara/Warialda areas during parts of 1868 and reference to his hideout on Gravesend Station is credible. In 1868 Gravesend Station was being managed by Ann Forrester's eldest son Charles Robert Martin, who was a few years younger than Thunderbolt.

Charles was a much younger cousin of George Forrester, who was a squatter at Narran Lakes and on the Barwon River by the 1850s. By May 1868 George was regarded by disapproving officialdom as a harbourer of Thunderbolt - as briefly mentioned on page 310 of Southwark Luck (with fuller details to appear in my proposed book about George Forrester, still in early draft form).