Book Review: DK Atlas of Exploration

This book is a disappointment.

I borrowed the DK Atlas of Exploration from the library for my Year 3 and 4 students whose project this term is to identify the best (most useful) books for finding out about Explorers of Australia.  (I will upload this new Australian Curriculum History unit later this year when I’ve finished teaching it and have tidied it up).

Like most books of its type, Atlas of Exploration is meant only to be a general overview and students can’t expect to find a great deal of detail about an area of interest.  Even though we might expect that the exploration of the last continent might be considered rather important to the rest of the world, Australians are used to being a bit of an afterthought in non-fiction texts published in America or the UK.  If there’s a page or two acknowledging our part of the world that’s about the best we can hope for, even in a book that purports to follow the world’s great explorers.

However, when it came to checking out the interactive CD-ROM, even these low level expectations weren’t met.  There are icons to click so that students can follow the voyages of various explorers – but not one of them is an explorer who came to Australia.

Don’t waste your money.

Title: DK Atlas of Exploration
Publisher: DK (Dorling Kindersley) 2008
ISBN: 9781405322089
Source: Kingston Library.

Book Review: Curious Minds, The Discoveries of Australian Naturalists, by Peter Macinnis

Curious Minds, by Peter Macinnis, is a lovely book.  I stumbled across it when I was at the library picking up a book I’d reserved (Simone Lazaroo’s (2006) The Travel Writer) and I’ve been reading it on and off over the weekend.

Australians often forget just how odd our flora and fauna seem to Europeans.  That Wallace Line which defines the boundary between our fauna and what’s in the rest of the world was only recognised in 1859, but long before that travellers’ tales were full of strange rats, greyhounds that hopped (i.e. kangaroos), swans that were black in defiance of Aristotle*, and double-ended reptiles.  Curious Minds is the story of the naturalists who came to our shores and began to identify and classify our strange animals.  It’s fascinating reading.

Dugong (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

It starts with my favourite ‘pyrate’ and his ‘hippototomus’.  William Dampier (subject of Dampier’s Monkey by Adrian Mitchell) visited Australia twice in the 17th century, and most importantly for science, wrote a book about his travels afterwards.  In A Voyage to New Holland (1699) he wrote about a massive shark that his men captured, which had in its mouth an animal still seen only rarely today :

Its maw was like a Leather Sack, very thick, and so tough that a sharp knife could scarce cut it, in which we found the Head and Bones of a Hippototomus, the hairy Lips of which were still sound and not putrified, and the Jaw was also firm, out of which we plukt a great many Teeth, 2 of them 8 Inches long and as big as a Man’s Thumb, small at one End, and a little crooked, the rest not above half so long.  (cited on p. 14)

A dugong!

A quokka family (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

But even before Dampier, there was Willem de Vlamingh (1640-c1698) with his Dutch crew .  They were searching for a ship lost at sea when they found themselves on an island they named Rottnest, (Rat Nest), in honour of the quokkas that they saw everywhere.    These cute little creatures will scamper up to visitors in hope of a treat – and from what I’ve seen they get a completely different reaction to an approach by rats – but then maybe sailors at sea were more used to rats than we are today…The men and women who observed these curiosities were indefatigable.  From the time of British Settlement, semi-professional and amateur naturalists gathered specimens, dissected them and sometimes (bravely) ate them.   They preserved their specimens with varying degrees of success, and they did their best to take them back, dead or alive, to Europe.  More in keeping with the way contemporary conservationists work, they also described them in painstaking (if sometimes inaccurate) detail, and drew or painted illustrations of them.  The book is lavishly illustrated with full colour pictures from the National Library’s collection and some of the botanical paintings are so beautiful one might almost buy two copies of the book to cut out and frame them.

Naturalists were not, however, always popular on board.  According to Nicholas Baudin (read more about him in my review of Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders by Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath and John West-Sooby), the single-mindedness of these enthusiasts could be rather a headache …

More anxious than the rest, they had pestered me from the moment they dropped anchor to allow them to go ashore, and I had been obliged to give my permission in order to be rid of them I must say here in passing, that those captains who have scientists, or who may some day have them aboard their ships, must, upon departure, take a good supply of patience.  I admit that although I have no lack of it, the scientists have frequently driven me to the end of my tether and forced me to retire testily to my room. 

(The Journal of Post Captain Nicolas Baudin, 1802, translated by Christine Cornell, 2004, cited on p24)

I was very pleased to see that the contribution of women is acknowledged in this book.  I had read about Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843) in The Complete Book of Heroic Australian Women but I had never heard of Amalie Dietrich (1821-1891).  Molloy came to the Swan River Settlement with a ‘genteel love of gardens and plants’ but was worn out with childbearing and the drudgery of pioneer life when an amateur botanist called Captain James Mangles heard about her interest in plants and struck up a correspondence with her, asking her to collect specimens for him.  She sent him remarkable new species, complete with viable seed and pressed specimens that were ‘far better than those sent in by professional botanists’.   Tragically, she died aged only 38. Dietrich, on the other hand, was a professional collector.  Although the biography written by her daughter is unreliable, Dietrich seems to have had training in collecting herbs from her husband, and when the marriage failed, she sailed for Australia to collect specimens for a private museum in Hamburg.  She appears to have been undaunted by Australia’s most deadly species: she is thought to be the first European to capture a taipan, and may even have gutted a 6.7 metre crocodile.  There are wasps named after her, and her collection of spiders formed the basis of the first study of Australian spiders.

Our little Aussie platypus is one of the most intriguing animals on the planet, and the story of George Bennett (1804-1893) shows just how this elusive creature has fascinated scientists for so long.  His quest to breed the platypus was never successful – and like many in this period he sent rare and valuable specimens back to England instead of retaining them for Australia’s fledgling museum – but still, he made a remarkable contribution.

Curiously though, considering that Sir Joseph Banks is a Big Name in Botany,** his erroneous assumptions about the lush meadows of Botany Bay nearly cost the lives of the First Settlers in 1788.  There were ‘no farmers, no naturalists, no botanists, and nobody who understood mining or geology’ in the First Fleet and since they arrived in the middle of Sydney’s scorching summer, they almost starved to death.  It was up to the chief surgeon John White to accompany the governor Arthur Phillip when he went exploring, and he sent drawings, specimens and his journal back to England.  Macinnes also tells us about the mystery of the so-called Watling Collection which consists of paintings which were the first scientific descriptions of several Australian species, including some such as the magpie goose which is now extinct in Sydney.

Macinnes has an engaging chatty style, enriching his stories of these remarkable men and women with quotations from their journals and anecdotes about their lives.  But it is no hagiography: he is alert to the temptations of pride and hubris, professional jealousy and dishonesty.  There was occasional recklessness, unconcern for the safety of others, and single-minded selfishness.  He acknowledges the improper appropriation of Aboriginal artefacts and remains ‘in the name of science’ and he recognises the limitations of those whose enthusiasm was not matched by preparedness or organisational skills.  He is staunchly patriotic, devoting the latter part of his book to those naturalists who were either born here or settled here permanently and were the foundation of an Australian-based scientific community.  These include Baron Ferdinand Von Mueller (1825-1896) who founded Melbourne’s own Botanic Gardens; Louisa Anne Meredith (1812-1895) whose exquisitely illustrated travel books chart the transformation of her opinions about the Australian bush from dismissive to enthusiastic; the Scott sisters, Harriet (1830-1907) and Helena (1832-1910)  whose artwork, says Macinnes, has never been bettered; and Louisa Atkinson (1834-1872) who was lost to natural science through childbirth – her studies of birdlife are just gorgeous.

I was especially taken with Macinnes description of Von Mueller’s protégé Ellis Rowan (1848-1922):and the challenge to her artistic credentials:

In open competition with male artists, she had again taken out a first-class award [the first was the gold medal in the Melbourne Exhibition] and the boys’ own hissy fit brigade began to squeal.  Not to put too fine a point on it, the chaps were outraged that a mere woman (and a mere flower painter at that) should again beat them. (p.142)

It was a sign of mean-spiritedness to come, but today her collection is the pride and joy of the NLA.

There is a delightful chapter about William Sharp Macleay (1792-1865) and his bunyip skull and Macinnes reminds us to ‘think kindly on Macleay, for he was a creature of his time and society … [and] … an original thinker, an extremely clever observer, and an encourager of others who were keen to pursue natural history’ (p. 152)

What shines through this lovely book is a sensitivity to the courage of people who set out for the unknown and to the curiosity that drove them to search for knowledge.

Highly recommended as a gift book or as a science, art, or history resource for every secondary school library.

Visit Peter Macinnes’s website to see more about Curious Minds.

* Aristotle used the example of white swans as an irrefutable fact, i.e. because all swans were white, etc.

** One of our loveliest plants, the Banksia is named after him.

Author: Peter Macinnes Title: Curious Minds, The Discoveries of Australian Naturalists Publisher: NLA Publishing (National Library of Australia), 2012 ISBN: 9780642277541 Source: Kingston Library

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Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers

Book Review: Bakir and Bi, by Jillian Boyd and Tori-Jay Mordey

Another book to add to our collection of indigenous materials at school!  Bakir and Bi by Jillian Boyd and Tori-Jay Mordey, is a small-sized hardback picture book, a little bit smaller than A5.  I mention the size because it so perfectly suits the intimate feel of this book, which is beautifully illustrated with line drawings, in sepia, teal, and black-and-white.

What’s so special about it to me, is that it’s the first story book that I’ve come across from the Torres Straits.   This is the blurb from the publisher’s website:

Bakir (rock) and Mar (storm bird) live on a remote island called Egur with their two young children. While fishing on the beach Bakir comes across a very special pelican (Bakir’s totem is a pelican) named Bi.   A famine occurs, and life on the island is no longer harmonious. One day Bakir and Bi disappear and Mar and the children are forced to make the journey to another island by canoe … and so begins the adventure.

Bakir and Bi is based on a Torres Strait Islander creation story, but aspects of it are rather dark, making it perhaps more suitable for older children.  In the beginning island life is lush and food is plentiful, but when the famine strikes families turn against each other.  The family has to hide Bi (their pelican) otherwise he would be eaten by the other islanders who are starving.  Bakir has already warned his family that they may need to leave the island one day, but when it is time for Bi (the pelican) to leave because he has outgrown his hideout, Bakir disappears along with the bird, leaving his family to fend for themselves.  They then have a perilous journey across the sea to a new island, and Lusik is almost lost at sea.  When they finally reach safety, they are not reunited with Bakir: he has become a rock to guide and watch over them instead.

I think that older children would enjoy discussing the supernatural elements of the story, but could also tease out the ideas behind Bakir following his destiny.  They could also explore the Kedawar tribe’s belief that a person grows to become their name: the children could find out the meaning of their own names and decide whether their names suit their personality or achievements.  (My own name means ‘devoted to God’ which is not particularly apt for a non-believer LOL!) And while the book shows people needing to find a new home because of famine, it could also be used to discuss the impact of global warming on island communities and what Australia’s role might be in offering a home to displaced communities as the water levels rise.

Born and raised on Thursday Island in the Torres Straits, Jillian Boyd was the winner of the 2012 State Library of Queensland black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship.  The illustrations by her niece, 18-year-old Tori-Jay Mordey are very impressive.  This young artist has a rare talent, especially for depicting facial expressions and emotion, and the colour scheme is gorgeous.

Authors: Jillian Boyd and Tori-Jay Mordey
Title: Bakir and Bi
Publisher: Magabala Books, 2013
ISBN: 9781921248863
Source: Review copy courtesy of Magabala Books
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Book Review: Kitty’s War, by Janet Butler

Somewhere in the archives of the War Memorial in Canberra, there is a small diary scribbled in pencil. It was donated by The Spouse’s family because old Eric was a gunner in the 7th Field Artillery Brigade and he was awarded the Military Medal in The Great War. Before he lost his leg in the conflict he recorded his impressions of the first tanks to arrive on the battlefield so it’s a most interesting document. Transcribing this diary is an eventual retirement project for The Spouse.

We had always thought that this would be a fairly straightforward task, but now that I have read Kitty’s War by Janet Butler, I realise that there is much more to a war diary than first meets the eye. What’s not in a war diary can be just as interesting as what’s in it… and what’s in it, is sometimes not much about war at all, but rather about changes in identity because of the war.

When Kitty McNaughton sailed away to do her bit as a nurse, she, like most of the other volunteers aboard, had never been out of Australia. The war (which everyone expected to be over soon) was an opportunity to see the world, and she devotes many pages to describing the journey. The troops and nurses were ferried to Egypt on the troopship Orsova, which was formerly a passenger liner. So this young woman enjoyed all the excitements that are common to cruise ships today: games and sports, fancy dress parties, a crossing-the-line ceremony, fancy dinners and so on. But there is no mention of any serious flirting because nursing was still cultivating a respectable image to counter Dickens’ Sarah Gamp. Kitty was always conscious that her diary was going to be read by others, especially her mother, and she is circumspect about what she writes.

That’s why, later on, when she’s nursing on the island of Lemnos, when she writes about the four young men who became important to her, she always refers to them as ‘boys’ or ‘youths’, and she always records the presence of some other person, making it clear that she is never alone with a young man. She is careful to adopt a sisterly tone, sometimes maternal, never romantic. Reading between the lines, we wonder what her feelings were, especially when we know that for most of the young men thrust into relentlessly all-male company for long years in that war, that mateship offered no outlet for emotional release. Men could talk about their feelings to women, but not to each other…

What’s also noticeable is that she doesn’t write much about the shocking injuries she encounters. Butler says that this is because Kitty feels constrained by her audience: these horribly mutilated young men often dying in dreadful pain were the husbands, sweethearts, brothers and sons of her friends and family back home. So, like others reporting to those at home both formally and informally, she maintains the conspiracy of silence about their suffering in order to protect them from the awful truth. It is when she is nursing German soldiers on the Somme that she finally feels able to write about the horror of what she witnessed, because they are Other, and she can describe their injuries and how their needs were addressed.

What is also most interesting about this period, is that for the first time, she indirectly acknowledges her own skills. A modest and self-effacing nurse had to be careful about this, because it was not thought seemly for women to have ambitions beyond their gender-assigned roles. It was in reading the passage below that I realised the importance of documents such as Kitty’s dairy being interrogated by an historian:

I have eleven with their legs off and a cuple [sic] ditto arms & hips & heads galore & the awful smell from the wounds is the limit as this Gas Gangrene is the most awful thing imaginable, a leg goes in a day. I extracted a bullet from a German back today, and I enjoyed cutting into him … the bullet is my small treasure, as I hope it saved a life as it was a revolver one… (p.130)

Now when I first read this I recoiled at the idea that Kitty ‘enjoyed cutting into him’ – to me it felt as if she was enjoying a sort of vengeance against the enemy. But what Butler’s analysis reveals, from looking at the diary in its entirety and comparing it with a host of other documents and diaries, is that what Kitty is enjoying is being entrusted with the scalpel and being allowed to perform procedures that traditionally were the sole preserve of male doctors. To read Kitty’s self-effacing diary at face value without realising that it deliberately undercuts her own achievements is to overlook that Kitty was in fact a very good nurse indeed: she received commendations; she was mentioned in dispatches; she was in sole charge of the whole Bosches Line of German wounded (more than one huge ward of very serious cases); and she was allowed to undertake surgical procedures as well.

What is also revealed by this rare documentation of the suffering of the German soldiers is that it offers Kitty emotional release. She describes her distress at the confronting injuries and the pitiable state of soldiers arriving with maggot-infested wounds, an outlet which is promptly closed when Allied soldiers arrive and she no longer gives herself permission to write about them.

Butler analyses the Conscription Referendum in terms of how it impacted away from home; the class issues including the hostility from Imperials to Colonials; and the decline of the ‘war diary’ from a place to share matters of interest to its role testifying to grief and despair. The appearance of gaps, when for long periods of time Kitty can find nothing of interest to write about, signals that the relentless tide of the wounded is contributing to what we would now call stress. When she is on the Western Front after the Somme, Kitty and her friends succumb themselves to illness, and she openly acknowledges it, perhaps in part because her own mother has died and she longer feels that she has to hide her suffering. (There is a remarkable pair of photos in the book that shows the impact of this ongoing stress on Kitty’s appearance. The nurses joke that first their hair goes, then their teeth and then their reputations, but it was true: the bad diet and the appalling conditions made Kitty’s hair go grey while she was still only in her thirties.)

While close female friendships were nurturing and supportive, they could not salve the ongoing stress entirely. This is especially true when Kitty is transferred to a clearing station near the front line, where the nurses are carefully chosen for their suitability and monitored for signs of strain. Where the official histories make no mention of the fact that the nurses are much closer to danger, Kitty and other nurses write about it in detail. She has to undergo gas training before the transfer, and we know from the diaries of other nurses that their clothes stank afterwards of the gas. Kitty also records shelling, missiles falling into the camp and the crash-landing of two allied planes in the field beside it, but she does not record her own bravery, as for example when she is ordered to fall back because of an impending German attack and refuses to go. Yet there is a striking absence of any commentary about the sick and wounded, at a time when the casualty rate is shocking. Medical officers reporting to their professional journals provide information about the horrific situation that is omitted from Kitty’s diary, and the testimony of a Matron O’Dwyer confirms that nothing – not even experience at the base hospitals further back from the front line – could prepare nurses for what they were to encounter at a clearing station. But Kitty’s experiences here are at war with the identity she has crafted for herself within this diary: as a tourist, a recorder of culture and a chronicler of the affairs of women, of family and of Anzac glory. (p. 181) In her four months at this clearing station, she does not know how to write about the relentless flood of seriously wounded men in pain.

There is so much more that I could write about this brilliant book but I will confine myself to recommending that if you read just one book about the ANZAC experience, it should be this one. Butler’s humane analysis covers much more than just the experience of one woman at war, and the issues raised by this book have been the subject of many conversations with friends and family while I’ve been reading it.

The book includes B&W photos of Kitty, comprehensive notes, a select bibliography and an index.

The launch at the Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance was a slightly more sombre affair than other book launches I have been to. Held in the visitor’s centre, proceedings began with a recitation of the Ode of Remembrance, and the book was launched by Colonel Jan Mc Carthy ARRC (retd) from the army nursing service. Many of the people there were descendants of Kitty McNaughton who shared the author’s pride that the story of this remarkable young woman has been told at last.

Highly recommended  for teachers of Australian History, teachers teaching on the topic of War, and teachers teaching Gender Studies.

Author: Janet Butler
Title: Kitty’s War
Publisher: UQP (University of Queensland Press) 2013
ISBN: 9780702249679
Source: Review copy courtesy of UQP, and autographed on the night by the author!

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Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers

Book review: Meet Mary MacKillop, by Sally Murphy and Sonia Martinez

I’ve always rather liked the Catholic idea of sainthood.  Not because I believe in miracles or any of the spiritual concepts associated with it, but because I like the idea of acknowledging people just for being good.  Society rewards soldiering with military medals, and most countries have some sort of honours system for high achievers. There are bravery awards, and educational systems usually have some kind of award system for excellence in a variety of fields.  But (as far as I know) only the Catholics confer sainthood on people for being good, and so it’s rather nice that Australia has got its very own saint at last.

I teach in a secular school and so this is the approach that I would take in the matter of the canonisation of Mary MacKillop.  She was a pioneer of education for all children rich and poor, and she was an inspiring female role model who set up her own school and founded her own order of nuns.  This kind of leadership was not common for women in the 19th century and so her story in Meet Mary MacKillop helps to provide gender balance when teaching children about significant people in Australian history.

Teachers who do even a rudimentary bit of research at Saint Mary MacKillop and at Wikipedia will soon see that Mary MacKillop was a spirited woman with a talent for controversy.  As the timeline in the back of this book shows, she was excommunicated and even when this was rescinded and she had the Pope’s blessing for her new Order of Nuns, there was conflict with her superiors in Queensland.  Wisely, Sally Murphy has skipped over all these complicated dramas, and told the simple story of MacKillop’s first foray into teaching in Penola South Australia in a beautiful hardback picture book.  The full-colour illustrations by Sonia Martinez contribute to showing the pioneer lifestyle and the text focusses on MacKillop’s initiative, determination and devotion to her faith.

Meet Mary MacKillop is one of a series being produced by Random House to resource the National History Curriculum.

You can find out more about Mary MacKillop at Saint Mary MacKillop and at Wikipedia.

Author: Sally Murphy
Illustrator: Sonia Martinez
Title: Meet Mary MacKillop
Publisher: Random House, May 1st, 2013
ISBN: 9781742757216

Review copy courtesy of Random House.

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Aboriginal Perspectives Resources (with thanks to Anita Heiss)

As teachers know, the new Australian Curriculum includes three cross-curriculum ‘priorities’, one of which is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures.  One of the science topics includes Year 2 students identifying toys from different cultures that use the forces of push or pull, and this made me wonder about traditional Aboriginal games and whether there was a concept of a ‘toy’ in nomadic lifestyles.  I’ve read a few memoirs and a quite a few children’s books by ATSI authors but I don’t recall any of them referring to this topic at all.

Keen to include Aboriginal perspectives on this topic if possible, I contacted Dr Anita Heiss who is Adjunct Professor at the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, at the University of Technology, Sydney.  Many teachers will also know her as the author of My Australian Story: Who am I?

But she also co-edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature which I recommend as an introduction to the diversity of indigenous writing  - see my review at ANZ LitLovers  - and she is also the author of these entertaining novels: Manhattan Dreaming, Not Meeting Mr Right, Avoiding Mr Right, and Paris Dreaming.  These popular novels are about sharing the highs and lows of being an urban Aboriginal woman but pitched at a mainstream audience.  Read more about the rationale for these ‘chick-lit’ novels here.

Her most recent book is Am I Black Enough for You? which as the book blurb says is a rejoinder to racist remarks made about ‘being too ‘fair-skinned’ to be an Australian Aboriginal. Such accusations led to  Anita’s involvement in one of the most important and sensational Australian legal decisions of the 21st-century when she joined others in charging a newspaper columnist with breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. He was found guilty, and the repercussions continue. This book is on my TBR and I will be reviewing it on the ANZ LitLovers blog when I’ve read it.

Anyway, Anita generously gave her time to reply to my query with some suggested sites:

Yulunga, Traditional Indigenous Games is an ‘activity resource of over 100 traditional Indigenous games created to provide all Australians with an opportunity to learn about, appreciate and experience aspects of Indigenous culture’.   It’s available as a CD-ROM.  Order it here.

There are tips and advice about teachers self-educating about indigenous history and culture at The Critical Classroom.   It’s not about doing formal professional development (though that’s a good idea if you can access it), it’s about reading indigenous literature, listening to indigenous music, using social media and viewing indigenous music. I’d add checking out indigenous art wherever you can access it, and if you’re in Melbourne, keeping an eye out for relevant events at the Wheeler Centre or the NGV at Federation Square.   If you’re keen to read indigenous literature, you might want to join in Indigenous Literature Week at ANZ LitLovers, I’m hosting it there each year during NAIDOC Week.  (If you don’t know where to begin, I’ve also reviewed some lovely books about indigenous art, mostly published by Wakefield Press, and UQP who sponsor the David Unaipon Award and are great supporters of indigenous writing have also sent me some interesting memoirs.  Check the Indigenous Writing Category in the ANZ LitLovers RHS menu to see what’s available there.)

The Critical Classroom has all kinds of useful resources including this game: Birrguu Matya: A Wiradjuri board game.   Links for where to buy it are here and if you ‘like’ The Critical Classroom at Facebook you can keep in touch with all kinds of stuff.

If you know of any additional resources or bloggers who’re working on this too, please share what you know in the comments below.

Book review: The Little Corroboree Frog, by Tracey Holton-Ramirez and Angela Ramirez

Magabala Books have sent me another lovely little picture book on the theme of conservation and caring for country.

Sisters Tracey Holton-Ramirez and Angela Ramirez are descended from the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, a place that most Australians associate with massive mining projects.  However this little book with its striking full colour illustrations is not about the Pilbara, it’s about a critically endangered frog found only in the snowy alpine regions of the Kosciuszko National Park in NSW.

Jet the Corroboree Frog wakes up from hibernation and sets about the serious business of attracting the attention of the girl frogs, and he gets lucky: ‘Bindi liked Jet’s croak the best, and before long she had laid more than twenty eggs in a mossy nest at the edge of the pond’. But things don’t go well and when the pond starts to dry up, Grandma Frog explains that it’s because ‘every year the summers are getting hotter…and the humans are not looking after our country.’

The book is pitched at young children so it has an optimistic message about doing what you can: a boy and his father arrive in a 4WD, and when the boy realises that the frogs need some help he and his father clean up the rubbish and set off home discussing what more they can do.

At the back of the book there are some facts about the Corroboree Frog and its habitat, some websites to visit, and a page about the authors.  The Little Corroboree Frog is their first collaboration and I hope we will see more of their stunning artwork in future books.

We’ll use it at my school in the Year 1 & 2 unit about Australian Animals.

The Little Corroboree Frog is due for release in March, and you can pre-order it from the links below.

Authors: Tracey Holton-Ramirez and Angela Ramirez
Title: The Little Corroboree Frog
Publisher: Magabala Books, 2013
ISBN: 9781921248818
Source: Review copy courtesy of Magabala Books

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Book review: At the Very Heart, 100 Years in Remote Australia, by Storry Walton

When At the Very Heart: 100 Years in Remote Australia first arrived chez moi from publishers Wakefield Press, I thought it was a coffee table book. It’s actually much more than that, and this copy is destined to be catalogued at my school library because its content is a valuable contribution to Australian history.

Everybody’s heard of John Flynn who founded the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) , but who knew that it was not entirely his idea? Kudos should also go to a young pilot who died in World War I, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at his entry on Wikipedia. Clifford Peel was a country lad from Inverleigh in Victoria, and at a public meeting he had heard John Flynn talk about the needs of people living in remote areas. Peel gave up his medical studies to enlist in 1916, but he did not forget what he had heard …

In a remarkable letter from the troopship Nestor at Port Said to John Flynn [in 1917], he outlined a detailed proposal for an aerial medical service for the inland, complete with maps, sites for bases, adaptations to the aircraft, operational considerations, costs and a budget. It became the model for the aerial medical service. (p. 46)

Clifford Peel died in action on the Western Front just before the war ended and you can see his name on the Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial. It took the indefatigable Flynn ten long years to create the RFDS, gathering support from far-sighted entrepreneurs such as Hudson Fysh who founded QANTAS and H V McKay of Sunshine Harvester fame.

This was a time when there was no doctor from Oodnadatta (1000km north of Adelaide) to Darwin (a distance of 1300 miles). It was a time when

If you elected to live outback, this meant that you didn’t complain, you lived with the pain, and sometimes you made it and sometimes you died. (p.128)

The first nursing home at Oodnadatta opened in 1911, and the book shows that the nursing staff took their share of pain too. The author notes that Oodnadatta is one of the hottest places in Australia …

Early one morning [Deaconess Sister Latto Bett] received a message from a travelling railway doctor that there was a seriously sick child at William Creek. She packed a few things in a basket and a friendly railway lineman offered to take her the 125-mile journey south on the open motor rail tricycle used by gangers. She wrote that despite the sight of hundreds of drought-dead cattle ‘the journey was on the whole quite pleasant when you take into consideration the fact that you have to sit very still in one place without a back rest or an umbrella to shelter from the sun’. (p. 131)

Latto Bett nursed her patient, then set off to travel a further 50 miles by buggy for an injured stockman, got lost four times in the dark coming back, took the new patient back to Oodnadatta, then nursed a new arrival till he recovered enough for her to accompany him on an 800-km train trip back to Port Augusta. On her return to Oodnadatta she nursed a patient for seven days day and night after he had come in alone by camel over 400 miles in temperatures of 50°C and then conducted his funeral in a dust storm when he died. Latto Bett isn’t in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) online and I couldn’t find her on Wikipedia but you can see the photo that’s in this book at Trove along with a mini-bio. Somebody somewhere should be writing a proper biography of this amazing woman – Storry Walton says she kept a diary …

(Actually, there’s a whole lot of incredible women in this book!)

The book also traces the history of the Australian Inland Mission (AIM) and its successor Frontier Services. Flynn was no city missionary, and neither are his successors. Remote Australia isn’t a place for churches and proselytising, it’s a place for adventurous people who are willing to fit into the idiosyncratic lifestyle of people who live in remote isolation, and who are willing to listen rather than talk.

City kids like the ones I teach will get a some idea of the vastness of the inland and hardships faced by pioneers from the graphics in this book. There is one of Flynn’s amazing 1924 map which shows how the train lines peter out, leaving a vast emptiness at the heart of our continent. Photos show just how hard it was to get around in the early days: there are vehicles of all descriptions getting bogged in the sand. (Storry makes the point that people tend to photograph the same things. After all, there’s not a lot else to take photos of between homesteads, eh?) The section about the mail service in its early days is illustrated with photos of posties on camels and horses and there is a poignant reproduction of a notice trying to locate a Victor Larsen so that his letter can be delivered.

There is also an enchanting picture of a new schoolhouse in Gippsland, which may well have been the ‘pride of the community’ but would have tested the mettle of both teachers and students. Made of rough timber and corrugated iron, it would indeed have been ‘severely cold in winter and hot in summer’ but it boasts a garden, a newly planted tree and a rose-bush, with netting to deter rabbits which were already making their presence felt in rural Australia.

I think kids will also be interested in the pictures of the School of the Air, then and now. Who knew that this was pioneered by Adelaide Miethke? Look at her miserable entry on Wikipedia and weep for the way the feminist founder of this crucial element in outback education has been treated by history. The ADB Online has a better entry, thank goodness. It shows that she was awarded an OBE (and so was Flynn but Clifford Peet doesn’t even have an entry. Miethke was a friend of Flynn’s, an educationist and first president of the RFDS in South Australia, and it was she who used the RFDS network at Alice Springs to connect children and teachers in the first School of the Air in the 1950s. She was also a peace activist and the first female Vice President of the SA Public School Teachers Union. Thousands of outback children owe their education – and their confidence in speaking to strangers – to the vision of Adelaide Miethke …

The book isn’t all about the inland, there are terrific stories from the High Country in remote Gippsland, Victoria. There’s a chapter called Time and Space which shows the diversity of remote communities across our continent. It features

• the Mobile Aboriginal Patrol which operates across Central Australian and South Australian deserts and padres past and present who served indigenous communities;
• AIM patrols in remote outposts in WA, travelling by bicycle, car, motorbike and camel;
• the Pilbara including the Mines and the Western Desert;
• the Burke and Wills Patrol in western Qld;
• the funeral of Ziggy Remienko who ran the pub at Betoota, the only one between Birdsville and Windorah; and
• the Frontier Services Midlands Patrol based in Oatlands Tasmania in the high mountains wilderness.

The book celebrates the work of past and present padres and mission staff but it’s inclusive of women and it’s not heavy-handed about the religious aspect of their work. These ministers preside over weddings and funerals, but most often they provide discreet counselling support for people. As John Case who serves on the Burke and Wills Patrol says:

Most people are not religious, but I have yet to find anyone who does not have some kind of fauth, something strong outside of themselves. (p.109)

However, while At the Very Heart isn’t a hagiography, I would have liked to have seen more about services for indigenous communities, which might have had to address some failings.

There is heaps more to discover in this brilliant book but I think you should get your own copy and/or give one to someone you love and /or to an impecunious school library near you!

The book has a timeline, references, a bibliography and an index.

Author: Storry Walton
Title: At the Very Heart, 100 Years in Remote Australia
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2012
ISBN: 9781743051344
Source: review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press.

Availability

Fishpond: At the Very Heart: 100 Years in Remote Australia
Or direct from Wakefield Press.

Cross posted at ANZ LitLovers.

Book Review: The Liberator’s Birthday, by Jill Blee

This is another book review that I had neglected to cross-post here.  I found it in my annual housekeeping spree at my ANZ LitLovers blog and am belatedly cross-posting now.

The Liberator’s Birthday is one of a series by Jill Blee, all historical fiction suitable for secondary students of history.    It’s an imaginative recreation of the sectarian conflict that characterised life on the Ballarat Goldfields in the 1870s…

Source: Wikipedia

Tommy Farrell’s parents run the pub, but he’s been left to run it single-handed because everyone else has gone to Mass to celebrate the ‘Liberator’s’ birthday. The Liberator was Daniel O’Connell, who campaigned for the right of Irishmen to take their place in the British parliament, and he’s still a hero in Ireland. We’ve got an imposing statue of him too, here in Melbourne outside St Patrick’s Cathedral , and that’s because the Irish were a significant presence here in Australia, right from the start.

Jill Blee has specialised in the history of the Irish in Australia, but the story wears her scholarship lightly. Perhaps in homage to James Joyce, the tale is structured like Bloomsday, covering the events of the day from first thing in the morning until late at night. Tommy gets the pub to rights, the early drinkers come in, and the blarney starts. Amongst themselves, this Catholic contingent manage to argue about all manner of things without too much angst, but when the Protestants arrive things become more heated and there is a punch up between the Orange and the Green, just like those saloon fights you’ve seen in American westerns, with heads getting knocked together and glassware flying everywhere.There are many threads to the tale. There’s an appalling priest whose curses have dreadful effects on the surviving family; and his superstitious flock fear his ire as much as they fear the flames of hell from the catechism. Unemployment has led to discrimination that wasn’t there before when jobs were plentiful, and there are terrible mining accidents now that the easy pickings have run out. There’s an over-ambitious social-climbing mother, whose son Gerald is spoiled rotten because he’s destined for the priesthood, and Tommy’s in love with a girl thought not to be good enough for him.

While the story is reasonably engaging, (once you get used to the thick Irish accent of the narrator) it was the little details that I especially enjoyed. It was fascinating, for example, to hear poor Tommy trying to work out the best way to travel to Bendigo on foot (it’s about 95k) in the days when the route was dirt tracks and virgin bush and Daylesford the tourist mecca was just a hamlet. I hope teachers of Australian history know about this audio book, because playing a few extracts would be a valuable teaching tool.

Most enjoyable. I have bought Blee’s other books, The Pines Hold their Secrets (about Norfolk Island) and Brigid (about the Irish potato famine) to read at a later date.

Author: Jill Blee
Title: The Liberator’s Birthday
Narrator: Stanley McGeagh
Publisher: Louis Braille Audio
ISBN 0732026962
7 CDs , 8 hours approx running time.

Source: Kingston Library

Book Review: Spinifex Mouse by Norma MacDonald

Here’s another delightful book from indigenous publishers, Magabala Books.   It’s due for release in early February.

Certain to appeal to small children and just perfect for units of work about Australian animals, Spinifex Mouse is about a cheeky little spinifex-hopping mouse from the Pilbara region of Western Australia.  Like all youngsters Cheeky likes to explore his world, but danger in the desert comes not just from predators on the ground but also in the sky.  Skilfully controlled tension rises as Cheeky’s aerobatic exploits become more and more risky and his taste for exploration takes him further away from safety.

Exquisitely illustrated with delicate water colours by Norma MacDonald from the Yamatji people of the Gascoyne Region and the Nyungar people of South West WA, the book is a gentle reminder to listen to the wisdom of the elders and not to be greedy.

Like all good books about Aboriginal history and culture, the book acknowledges information about the indigenous origins of the author.

Magabala is a non-profit publishing house based in Broome that aims to ‘promote, preserve and publish Indigenous Australian culture’.

Author: Norma MacDonald
Title: Spinifex Mouse
Publisher: Magabala Books 2012
ISBN:9781921248801
Review copy courtesy of Magabala Books

Highly recommended.

Availability:
Fishpond: Spinifex Mouse or direct from Magabala Books.