All about Aussies
Plaudits have come in the form of two Miles Franklin awards, probably Australia’s highest literary honour, as well as for short-listings for the Booker Prize, winning in 1982 for his most famous and acclaimed novel, Shindler’s Ark, that stirring, stunning piece of work that was, with a slight tweak of its title, made into the Oscar-winning Steven Spielberg film, Schindler’s List.
Keneally is a man of many talents and he has enjoyed a second, parallel career in non-fiction. This work is overshadowed, perhaps, by his fiction, but Keneally has received frequent acknowledgement as a sharp and erudite essayist and a passionate historian. He seems ideally suited to tackling a project with ambitions to recount nothing less than the geographical, political and cultural shaping of an entire continent. The result of this is Australians: Origins to Eureka.
We join the story at the literal beginning, 45m years ago, when Australia broke from Gondwana, the great southern super-continent, and first came into being as an individual and recognisable entity. What follows next is a chase through prehistoric time.
We are treated to a ‘guesstimated’ recounting of the first settlers, who crossed from southeast Asia somewhere in the dark gulf of 60-30,000 BP (before present), and led on towards the discovery of this great landmass by the west, the Dutch initially showing the way through a series of voyages by men like Willem Jansz and Abel Tasman, followed by more thorough and definitive explorations by the British, most notably those of pirate/privateer William Dampier and, later still, James Cook.
Some 600 pages later, we reach the Eureka moment, the carnage that ensued from a police and military raid on a goldmining stockade at the Victorian town of Ballarat in December 1854, one that in its sad, bloody way stirred awake a strong sense of social justice and which played a major part in shaping Australia’s future. In the roughly quarter of a millennia between, we are treated to, and repulsed by, relentless tales of Aborigine slaughter, transportation, starvation, corruption, land-grabbing, the influx of famine-fleeing Irish, adventure, the stirrings of rebellious hearts and even the occasional triumph. From origins to eureka, it is a heady and often overwhelming journey.
The read is an enlightening one. The Aborigines were viewed from the beginning as savages and treated accordingly, their lives worth nothing, their ways worth even less. Seal-skinners and bushrangers, reduced to near savagery themselves either by circumstance or convenience, often abducted Aboriginal women and bludgeoned them into obedience.
The bushranger James Carrot, for instance, forced his paramour to walk in front of him, wearing her murdered husband’s head around her neck. The Aborigines’ story abounds with the infliction of venereal diseases and near-obliteration through smallpox, as well as occurrences of spearing, floggings, atrocities committed on entire tribes and the inevitable revenge attacks on lonely outposts.
Not that the convict class fared greatly better. Conceived as a way of easing the strain on Britain’s seam-splitting prison system, families were torn asunder as men and women, guilty of what seems now the merest slights, were hauled on board ships. Countless numbers died during the tortuous voyage; those who survived suffered some of the worst and most depraved conditions imaginable.
The women’s ships were particularly bad, the most desperate of them seen as floating brothels. And those prisoners who did survive found a new world hungry only for their toil. The convict class existed as little more than slave labour. Many were transported for petty crimes, such as stealing clothes or poaching, yet the punishment was so severe that treachery, theft and violence became inevitable.
Meanwhile, the upper class, those of so-called gentlemanly stock who had been granted vast stretches of land in the new country, seemed above the law.
Inevitably, we are presented with an immense cast. Keneally is particularly gifted at bringing them to life, though, too often, such life tends to be all too fleeting. People appear and then, within a page or two, are gone. Their stories linger on, but they leave us unfulfilled. This is particularly frustrating whenever we are presented with a real find, some character who intrigues as more than just a name on a page.
Certainly, it feels as if more could have been made of the Irishman George Barrington, prince of the pickpockets and “a brand name of crime, like Jesse James, Ned Kelly, Dick Turpin or Al Capone”. Or the enigmatic native, Bennelong, by turns ingratiating and treacherous, who had such a passion for women, and who coerced Governor Phillip into building him, as a gesture of appeasement, a brick house on Tubowgulle, the eastern point of Sydney Cove and on the very spot were Sydney Opera House stands today.
Or even the pregnant emigrant Sarah Davenport who was sitting in her berth with her infant son, Albert, on her knee when a girl, coming down from an above deck, stumbled and spilt hot gruel on the child, scalding him to death. The shock of the loss brought on premature labour in Sarah; in one day, she had fed two children to the waves. Such grief would crush a lesser spirit, but somehow she found the strength to go on, to raise a family, and grow old along the Murray river. And these are merely three examples among dozens.
There is a great deal to admire, just as there is much to frustrate. Kenneally is undeniably skilful. His style is clean and swift and never impedes the narrative flow of the text. He uses all his novelistic flair to flesh out even brief scenes in a vivid way. Alas, the devil here is in the detail. Moments of genuine enlightenment aside, a history book demands the kind of minute factuality that can, at times, turn the story a little leaden for the casual reader.
With Australians: Origins to Eureka, volume one of what will probably stand as a three-volume set, the writer has set himself a truly gargantuan task. It is a large book, packed with dense text, but the subject matter itself is even bigger. Not merely is he attempting to recount the entire history of a nation, in all its raging glory, he is actually trying to capture in ink some essence of a country’s and a people’s collective soul. But while, in the final analysis, this book is unlikely to stand as the definitive word on Australia’s short and storied past, that he should even come close to succeeding at all is a fact impressive almost beyond measure.
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