Basing this fine novel about the settlement of Australia’s New South Wales on the real life and notebooks made by Lt. William Dawes from 1788 – 1790, author Kate Grenville subjects the empire-building attitudes of the Crown and its representatives to careful scrutiny and creates a novel filled with conflicts and well-developed themes. New South Wales was already inhabited by an aboriginal population which had its own language and culture when a thousand British officers and prisoners, both male and female, landed their eleven ships in Sydney Cove and took over land which had been the traditional homelands of the aborigines. Demonstrating the arrogance of conquerors, these officers and officials imposed their harsh “justice” upon anyone who challenged their will and their national “destiny.” Lt. Daniel Rooke is on the first ship that lands in New South Wales. Allowed to set up an astronomical observatory on a headland above the settlement, Rooke is happily alone with his instruments and calculations all week, climbing down to base for Sunday dinner and avoiding most of the daily conflicts at the settlement. Isolated from the settlement, he is respected by the aborigines, who visit him, but he also recognizes that he is in conflict with his peers at the most basic level. A well-developed novel which explores the human costs to both sides of colonial conquest.
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“Wanting” with its two meanings—“desire” and “lack”—forms the thematic underpinning of this novel, with intriguing plot lines and settings which move from the British penal colony of Van Dieman’s Land (now Tasmania), with its on-going battles to control, if not eliminate, the aborigines, to London’s highest levels of aristocratic and literary society. Famed explorer Sir John Franklin and his wife Jane, who represent the Crown in Van Dieman’s Land, share the stage with aborigine King Romeo, his wild and mysterious daughter Mathinna, an assortment of local workers and tradesmen, and eventually, with Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and even, on one occasion, the royal families of Europe. An unusual novel which shows the damaging effects of empire-building, on both the conquered and on the arrogant “conquerors,” Wanting makes the reader understand why the surviving aborigines ultimately believe “the world was not run by God but by the Devil.”
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Set on the remote southeast coast of Tasmania, the isolated island at the southernmost tip of Australia, Nicholas Shakespeare’s latest novel examines the hard-scrabble lives of Alex and Merridy Dove as they try to create satisfying lives, cope with traumatic childhood memories which have forever affected their sense of security, and ultimately decide that “We’d better start living. We’re dead an awfully long time.” Shakespeare, who lives in Tasmania for four months a year (and in England for the other eight months), creates a vibrant picture of life at Wellington Point, and of the connections the inhabitants forge with each other and with the land and the sea. Moving back and forth in time, the novel provides the individual backgrounds of all the characters, their courtships and love affairs, their hopes for the future, and their personal interests. The leisurely, domestic pace of the novel quickens with the arrival of Kish, a teenage orphan whom Alex and Merridy rescue from a ferocious storm at sea. Merridy and Alex give Kish a place to stay temporarily, along with a job, each of them trying to fit Kish into their memories of the past and their dreams for the future.
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Brucie Pike (“Pikelet”) relives his coming-of-age on the west coast of Australia in the 1960s and 1970s. A lonely boy leading a solitary life, he finds a companion, if not friend, in Ivan Loon (“Loonie”), with whom he shares his love of surfing. “How strange it was,” Pikelet remarks, “to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw and cared.” But the beauty of surfing quickly yields in importance to its excitement and its increasingly dangerous thrills. “There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears. We didn’t know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching,” Pikelet declares. In spare prose which uses some of the most vivid action verbs ever included in a novel, Winton tells an exciting story which makes the seductive thrills of surfing comprehensible to the non-surfer. Pikelet, Loonie, and Sando clearly reveal who they are as humans—within the surfing milieu and within their private lives.
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Set in Australia’s bleak outback, this 2002 film takes place in 1931, when white bureaucrats forced their own morality on aboriginal half-castes living in the bush. Believing that these half-white children “deserved” the “advantages” of “civilization,” and convinced that in three generations their blackness could be “bred out,” the Australian government forcibly removed them from their families, brought them to settlements hundreds of miles from their homes, and trained them to be domestic servants. Forty years later the government finally abandoned the policy, leaving a “Stolen Generation” in its wake. Molly Craig has long been the symbol of the Aborigines’ refusal to accept this genocidal policy, and this film, brilliantly directed by Philip Noyce, celebrates her unconquerable spirit in the face of sanctioned governmental cruelty.
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