Book review: The Great Race
FIRST published in Australia in 2012, and subtitled ‘the race between the English and the French to complete the map of Australia’, the thought that first goes through the mind is whether this non-fiction book might be a semi-factualisation of one of CS Forester’s seafaring novels.
Australian author, David Hill, has other ideas, however. Whatever derring-do is here (and there’s a lot) is derived not from dashing tales of fictional Royal Navy officers like Horatio Hornblower but from real life 18th century adventurers such as Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicholas Baudin.
