Establishing Australia’s first British colonyBotany Bay, a natural harbor on the southeastern coast of Australia, was discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770. When Britain decided to colonize Australia, Botany Bay was judged the most promising location to establish a settlement. In 1787, a fleet of 11 ships set out from England to do just that. With several hundred convicts on board to serve as settlers of the new colony, the ships arrived in Botany Bay in January of 1788. Finding the land too swampy for settlement, however, the expedition opted instead for another harbor nearby, Port Jackson. The settlement they established there would eventually become the city of Sydney. Watkin Tench was an officer on one of the vessels in this company of ships (now known as the First Fleet). Prior to departure, Tench made a deal with a London publishing firm to write an account of the voyage. His memoir was published in 1789 as Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay.
Tench begins his narrative with the embarkation of the convicts in England. It isn’t until almost halfway through the book that the ships arrive at Australia. Along the way, Tench discusses stops the fleet made at Teneriffe (in the Canary Islands), Rio de Janeiro, and the Cape of Good Hope. These chapters mostly consist of information that would be valuable to mariners, such as geographic coordinates and the availability of supplies and fresh water. Tench also describes the conditions on board ship and the dangers of transporting prisoners, but in general he has nothing but good things to say about the behavior of the convicts. Because of Australia’s unique status as a prison colony, Tench delves into some of the legal and penal codes that applied to the settlement’s convict colonists. It seems like just about every infraction, major or minor, was punishable by death. For the most part, however, the convicts seemed pleased with their second chance at life and worked hard to create a new home amid the hardships of wilderness.
Tench describes the land, climate, wildlife, and agricultural prospects of the Australian terrain. His prose has the no-nonsense style of a military report, but there is also a tone of disappointment and disgust that runs throughout. Tench seems to regret his mission to this godforsaken place and doesn’t express much hope for those required to settle there. He also grumbles about the lack of governmental support of the expedition and the colony. In describing the land’s natural attributes, Tench often has to apologize for his own ignorance, since the British government didn’t see fit to send any scientists along on the mission. As a makeshift naturalist, however, Tench does express some admiration for the beautiful birds and plants of Australia, and he finds much of interest to say about the kangaroo. Tench readily admits that he doesn’t know much about the aborigines, who mostly kept their distance from the colonists. From his few encounters with the natives, Tench makes it clear thhe finds them physically repulsive. In general, however, he finds their behavior neither hostile nor amiable, simply aloof
Tench’s Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay only covers the first few months of the Australian colony. He would later follow it up with a second book, the Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson. For anyone interested in Australian history, Tench’s books are a must-read, but compared to other expedition narratives, like those of Captain Cook for example, Tench’s Narrative is not very exciting and only moderately informative.
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Exasperating romance in the Australian bushOriginally published in 1901, My Brilliant Career is the debut novel of Australian author Miles Franklin, who despite the male-sounding name is actually a woman. The novel is narrated in the first person by Sybilla Melvyn, a teenage girl who, like Franklin, grew up on a farm in New South Wales and dreams of being a writer. Franklin, in fact, was only a teenager when she wrote the novel and was about 21 when it was published. My Brilliant Career is one of the most popular works of Australian literature from the Victorian Era. From an American perspective, I would imagine that the novel occupies a similar position in the Australian canon as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women holds in American culture. Both books make proto-feminist assertions of feminine independence, but My Brilliant Career also contains nationalist sentiments that probably make it even more beloved to Australian readers.
The pleasant surprise of My Brilliant Career is that the title is meant to be ironic. The reader soon finds that Sybilla’s career is in fact far from brilliant. This isn’t one of those rural regionalist novels that gushes about what a wholesome joy it is to grow up on a farm in the boondocks. Sybilla makes it clear just how hard of a life a farm girl had to endure in the Australian bush, particularly when born into a poor family. She expresses a genuine loathing for her surroundings, her daily duties, and even to members of her own family. Her father is a drunkard; her mother a shrew. Dad’s ill-conceived business dealings keep the family in perpetual debt. The antipathy that Sybilla expresses towards rural life is a refreshing change from typically idyllic depictions of bucolic life in Victorian literature. Even more surprising, Sybilla is a confirmed atheist who doesn’t hesitate to foist her godless views upon the reader. Such a heretical heroine would be almost unheard of in British fiction of the era.
These promisingly unique aspects of My Brilliant Career make it all the more disappointing when, after the first few chapters, the story veers into yet another conventional Victorian romance. Every bachelor who meets Sybilla immediately wants to marry her. By her seventeenth birthday, she has already had no less than five suitors striving for her hand. Despite constant assertions of her own ugliness, Sybilla is arrogant enough to vehemently reject her admirers. Although the reader is no doubt supposed to admire her self-reliance, she really comes across as unnecessarily rude and unpleasant. The one contender who seems to win the matrimonial lotto doesn’t get off any better than his rivals. While an independent spirit is a commendable quality in a young woman, there’s nothing to admire about the way she strings this poor guy along, plays mind games with him, and at one point even physically assaults him. In the Victorian age it was a point of honor for a gentleman to put up with all manor of unreasonable behavior from the woman he loved, when really he should have just spotted the red flags, turned around, and walked the other way. The conclusion to this miserable courtship is unforgivably predictable.
The novel closes with an epilogue that shares the pessimistic and cynical tone of its initial chapters. Such wry passages are the most refreshingly charming aspect of the book, but the romance was quite off-putting. Franklin doesn’t seem to recognize that spunkiness, male or female, doesn’t have to mean conceited, uncivil, and spiteful. My Brilliant Career does, however, provide a colorful inside look at life in the Australian bush. Perhaps that’s why Aussies love the book so.
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A barrage of interesting minutiae lacking coherence
Australian author Stuart Kells’s 2017 book The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders is not quite the history of libraries it promises to be. Though it contains a lot of historical information on some libraries of the author’s choosing, the definition of library is about as broad as it could possibly be. Arranged neither chronologically nor strictly thematically, The Library is a haphazard collection of anecdotes, data, and historical trivia on libraries, bookmaking, writers, readers, and just about anything else related in any way to books. Within this very broad range of subject matter, Kells throws in just about anything that strikes his fancy. If you are a lover of books and libraries, there is plenty of interesting content here, but the presentation leaves a lot to be desired.
In the book’s preface, Kells reveals that he is a collector of rare books, which explains why this really is a book about book collecting more than it is a book about libraries. Most of the libraries Kells discusses in the book are private collections, not public institutions. He expresses his admiration for illustrious book collectors of the past and envies their shrewd purchases and acquisitive luck. Many of these great collectors of centuries gone by were clergymen, so there is quite a bit of coverage of monastic libraries as well. Most of Kells’s bibliographic interests seem to fall prior to 1800, though he does cover a few more recently founded institutions such as the Morgan Library and the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale.
Some chapters tell a single story in exhaustive detail while others are just a hodgepodge of loosely related bits and pieces. A chapter on library fires, for example, is just a string of one-paragraph summaries of different libraries that burned, without any discernible organization to their sequence. Some chapters drift farther afield, as when Kells makes the case that the traditional oral histories of Australian aborigines constitute a library. In another chapter he discusses fictional libraries in the works of Umberto Eco and J. R. R. Tolkien. There are some good chapters on papermaking, printing, and binding, but again, that’s more about bookmaking and collecting than about libraries. One gets the idea that Kells is far more interested in the physical packaging of books than the actual content of them. Books are objects to be owned, not knowledge to be used. Only one chapter really deals with issues of public or academic libraries today, and Kells uses it to assert the inferiorities of digitized texts when compared to the heft and smell of old tomes.
Though Kells often ventures off into irrelevant asides, many of the stories are fascinating, and the book is packed with interesting information. It’s all delivered with such a lack of structure and organization, however, that it is difficult to remember anything from this verbal quagmire. Kells seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of these subjects, but without any notes or bibliographical references there’s no way to gauge the truth or accuracy of any of the data. I don’t know about the print edition, but the ebook has zero illustrations, which is a shame. It is only natural that after reading about these wonderful libraries and beautiful bindings readers would want to see some photographs of them, but no such luck.
Perhaps I would have had a more positive opinion of this book if it had been titled more accurately. The Library is worth a read, but its constant barrage of tangentially related factoids is also a frustrating mess, somewhat like a book composed entirely of footnotes. Readers who really love libraries and old books will likely find it equal parts delightful and disappointing.
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