Book Review: Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders by Jean Fornasiero, Peter Monteath and John West-Sooby

I have cross-posted this book review from my ANZ LitLovers blog because I think it belongs in every secondary school library, and every teacher of Australian history at any level should read it!

Maybe it’s because I did all my childhood international travel by ocean liner that I am so fascinated by the early voyages of discovery? Perhaps there is something about being surrounded by the vastness of the world’s oceans when you are indeed very small yourself that creates a lasting sense of awe about sea voyages? I still remember the sense of excitement at the prospect of land after weeks at sea and now that I know just how many ships came to grief along the Shipwreck Coast off southern Australia I feel a sense of gratitude to the builders and designers of all kinds of maritime safety devices from radar to lighthouses to John Harrison’s marine chronometer. I cannot begin to imagine what courage it took to set sail before these things were invented, the more so when the destination was unknown, an uncertain guess-line on a map…

The Dutch came first, naming the west coast New Holland:

New Holland 1659 map prepared by Joan Blaeu (Source Wikipedia Commons)

and William Dampier was the first Englishman to make landfall (see my review of Adrian Mitchell’s terrific book, Dampier’s Monkey)

William Dampier's map 1699 (Source Wikipedia Commons)

and as every school-kid knows the ‘missing’ east coast was filled in and claimed as New South Wales for Britain by the voyage of Captain Cook in 1770. But nobody knew that Tasmania was an island or whether the east and west coasts were joined. These missing links in the map of Australia were filled in by explorers both British and French, the most notable of whom were Matthew Flinders who is credited with the first circumnavigation of Tasmania and the first circumnavigation of Australia, and Nicolas Baudin who is credited with being the first to explore the western coast. It was also Matthew Flinders who resolved the conflicting names of our continent by suggesting ‘Australia’ – a politically neutral choice originally resisted by Joseph Banks but the one that triumphed in the end.

Encountering Terra Australis is a beautiful book: it’s obviously thoroughly researched and academically impressive but it’s printed on expensive paper and has many full colour and B/W reproductions of lovely artworks made on the voyage to entice the general reader. The first chapter ‘The Lure of the South’ traces the antecedents of these two voyages so significant to the history of Australia. It explains the rivalry between France and Britain, and illuminates the behind-the-scenes persuasions that facilitated funding for the expeditions. But it also makes a case for recognition that the meetings of these men – who were motivated by personal ambition and scientific curiosity -

were marked by cordiality and respect. The ugly international politics of their day should by rights have pulled them apart, but the spirit of science that drove them both on long and dangerous voyages united them. If there is much in the stories …that gives expression to the bitter rivalries of their day, there is also in the character of these two remarkable men a nobility of spirit that both defines their age and transcends it. (p13)

In this period Britain and France were imperial adversaries. Napoleon was rampaging around not just in Europe, and the Brits were keen to recover from the loss of the American colonies in 1783. There were clear economic and military advantages – not to mention world prestige and one-upmanship – in extending dominions into the unknown southern stretches of the globe, but the men who led these expeditions were inspired by the Enlightenment. Flinders prided himself on his skill as a map-maker contributing to world knowledge, and Baudin’s interest was that of a scientific voyager and chronicler. Both were more interested in the discoveries they might make than in making geo-political gains for their respective empires. The achievement of Encountering Terra Australis is that the authors analyse the foibles, flaws and merits of these men to ensure that their reputations are based on the historical record and to give them their rightful place in the history of exploration and science.

Nicolas Baudin, Albany WA

Nicolas Baudin was the French explorer who in 1801 first mapped the western coast of Australia, and part of the southern coast. His expedition consisted of two ships, the Géographe and the Naturaliste, nine zoologists and botanists, and under his leadership 2500 new species were discovered. In 1802 – astonishingly in the middle of an apparently desolate stretch of coastline now known as Encounter Bay – he met up with the English explorer Matthew Flinders who in the Investigator was also charting the coastline. But there were no hostilities. Quite the contrary: despite the language barrier, they shared information and maps and each of them recorded the encounter in journals which show that they not only respected but liked each other. (And it must have been no small thing to make a copy of a map by hand overnight…)

Flinders went on to become pre-eminent in the history of Australian maritime exploration while Baudin’s legacy has been less valued. This was in part because of the strained personal relationships that he had with his men and I find it interesting to note that the history of successful exploration is so often a matter of temperament (something Patrick White explored in Voss.) While Flinders had his flaws, it was Baudin who had difficulties with the ship’s company in general and his rival, Péron, in particular. Baudin’s premature death left Péron to misrepresent the expedition’s aims and accomplishments, and in order to further his own grandiose ambitions back in France, he denigrated Baudin with the effect of delaying recognition of his legacy until comparatively recent research. So although Flinders had all kinds of difficulties, including having to cool his heels in a Mauritian prison for seven years on the way home because the French thought he was a spy, he has had the better press and is better known.

King Bungaree, chief of the Broken Bay tribe, N.S. Wales, died 1832 by Charles Rodius, used by persmission of the National Libary of Australia, Digital Image Collection no 8953976

I learned all kinds of interesting snippets from this book. From the chapter entitled The Clash of Cultures I discovered that there is anthropological evidence that news of the arrival of ‘strange new people in bright and colourful uniforms’ travelled astonishing distances across from the west to central Australia in song and corroboree. I now know the name of the first Aborigine to circumnavigate Australia: Bongaree (or Bungaree). I discovered that Coffin Bay owes its macabre name not to any unfortunate deaths but to the convention of naming places after potential sources of patronage, whereas Catastrophe Bay was so named because the Investigatorlost eight crewmen there, including Flinders’ great friend John Thistle. I learned that ten convicts got a free trip home and a pardon because Flinders was short-handed after the disaster at Catastrophe Bay and he hired them for the return journey to England. And I was reminded once more how the search for potable water put constant limitations on any voyage of discovery: it’s heavy and it takes up space so a ship can’t carry too much of it. Sometimes, just when things are getting interesting, a ship must turn around to where there is a known water supply rather than risk running out of it….

One thing these great navigators had in common was that both of them had their disappointments. Both sailed within coo-ee of the mouth of the Murray River but never saw it; Flinders missed the mouth of the Brisbane and Clarence Rivers too. Baudin missed the entrance to Port Phillip Bay as well while Flinders managed to sail through its perilous heads thinking he was the first to find it – but in fact John Murray had already done so, and named it mere months beforehand.

The authors do not shy away from reflecting on the role of these explorers in what came to be Aboriginal dispossession. There is a whole chapter about how these visitors were at pains to avoid conflict with the indigenous people, and how when misunderstandings arose, both Baudin and Flinders sought to rationalise them as errors of understanding not malice. But – beyond the whole issue of how opening up the continent meant inevitable European settlement – both explorers conformed to the tradition of naming places that already had indigenous names, and both helped themselves to game such as kangaroo without consideration of the needs of nomadic hunter-gatherers, even though they noticed that some of them were skinny.

Both expeditions included artists engaged to make studies of flora, fauna and the landscape (and there is a whole fascinating chapter about that) but they were to some extent captive to their own preconceived ideas about indigenous peoples. On the one hand there are precious portraits, scraps of language and records of cultural practices and artefacts of Tasmanian Aborigines from tribes now lost – but on the other hand some of the portraits are representations that bear more relationship to Greek statuary than to any real person. Careless acts such as the desecration of Aboriginal tombs by the Baudin Expedition on Maria Island are noted, and there was also a disconcerting incident in the Gulf of Carpentaria when friendly relations turned sour and – contravening Flinders’ orders – an Aborigine was shot. Under Flinders’ command there was no punishment for those responsible, as there should have been.

Interesting as the all these facts are, what made this book work for me was the voices of Baudin and Flinders. The translations by Jean Fornasiero are flawless and it is a delight to read the impressions of these brave and dedicated men in their own words. My favourite is this one, from Flinders, about the future of Sydney:

Amongst the obstacles which opposed themselves to the more rapid advancement of the colony, the principal were, the vicious propensities of a large portion of the convicts, a want of more frequent communication with England, and the prohibition to trading with India and the western coasts of South America, in consequence of the East-India-Company’s charter. As these difficulties become obviated and capital increases, the progress of the colonists will be more rapid; and if the resources from government be not withdrawn too early, there is little doubt of New South Wales being one day a flourishing country, and of considerable benefit to the commerce and navigation of the parent state. (p200)

The first edition of Encountering Terra Australis won the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Book Prize in 2004, and Daniel Fazio at the Australian Public Intellectuals Network found this book ‘engrossing, very readable and superbly illustrated’ . It deserves to be widely read, and not just by historians.

PS In the course of looking for an image of the map that Flinders started out with, I came across a terrific ABC site called The Navigators which includes amongst other things, an interactive map of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia in 1802-3.

Authors: Jean Fornasiero; Peter Monteath, and John West-Sooby.
Title: Encountering Terra Australis: the Australian voyages of Nicholas Baudin and Matthew Flinders
Publishers: Wakefield Press, 2011 (Second edition, first published 2004).
ISBN: 9781862548749
Source: review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press

Availability: Fishpond: Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders
or direct from Wakefield Press. (You can buy it as an eBook there too, but then you’d miss out on the gorgeousness of the book!)

Book review: The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, by Mungo MacCallum

Just in case there are some secondary teachers of history or politics who read this blog, I’m cross-posting this review from my ANZ LitLovers blog…

Guess which Australian Prime Minister counted his three greatest achievements as winning a Cambridge Blue, captaining the St Andrews Golf Club (the one in Scotland, not the one at Gunnamatta) and being a member of the Royal Society? Not, you will have noticed, running our country for six years. He’d have had to have been here in this country for that, and he wasn’t any too interested in Australia, hanging out in London for most of his adult life including large chunks of his term of office. Presumably he thought that running our little backwater was a minor achievement, perhaps analogous with managing the staff in a country house.

Give up? Stanley Melbourne Bruce (1923-29) was his name (christened thus to acknowledge the place where his family made their impressive fortune) but (serves him right) this arrogant prat’s claim to fame is that he left the economy in ruins and was so out of touch with the electorate that he lost his own seat when they booted his government out in 1929. (John Howard (1996-2007) is the only other PM to suffer this ignominy, in the rubble of the Kevin 07 landslide).

This and many other interesting titbits come from Mungo MacCallum’s entertaining new book, The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, Australia’s Prime Ministers. It is just the antidote needed for an electorate that is bored witless by what passes for political debate in this country at the moment, and a salutary reminder that, as PM Paul Keating said in the election campaign that he lost to Howard, leadership does matter.

If you’re like me and have paid mild attention to politics for most of your life, you’ll already know a fair bit about our most recent PMs, so it’s the early ones that will be the most interesting. MacCallum lifts them out of the dry and dusty pages of our early political history with amusing anecdotes, and he analyses their contribution with a wry eye. While I would have liked this book to include a timeline* and for each chapter heading about each PM to have included the term of office* this is a terrific survey of our political history as well as an interesting portrait of each leader. MacCallum has been around the Aussie political landscape so long that there’s not much each doesn’t know about it. As he tells us, his lifespan is covered by 15 PMs, of whom he’s met 12, and been on first-name terms with 11. This familiarity, he says, accounts for his ‘less than worshipful tone’ but, a-hem, he’s none too worshipful of the long-dead ones either…

And why should he be? Let’s face it, Australians are not very good at tugging the forelock or doffing the cap, to politicians dead or alive. And MacCallum seems to be fair. He goes out of his way to identify the achievements of some whose reputation has been trashed by history, even finding a few kind words for Joseph Lyons who is basically only famous (if famous at all) for having a wife who became Australia’s first female minister. Goodness me, there’s some interesting goss about his cradle-snatching romance with her!

But at the end of the day we’ve had a few duds in the job, and MacCallum says so. (Nothing comparable with, a-hem, political leaders in a certain very powerful country, though. Nobody who took advice from astrologers, for example. Nobody starting unwinnable wars, or supporting torture when it suits. Our duds have mostly stuck to general incompetence or just being derivative and dull.)

Some of our PMs were just unlucky – and the poor old Labor Party with its penchant for taking office in times of economic downturn and crises not of its making had more than its share of those. (The ALP has also created a lot of their own problems, of course, but hey, how boring would Oz Politics be if we didn’t have Labor Party dramas to liven things up?) One of the unluckiest was James Scullin (1929-32) who led the nation during the worst of the Depression, but he’s one of my favourites because the Commonwealth Literary Fund was his baby even though they bundled him out of office before it got off the ground. He also – way, way back in 1931 – established the Arnhem Land Reserve in the Northern Territory, a brave landmark step towards land rights for our indigenous people.

I’d read David Day’s excellent biography John Curtin: A Life some years ago so I already knew a fair bit about Curtin (1941-45) Australia’s most-admired PM, who steered the country through WW2 and died in harness from overwork. But MacCallum also draws on a biography by Lloyd Rees, and his summary of Curtin’s achievements, his selflessness and his courage is a good introduction for those not motivated to read a biography the length of Day’s. (It’s 784 pages, so you have to be keen).

What does this lovable pooch at left have to do with MacCallum’s book? I’ve been waiting for a ‘relevant’ opportunity to upload a picture of our dear little dog on this book blog and this is it: his name is Chifley, named after Prime Minister Ben Chifley (1945-49). A friend had suggested that our little refugee from The Lost Dogs Home looked like Churchill, but like many Aussies I have ambivalent feelings about Churchill. His WW2 demand for our Aussie troops had the effect of leaving Australia unprotected against the Japanese onslaught. It was PM John Curtin who brought the troops home and who for a fortnight while they were at sea suffered agonies of fear for their safety – because Churchill wouldn’t provide an escort and the route home was the haunt of Japanese subs. So no, while Churchill is a great hero who stood alone against the Nazis for most of the war, The Spouse and I weren’t going to name our Aussie pooch after him.

We couldn’t in all honesty name him after Curtin either. Our stoic little patrolman is more loved than admired (because he is, alas, a pooch of Very Little Brain), so we named him Chifley instead. (Because, I hasten to add, everybody loves him, not because his namesake had any deficit in the brains department. Far from it.) Since we don’t know Chifley’s date of birth (except for an approximate vet-guess based on how many teeth he had), we celebrate his birthday on September 22nd, the same as his namesake Ben’s. Proof of enduring affection for the PM who bears his name occurs whenever during our daily walks he is introduced to older Australians, who always smile in recognition, and murmur something about what a great man Ben Chifley was. (BTW Sapphire – aka Marie Antoinette in a past life – is only included here on this post because she will sulk if she finds out that Chifley is internationally famous and she’s not. She is on the Right because that is her political preference since – as befits her aristocratic pedigree – she is much opposed to Chifley’s welfare, or anyone else’s for that matter).

Chifley’s Home in Bathurst

Anyway, Ben Chifley was another one of the better PMs. David Day has also written a fine biography Chifley: A Life but again, it’s long (720 pages) as a definitive bio tends to be, and MacCallum’s 10 pages is a handy introduction to the man who is Australia’s best-loved PM. He came from humble beginnings, and never lost his touch with the common people. He refused to live in The Lodge and commuted by train from his modest home in Bathurst. (A must-visit site if you’re in the area, even if you’re not interested in politics). Chifley began his career as an unskilled labourer and rose to this country’s highest office because of his hard work, determination, and integrity, but he was also ambitious from an early age because he saw that political power was the way to make things better for ordinary people.

But some of our PMs were, to use the Australian vernacular, drongoes. Joseph Cook (1913-1914), for example, was a ‘drab and colourless figure’, ‘left no record of wit or flamboyance’ and presided over ‘fifteen months of spectacular non-achievement’. He was also the first of the Labor ‘rats’ i.e he abandoned his own party over the conscription issue and helped to form Billy Hughes’ minority Nationalist government. Hughes, of course, was the quintessential ratbag politician, who ‘was in at the birth of six political parties, led five of them, served as a minister in four of them and ratted on three’.

One of the aspects of American politics that’s always baffled me is the public prurience about their politicians’ private lives. They probe and prod until they find some indiscretion as if it has anything to do with the hapless candidate’s competence for public office, and they end up excluding some of their best and brightest because he had some foolish dalliance with a kiss-and-tell opportunist. Someone like Harold Holt (1966-1967) wouldn’t have had a chance if his private life had been the subject of press scrutiny. He had a long-standing affair and fathered a number of sons while his eventual wife was married to somebody else, but (even though the other politicians must have known about it) nobody took any notice of his playboy image because the Australian media has mostly minded its own business and kept out of so-called sex scandals.

Holt was heir apparent to Robert Menzies (1949-1966) who made my mother weep when he retired – though there were probably plenty of others quietly cheering on the other side because he was our longest-serving PM and had been unbeatable in the polls. MacCallum has much to say about Menzies, (how could he not, given his political longevity?) but this post is getting a bit long so I’ll content myself with sharing a little ditty that he quotes from ‘those centres of ferment, the universities’:

There’ll always be a Menzies
While there’s a BHP
For they have drawn their dividends
Since 1893.

There’ll always be a Menzies
For Menzies never fails
As long as nothing happens to
The Bank of New South Wales.

If we should lose our Menzies
Wherever should we be
If Menzies means as much to you
As Menzies means to me.

MacCallum makes the point that Menzies was lucky to preside over a long period of post-war prosperity. His championship of the White Australia Policy and support for Apartheid South Africa to remain in the Commonwealth makes his legacy more dubious than his reputation would suggest, but hey, the Australian people voted him in, time and time again. The economy was good, things were stable, relaxed and comfortable, and the Opposition was a disorganised rabble with the most uncharismatic leader you could imagine. I’ve never forgiven Menzies for dragging Australia into the Vietnam War and introducing conscription (for 20 year-olds to young to vote for or against it), but again, that decision was decisively endorsed by the Australian people.

That’s democracy for you.

This is a terrific book. Highly recommended.

© Lisa Hill

*These links go to the National Archives timeline but it’s very clunky. I can’t get it to link to a succinct timeline that just shows the PMs and when they ruled. To get that, and not an interminable list of everything everyone ever did that’s not very fascinating, scroll down the page to ‘Search Timelines by Category’ and you should see ‘All PMs’ ticked and the radio button for Prime Ministers already selected. Scroll down and click Go and you will get a nice timeline that shows the PMs in chronological order and a one-sentence summary of each one. But it will do you no good to bookmark that timeline because it reverts to the long and boring one. Bookmark where you started from i.e. http://primeministers.naa.gov.au/timeline/

Author: Mungo MacCallum
TItle: The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely, Australia’s Prime Ministers
Publisher: Black Inc, 2012
ISBN: 9781863955539
Source: Won in a Black Inc competition.

Availability:
Fishpond:
The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers

Book review: Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier by Adrian Mitchell

The publication of Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier by Adrian Mitchell is not just of interest to readers keen on Australian history, it’s timely for another reason.

Starting in 2013, Australian teachers will begin teaching the new national Australian Curriculum, and so any primary school teacher under the age of 40 will probably need to learn something about the history of European Exploration. It was, I believe, last taught as a compulsory topic in the 1956 Course of Study when students of my vintage laboriously traced maps into exercise books and with coloured pencils marked the voyages of assorted explorers across the world’s oceans. I found it fascinating because of Miss Baird, who told us tales of high adventure, danger and mayhem while we struggled to keep those dotted lines even and in the right place. I loved Miss Baird. She was young and pretty, and, I now realise, she had taken the trouble to jazz up her lessons by doing some background reading that went beyond the dry facts mandated by the Victorian Department of Education.

The 21st century version of that curriculum for 9 year-olds in their fifth year of schooling looks like this:

The Level 4 curriculum introduces world history and the movement of peoples. Beginning with the history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, students examine European exploration and colonisation in Australia and throughout the world up to the early 1800s. Students examine the impact of exploration on other societies, how these societies interacted with newcomers, and how these experiences contributed to their cultural diversity. (ACARA, The Humanities – History)

And the mandated content goes like this:

The journey(s) of AT LEAST ONE world navigator, explorer or trader up to the late eighteenth century, including their contacts with other societies and any impacts. (Content description ACHHK078)

The (non-compulsory) suggested examples are Christopher Columbus, Vasco de Gama, or Ferdinand Magellan – but I hope some teachers choose the politically incorrect buccaneer William Dampier instead. He was the first to circumnavigate the world three times, so he counts as a world explorer, but he’s much more interesting to Aussies because in 1688 (100 years before James Cook’s portentous landing at Botany Bay on the east coast) Dampier in the Cygnet became the first English explorer to make landfall in Australia. And if he wasn’t a pirate, he was perilously close to it…

Alas for Mr Dampier, he landed on what he found to be an unprepossessing north-west coast and didn’t find any opportunities for either plunder or trade. Although he returned in 1699 in the Roebuck for more than his previous cursory inspection, in one of those fascinating ‘what might have been’ moments of history, he dismissed the West Australian coast and its inhabitants as unworthy of further notice. So Cook and his Union Jack got the gig as the explorer who claimed Australia for the British, and Dampier was relegated to comparative obscurity…

But as Adrian Mitchell’s book makes clear, Dampier deserves better. Even though the biographical details are a bit scanty, and Dampier himself rejected any suggestion that he was a rogue, enough is known about him for us to be sure that he was more than a bit disreputable, which – let’s face it – makes him much more interesting for kids to learn about than the respectable Captain Cook!

If teachers do decide to lift Dampier from his relative obscurity, they will find Adrian Mitchell’s Dampier’s Monkey a useful resource for background information. They will discover, for example, the reasons that Dampier didn’t – as he wished to – explore more of the ‘New Holland’ coast. I was enchanted to discover why on his first voyage he didn’t sail south:

Like all buccaneers, Dampier navigated the world’s oceans in the hope of making money, and he was especially keen on finding precious metals, i.e. gold and silver. His New Holland Plan was, clearly, to make his fortune in this new world, and that meant finding gold, preferably gold already dug up by accommodating natives who could be persuaded by one means or another to part with it. This ambition cost him a significant place in the history of Australian exploration, and for a reason I could never have guessed.

Though he occasionally found it handy to use sailors’ superstitions to persuade others to do what he wanted, Dampier was a rational man who made his decisions on the basis of known evidence. He sailed north and not south because he reasoned that ‘the gold and silver which the new continent must surely contain would be in the tropic latitudes, as everywhere else around the world’ (p125). This ‘concept of geology determined by geographic zone’ with ‘echoes of an older, medieval notion of some correlation between warmth and mineral wealth’ (p126) precluded Western Australia’s Kalgoorlie and South Africa’s Johannesburg as well as California and the Klondike in the Northern hemisphere, not to mention the lucrative Victorian goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo and Bathurst in New South Wales.

(Mind you, if he had sailed south, he’d have had a bit of a hike to find the nuggets lying about in Kalgoorlie because it’s a good six hundred kilometres inland and there’s a good reason for the pipeline that runs alongside the highway all the way from Perth; there’s very little water to be had. Still, he would have found some very desirable real estate all the same.)

HMS Roebuck 1690, source Wikipedia Commons

And why on his second voyage in the Roebuck didn’t he explore the eastern coast as he wished to? For the most prosaic of reasons – because of borers in his ship. After the publication of his first book, New Voyage Round the World in 1697 there was a lot of enthusiasm for this second voyage but less so for provisioning it, and the ship he was fobbed off with was deficient in many respects. So having made the first detailed survey of the flora and fauna of Shark Bay, and discovered to his dismay that the local Aborigines had no concept of trade that he could exploit, Dampier had to abandon the rest of his plans because of the incompetence of his ship’s carpenter, and set sail for Timor. Just as well he did, because it wasn’t long before the ship sank, off Ascension Island. Fortunately Dampier was able to salvage his journals and some specimens, and it was his expert navigational records that eventually enabled the wreck of the Roebuck to be located by divers in 2001 and some relics including its bell to be salvaged.)

What I found from Mitchell’s book is that it’s not the bare facts of Dampier’s journey that make him so interesting. You can find those on Wikipedia:

Dampier reached Dirk Hartog Island at the mouth of what he called Shark Bay in Western Australia. He landed and began producing the first known detailed record of Australian flora and fauna. The images are believed to be by his clerk James Brand. Dampier then followed the coast northeast, reaching the Dampier Archipelago and then Lagrange Bay, just south of what is now called Roebuck Bay all the while recording and collecting specimens, including many shells. (The Roebuck Expedition, Wikipedia)

What Mitchell does is to analyse Dampier’s journals and his published books to discover discrepancies between them. Dampier began sailing at a time when a blind eye was turned towards buccaneering; the spoils it brought benefitted cash-strapped kings and it led to the development of all-important trade. But James II issued a proclamation against piracy, and Dampier was hauled before the Board of Trade twice (1697 and 1698) and court-martialled too in 1702. It was his books which saved him and his reputation: while the pirate Captain Kidd was strung up and his body left in chains on display to warn others not to replicate his crimes, Dampier was a guest of Samuel Pepys in 1698 and presented to Queen Anne in 1703.

His journals are the key to this differential treatment: while his style was influenced by The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, a book of marvels and monsters based on Mandeville’s supposed travels first circulated between 1357 and 1371, , Dampier’s books documented marvels that he had seen and actually knew about, based on the careful observations in his ship journals. New Voyage Round the World (1697) and its successors Voyages and Discoveries (1699) and the two-part Voyage to New Holland (1703 and 1709) were written to captivate his readers with artful descriptions of massive birds and peculiar animals, but in a rational and coherent way. Dampier was arguably the first of the great travel writers.

Mitchell also includes a very interesting chapter about the words that Dampier introduced into English. He was very keen to report back using the indigenous words for things, and this is how we have the word ‘gong’ and also ‘barbecue’!

So you’d think that Dampier’s journal of the 1681-1691 voyage in the South Seas would have made it into print long before this, but no, it’s in this book by Mitchell that we can see it for the first time, complete with Dampier’s (sometimes sanitising) annotations and written in that eccentric seventeenth century spelling as well. (I’d be tempted to give a short extract to a small group of clever Year 4 students for a fun proof-reading exercise!)

The cover illustration is of Norman Lindsay’s The Landing of Dampier (1925), and there are also some interesting reproductions of maps and engravings from Dampier’s books, including one accompanying his record of sailing through a violent storm to Aceh after being deliberately marooned on Nicobar Island. Dampier and his Companions in their Canoe, overtaken by a dreadfull Storm (1777) which (unlike most of the rest of them) is actually in the National Library of Australia.

Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages is a scholarly work and here and there it’s a bit arcane, a bit opaque for a general reader. If you’re trying to find a simple summary of why Dampier matters in the history of Australian exploration then this is not the book for you. But to discover the life and interests of a complex, influential and morally ambiguous man who played an important part in the development of natural science, linguistics and anthropology, it is worth the effort.

Miss Baird would have thought so. She’s actually the only teacher whose name I remember from the patchwork of primary schools I attended across three continents. Her approach has to be worth emulating, I would say.

Cross-posted at ANZLitLovers.

© Lisa Hill

Author: Adrian Mitchell
Title: Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier
Publisher: Wakefield 2011
ISBN: 9781862547599
Source: review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press

Availability:
Fishpond: Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier or direct from Wakefield Press.

Book review: Meerreeng-an: Here is My Country, edited by Chris Keeler and Vicki Couzens

Most of the stuff that lands in my pigeonhole at work is either administrivia or wasteful paper catalogues for the library, but every now and again there’s a bit of treasure.

So it is with Meerreeng-an: Here is My Country, The Story of Aboriginal Victoria Told Through Art.  It is stunningly gorgeous and every school in Victoria has been lucky enough to receive one.

The Story Cycle is arranged in nine themes arranged to explain central cultural concepts.  There are stories and artworks showcasing

• Koorie Creation myths;
• the transmission of culture and law;
• ceremonies, music and dance;
• cloaks, clothing and jewellery, and
• land management, foods, fishing, hunting, weapons and tools

The experience of invasion and conflict is also explored, and resilience is celebrated in the sections about culture and identity, country and kin.

The book has numerous examples of artworks matched with stories which explain Aboriginal culture and beliefs to non-indigenous Australians like me, but for copyright reaseons I’m not able to share the artwork here.  However you can see some of it at Culture Victoria and there is also a video that shows how a kangaroo tooth necklace was made.  Click these links to get an idea of the contents:

• The Time of Chaos told by Carolyn Briggs and Bunjil the Eagle created by Mandy Nicholson.  This is the creation story that explains how plains along the southern coast of Victoria were inundated to form Port Phillip Bay.  In the book this is also matched with a beautiful kangaroo skin cloak created by Mandy Nicholson.  It is painted to form a map of Port Phillip Bay and all the rivers that flow into it.  Every Melbourne schoolkid should know this story and the role of Bunjil the Eagle who resolved conflict between two warring nations and is the protector of our city.
• How the Murray River Was Made told by Irene Thomas and Snake and Water-lilies created by Ralph Nichollas is another creation story.
• The Possum Skin Cloak designed by Wally Cooper isn’t just gorgeous, it’s also symbolic of the warmth and the safety of belonging and of knowing who you are.
• The Eel Pot created by Doris Paton represents food cycles – hunting and gathering bush tucker.
• Rachel Mullett’s painting ‘Metung’ and poem will touch your heart.

This is a fabulous resource for schools, (and invaluable for the Aboriginal Culture and History Cross-Curriculum Priority in the new Australian Curriculum, but it’s also essential reading for anyone interested in Aboriginal art and culture.

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers.

© Lisa Hill

Title: MEERREENG-AN HERE IS MY COUNTRY: The Story of Aboriginal Victoria Told Through Art
Edited by Chris Keeler and Vicki Couzens
Publisher: Koorie Heritage Trust, Melbourne, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9807863-0-9 (Paperback) ISBN 978-0-9807863-1-6 (Hardback); 256 pp, full colour

You can buy it from the Koorie Heritage Trust RRP $49.95 soft cover; $79.95 hardback

What Brings History Alive? Anna Clark (HTAA Conference 2011)

Can history be engaging, fun even, and  have integrity? [i.e. history should be interesting, but not dumbed down].

1. What makes it fun? 

The community is very interested in history but that doesn’t seem to translate into the classroom. There is interest in heritage trusts, visits to historical buildings,family history, books (historical fiction, biography), passing on items of historical interest to the next generation – there’s huge popular interest in the past.

Ashton and Hamilton research – noted interest in popular history, but found  disinterest in a formal historical narrative such as taught in school.  In America, research likewise showed that history was thought to be boring.   Clark’s research confirms these findings, a current oral history research project builds on her previous research within schools and extends it into the community.  People of all ages and backgrounds are not engaged with the formal national narrative.  Young Australians have been exposed to the national story but don’t connect with it.  Older people seem to be interested in social history, personal stories, not kings and queens or past eras.  The intimate  past is alive, but is it history?? How to translate this into historical understandings so that people are aware of – and can engage in – the complex debates about major historical issues?

[The quotations Clark seemed to me to show the respondents to be stuck back in the primary history agenda for Prep – year 2,  of connecting at a very simplistic level with a personal past, and not having moved on intellectually].

Media criticism about students not knowing history isn’t fair, because it simply reflects attitudes held in the community anyway.  Teachers know that it’s important to make it real, to provide a personal connection and an immediacy so that students will want to engage in history. Clark noted that it’s easier to get that engagement on the topic of war, with its personal stories, than it is with Federation.

Why the disconnect?

2. Historical integrity. 

It’s not enough to get them interested, students need to develop historical understanding at a broader level.  There’s plenty of evidence that too few children know about Barton, what Australia Day means etc.  The public response falls into two opposing camps: teach ‘em the facts v teach them stuff that interests students.  This is why there is so much heated discussion about history teaching in the media.

Clark thinks that the aim should be to teach students to be historians, and doing history requires knowledge and expertise.  They can’t have informed opinions and debates without knowing what happened at some level.  Skills are needed and so is knowledge.  It’s not enough to have fun, and the skills are not intuitive, they have to be learned.

Essential skills

1. History is soooooo much more than simply knowing what happened.   Factoids and mere fragments of knowledge are not history.  It’s not a disaster if a date or name is forgotten, the point is that students should actually understand the history behind events, but….

2. Having said that it’s also really important to know what happened.   You can’t know or understand the historical story if you don’t.  It’s getting the balance right that’s hard. There needs to be a narrative, a chronology and at the same time to have enough of the detail.

3. Historiography: Students need to know that there is no one right story, e.g. alternative ways of interpreting the Aboriginal story, or the bicentennial.  Teachers needs to challenge students to go beyond right v wrong, B&W, and look at the grey areas. That’s what thinking historically is all about.

4. Moral judgement in history:  Students need to learn how to pass judgement on the past?  To explore issues such as aHiroshima or colonialism  – who was right and wrong, how to step back into the minds of the time about wanting to end the war or bring ‘civilisation’ to other parts of the world – and at the same time deploy 21st century perspective on it.  This is thinking historically.

None of these essential skills will be learned, however, without some personal connection.  This is as true of the national curriculum as every other curriculum.  Tony Taylor at the HTAA conference in Sydney said that history has to be ‘teachable’, around the country.

It’s a challenge!

Keynote address History Teachers Conference: Prof Stuart McIntyre

(Prof McIntyre along with Tony Taylor, has been a Lead Writer involved in the writing of the Australian History Curriculum)

It’s three years since work on the National Curriculum began: it’s now at an advanced stage and ministers for education have agreed to staged implementation.  It’s hardly been rushed…and while it’s been making slow progress….

…the consensus about implementing it has since  weakened due to the federal election and successive state elections, and there have been discouraging statements from the opposition. 

Prof McIntyre has some reservations about some changes:  Some recent revisions have altered the underlying design of the curriculum, and some have taken no account of the consultative process.

It was initially determined that the curriculum had to start from first principles, not be an amalgam of existing curricula, have a futures perspective and so on. The issue of there being distinct disciplines is one that McIntyre agrees with, and he was pleased that History is conceptualised as it is in AC. It’s important that history be a World History, it needs to go beyond what’s familiar and dear to us. The writers also recognised that most Australian children found history classes boring and they wanted to redress this.

The AC document partially realises its aims. The primary curriculum is less than he had hoped, because it’s constrained by lack of time available, and because it’s mostly taught within an integrated curriculum.  most primary teachers are not trained historians. Remains to be seen how much time it gets given the focus on literacy and numeracy.  It’s not much about a world history; it’s about home, community, and the nation (in later primary years).  It’s very Australian – some minor comparisons e.g. NAIDOC day can be compared with Bastille Day, but it’s overwhelmingly local – given that Australia has an immigrant background, it’s remarkable that there’s no greater attempt to invoke their histories. There’s still a lot about military history, and it’s a bit Eurocentric. In later years Asian history is episodic, and there’s not enough about other countries.   No history can be fully comprehensive, but it could be better, he thinks.

Digitisation has brought history out of its previously specialised academic limitations – the problem now is not opportunity. School history needs to excite so that students have the skills to evaluate what’s online.  But many teachers want to hang on to topics they’re comfortable with, and the history curriculum has had to cede some of its topics to social science, that is, many of the big picture issues that history might excite students with, e.g. globalisation, were criticised because that was ‘current affairs’. 

So – what happens next rests with the teachers who have to implement it!

HTAA Conference opening address: Closing the Achievement Gap

Closing the Achievement Gap: will the national education agenda be a help or a hindrance?

Prof Alan Reid, University of South Australia

NB These are notes taken at the History Teachers Association conference, and they are done ‘on the run’ so they may not fully represent what was said. If I had made any errors please contact me ASAP and I will correct them.

Equity: increasing national influence over education which has been the province of the states. Reid supports the principle, but has some concerns re equity.
Equity = dominant theme in national agenda, revival of its importance, talk of closing the achievement gap and used to make judgements about education programs.
Reid thinks most programs are counter productive because processes are superficial and lacking in education research – won’t achieve the rhetoric.

History of education and equity in Australia -

1870- 1960s
concept of equity weak – schools established for working class children, basic, elementary schooling for the purposes of social control.  Secondary education was for middle and upper class children who’d be leaders – over the century access broadened via an emerging ideology that had a liberal, meritocratic agenda – people could succeed if they had the ability, interest and capacity for hard work. But it didn’t take account of child’s background so it tended to replicate existing patterns.  Most children still left at 14 or went to tech.  Exceptions ‘proved’ that this system ‘worked’. 
1960s – early 1990s
Post-war demand for better opportunity – age of compulsion rose to 15,  economy needed more skilled workers, need for more mass education, finishing secondary education

became the norm, and 70s and 80s states funded eg disadvantaged schools program to redress unequal outcomes.  Realisation that equity was not just an individual concern, also collective and social – wanting all children to contribute.  Recognise of barriers e.g. from particular barriers which needed to be removed, curriculum and resource barriers.  Research showed that tackling inequity was more complex than first thought.  Strategies – funding policies, curriculum reforms, teaching strategies to broaden away from favouring certain cultural groups. Not a golden age, some inroads made and recognise that sustainable long  term change would be difficult.

1990s – 2007
Education as a key factor in economic reform.  Economic purposes of education strengthened with ideological twist: market ; talk of equity waned: a positional good for individuals not a social good, choice and competition.

2007 -present (Rudd/ Gillard)
- equity returns to centre stage – goal lifting retention rates to 90% , lifting participation for disadvantaged groups, improving outcomes for Aboriginal children etc.  Equity has a visible presence in rhetoric, but there’s no clear meaning of what equity means, so equity is shaped by 3 dominant ideologies:
1. preparation for workforce
2. schools operate best when they compete against each other in an  education market
3. Best way to achieve quality is via transparent accountability to enable consumer choice and strategies to motivate teachers.

PISA and NAPLAN are used to assess progress. These enable assertions about gaps, but not in effective strategies to change anything.  Only simplistic policy solutions, which don’t and won’t work.

Reid’s analysis:
1. Policy simplification
2. Policy borrowing
3. Policy catch-up

1.  Policy simplification
Tanner shows how policy is being dumbed down in Australia – in education this is true too. e.g.
* Causes of problems rarely explored with frequent leaps from problem to solution. e.g. research about quality teaching has leapt into focus as the sole factor instead of looking at other matters such as child background and it sets up false expectations and is doomed to failure.  Any criticism is met with response that you don’t care about quality teaching.
* language of certainty: ‘it’s the right thing to do’.  NAPLAN raised as ‘real and true’ sole arbiter of truth, more nuanced data excluded as soft.
* strident over-claiming about its benefits – first draft of national curriculum said it was a world class curriculum, claiming world status. Politicians chest thumping about standardised testing showing improvement = result of policies they’ve put in place.
* Professional educations not trusted, often blamed and rarely consulted.
* Increasing trust of people with no expertise in education, non-experts in education gaining a hold in policy circles.  e.g. business people, lawyers, journalists, etc. Bill Gates is involved in policy in the US. Here in Australia, Murdoch in 2008despite spending more and more money presented Boyer lectures Golden Age of Freedom, one dedicated to education, an American businessman talking about education during the GFC, in Australia, UK and US, ‘our public education systems are a disgrace’ ‘children learning less and less’ – no evidence given for this, apportioned blame to the public school educators.  His reasons for wanting equity are economic not social justice, 3 strategies needed: set higher standards; holding schools to account, corporations should get involved in schools especially at the lower leaders b/c they know better than anyone else what’s needed to make sure children ‘at least a basic education’.  (Don’t quote this online without checking properly).  Quoted some very amusing and reductive ideas from Murdoch which would be funny if he had no influence. The speech was widely reported and very favourably.  Since then he has outlined plans for the Murdoch corporation to become a major provider of educational materials, and has recently spent big on this agenda. 

Policy borrowing
Risky to import from other countries with a different culture.  Education Revolution borrows from New York. In 2002 Joel Klein lawyer and businessman was appointed in charge of education system – they had to change the rules b/c he had no background in education.  he used to lifting the gap rhetoric, and designed an education program to improve it i.e. he set up

• the use of standardised test results,
• awarding schools public grades with consequences, i.e. the school got grants if A, principals removed or school closed down if graded E or F
• Bonuses to principals and schools for rewards
• Charter schools offering ‘choice’
• Promoted the ‘Teach for America’ program – recruitment of top graduates from other areas, gave them 6 weeks teacher training and then put them into disadvantaged schools.

Two years later Klein claimed great improvement, though there were vociferous protests from communities when disadvantaged schools closed.  Julia Gillard was education minister at this time and invited him here, and she had no doubt about his effectiveness, claiming his ideas to be ‘morally compelling and intellectually convincing’.  So our ‘Education Revolution’ resembles Klein’s agenda:

• My School 1 & 2
• Performance bonuses for schools with improved NAPLAN
• Performance bonuses for teachers and principals
• Autonomous schools (like Charter schools)
• Teach for Australia

What’s wrong with this?  Apart from the fact that we have different circumstances, and different contexts, there are these problems:

1. If we’re going to borrow, borrow from successful countries. Assuming international PISA tests have validity, US was ranked 29th and Australia 15th in Maths results, and Australia 9th and17th US in reading results.  We should have borrowed from Canada or Finland who are ranked higher than us not below us.
2. It ignores research from US and UK which shows the failures of these ‘accountability’ regimes. They narrow the curriculum, and they get phony results because schools exclude students, teach from the test, they cheat etc. There are NO improved outcomes overall.   Performance bonuses show they don’t work, and they diminish teacher collegiality as well. 
3. We should investigate in depth the claims made by people like Klein before transplanting the policy. In 2009 84% of schools were A rated – apparently huge advances, and Klein was riding high then.  The US mayor used these results to bolster his re-election, and Gillard became enamoured of this approach. But claims subsequently surfaced that the tests were getting easier, and teachers could prepare the students because the test didn’t change from year to year, and the benchmark was being lowered.  When a new test was introduced due to public pressure, (a national test) – results plummeted.  Over half the schools failed English, worse for black and Latino students.  This revealed the agenda as sham, and NY parents protested about exaggerated results because it denied help to children.  The equity gap as wide as ever it was…

These results were replicated in other US states which adopted the regime too. Klein quickly resigned and went elsewhere, i.e. to Murdoch’s education division.  

But this is the regime that Gillard wants to impose.  *sigh*

3. Policy catch-up (policy ‘Spakfiller’)
As problems emerge from implementing AC Phases 1 & 2, curriculum writers have to paper over the cracks,  handicapped by previous policy statements that were made. 

The National curriculum began with just 4 subjects and had no sense about the other subjects, no coherent ideas about them and then they were gradually added in phases 1 & 2. (ACARA says this was always intended because of the Melbourne Declaration).  But the subjects not in The Big 4 can only pick up the scraps so the lack of an overall curriculum design is problematic.

The Implementation timetables had to be altered anyway because the original timetable was unrealistic – so they could have actually redesigned the whole curriculum while they had time.  Conceptually opportunities have been lost.  Catch up work still needs to be done to patch the gaps, for example:. 
1. Assessment and reporting: the nature of achievement standards not thought out well, there’s no common approach within subjects or between them.  Some are just summaries of content.
2. General capabilities – were supposed to be so important e.g. creativity: but naming and defining them has not been done well so individual writers had to do the best they could.  Catch up now being done, but there’s still no conceptualisation about what they are.
3. Approaches to equity and curriculum – no statement about principles to be followed, ACARA is currently advertising for people to give advice about that.
4. Interdisciplinary work – should/could have provided triggers or signals for this to be done, again catch up being done.

The curriculum has a narrow, emaciated, individualised view of equity: it’s counterproductive to achieving equity- public test results and holding individual schools to account won’t change anything.  It’s a complex area, and it’s galling that instant non experts are destroying the hard won gains over the years. 

Our curriculum should 

• Be based on a developed and articulated view of equality
• Be thorough and systematic and recognise complexities
• Be based on research
• Not reinforce inequities
• Trust the profession
• Be wary of hyper inflated claims

Thanks to the History Teachers Association of South Australia for hosting a great conference!

PS I will tidy these notes up a bit when I get home and it’s not costing me  a mint to be online.

HTAV Primary Teachers Conference 2010

The HTAV Primary Teachers conference was a disappointment.  This is a real pity because it was great to see this secondary subject association offer its expertise to primary teachers for the first time.  That the conference didn’t live up to its promise is probably nobody’s fault: the timing was premature…

I booked myself in (paying the registration myself) because it was advertised as an opportunity to identify the differences between the new national curriculum and the Victorian VELS.  As Director of Curriculum, I wanted to explore these implications in detail so that we could make an informed start on implementing the new curriculum in 2011.  Partly because of the political hiatus in Canberra and Tony Abbott’s threats to jettison the history curriculum if he forms government, and partly because our local Powers- That-Be have by their own startling admission made no plans to provide practical support for its implementation, the conference floundered around in a bit of a vacuum. 

David Boon, the keynote presenter was wonderful.  I had heard him do a presentation at the History Summer School in Canberra and once again he was able to focus in on (probable) key themes in the draft curriculum with examples of how it could be brought to life for young children.  I would dearly love to be able to access his ideas and resources online but I suspect that there’s not going to be any funding for anything as useful and practical as that!

I also went to a really good session about using ICT in the history curriculum.  Louise O’Doughery had some great practical ideas, all focussed on the premise that an interactive whiteboard is best used by the students so that it generates discussion.  Alas for the profession, this talented teacher is leaving teaching to work for a whiteboard company – for all the hot air talked by politicians state and federal about improving teaching standards there still seems to be no way to retain our best and brightest.  Would a teacher like Louise be lured into staying for a vague promise of a possible occasional bonus if her class results are better than the rest?  Of course not.  It’s a stupid idea, Julia Gillard.  (Who is this twerp who has the PM’s ear about education, importing the most stupid of stupid ideas from the US??  It is this ‘faceless’ man or woman I’d like to see lose influence in Canberra!)

The publishers’ stands were a bit of a disappointment too.  The same old cultural institutions (Arts Centre, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, etc) promoted their wares, but there was only one very limited display of books that could be used to bring history to life.  Perhaps because I teach history in my library classes I have a better idea than most about how a well-chosen picture book or serial can transport kids back to the past, and I would have liked to have  seen a collection of diverse titles from a major supplier (e.g. Scholastic or Link).  Perhaps they were approached and couldn’t/wouldn’t do it?  I don’t know.

What this conference revealed to all of us there on the day was that primary teachers are, as usual, on their own, with no support from our employer, for the implementation of curriculum.  We will be expected to develop our own units of work, in our own time, and – no doubt – encouraged to share them on the Ultranet.  We will have to spend hours researching websites and local history sources to customise the curriculum for our own schools, and while teams of secondary history teachers will have text books galore and time away from face-to-face teaching to design their curriculum, we’ll have to find the time to do it within our paltry two-and-a-half hours per week time release and implement the new English, Science and Maths curriculum as well. 

The Usual Suspects will develop units of work for ‘years five to eight’ which will inevitably be pitched at years seven and eight, and primary teachers will (a) get to spend their time ‘adapting them’ and (b) get criticised (with some justification) by secondary teachers for pillaging the best bits out of these units so that year seven and eight students complain that they’ve done it before.

Not only that, we’re told yet again that the solution to finding the time for the inclusion of history in the curriculum is to integrate it into the literacy block.  Do these people who suggest this have any idea how to teach literacy?  A literacy lesson is planned to provide for individual literacy needs.  It’s about teaching reading and writing.  Children are grouped together and taught specific skills that they have not mastered.  Four or five groups have different texts and different tasks because they have different learning needs.  Are they seriously suggesting that teachers can come up with resources and tasks for four or five groups with different needs for history topics????  No, of course they’re not.  They’re suggesting that kids read something or other about the history topic and that can be called a literacy lesson just because some of the kids – though certainly not the ones with low reading ability - are going to be reading it.   Is it any wonder that there were cross mutterings in the auditorium?

On the plus side, the venue was NGV at Federation Square so I was able to duck in for a quick look at some of the exhibitions, and when it was all over I was able to meet up with The Spouse for a couple of evening Melbourne Writers Festival sessions as well!

PS While hunting around for a site about interactive whiteboards, I came across this one – check it out!

Dare to Lead PD at Dandy South Ps

Today I attended a professional development activity called Dare to Lead, presented by Rob Miller at Dandenong South PS.  It’s an initiative  set up by Principals Australia aimed at improving the teaching of Aboriginal history and culture.  They run PD such as conferences and send out regular newsletters about resources and so on. Membership is free and you can sign up online. I attended to find out more to support the implementation of the Wannik Strategy at our school.

Rob stressed the importance of knowing the children you work with: you need to ask where they’re from, whose mob they belong to.  He also said that it’s important to have a go, even if you don’t know much about a topic, it’s better to try than do nothing.  But when you can, personalise the curriculum so that it’s Victorian, and even better, so that it’s local. 

There was a spirited discussion about whether to teach ‘units’ about Aboriginal history, culture and issues, but Rob agreed that including Aboriginal perspectives across the curriculum (as we are at MPPS) was a better way to do it.    The APAC site (from Western Australia – there isn’t one for Victoria) – has concept maps which show how Aboriginal perspectives can be infused with ideas about Aboriginal history, culture and issues, and there are other resources such as lesson plans too (though of course not all of these are transferable to other states and you need to assess their appropriateness).

If you interested in the work we’ve done at Mossgiel Park, visit the Aboriginal Perspectives page on this blog.

The Victorian Bushfires

Photo: ©Carl Brewer

 

Saturday, February 7th 2009 is a date that we will all remember as a dreadful day.  In her Condolence speech in the Federal Parliament the following Monday, the Deputy Prime Minister, Julie Gillard described the Victorian Bushfires in which so many have died or been left homelss as ‘ A tragedy beyond belief, beyond precedent and really beyond words’.  

Ms Gillard is right, and so we must turn to our artists and poets to help us express our feelings about this tragedy.  On the State Library website there is a link to William Strutt’s painting of Black Thursday which depicts the calamitous fires of 1851, and in the National Gallery of Victoria, David Larwill’s painting Ash Wednesday shows the pain and heartache felt now by so many.

The amazing stories of courage, and of Australians pulling together in their hour of greatest need, reminded me of  Henry Lawson’s poem about this powerful unity which transcends all others at times like this…

The Fire at Ross’s Farm.

The squatter saw his pastures wide
Decrease, as one by one
The farmers moving to the west
Selected on his run
Selectors took the water up
And all the black soil round
The best grass land the squatter had
Was spoilt by Ross’s ground

Now many schemes to shift old Ross
Had racked the squatter’s brains
But Sandy had the stubborn blood
Of Scotland in his veins
He held the land and fenced it in
He cleared and ploughed the soil
And year by year a richer crop
Repaid him for his toil

Between the homes for many years
The devil left his tracks
The squatter pounded Ross’s track
And Sandy pounded Black’s
A well upon the lower run
Was filled with earth and logs
And Black laid baits about the farm
To poison Ross’s dogs

It was indeed a deadly feud
Of class and creed and race
But yet, there was a Romeo
And a Juliet in the case
And more than once across the flats
Beneath the Southern Cross
Young Robert Black was seen to ride
With pretty Jenny Ross

One Christmas time, when months of drought
Had parched the western creeks
The bushfires started in the north
And travelled south for weeks
At night along the riverside
The scene was grand and strange
The hill fires looked like lighted streets
Of cities in the range

The cattle tracks between the trees
Were like long dusky aisles
And on a sudden breeze the fire
Would sweep along for miles
Like sounds of distant musketry
It crackled through the breaks
And o’er the flat of silver grass
It hissed like angry snakes

It leapt across the flowing streams
And raced the pastures broad
It climbed the trees and lit the boughs
And through the scrubs it roared
The bees fell stifled in the smoke
Or perished in their hives
And with the stock, the kangaroos
Went flying for their lives

The sun had set on Christmas eve
When, through the scrub lands wide
Young Robert Black came riding home
As only natives ride
He galloped to the homestead door
And gave the first alarm
“The fire is past the granite spur,
And close to Ross’s farm”

“Now father, send the men at once
They won’t be wanted here
Poor Ross’s wheat is all he has
To pull him through the year”
“Then let it burn”, the squatter said
“You shall not take the men -
Go out and join your precious friends
And don’t come back again.”
“I won’t come back,” young Robert cried
And reckless in his ire
He sharply turned his horse’s head
And galloped towards the fire

And there for three long weary hours
Half blinded with smoke and heat
Old Ross and Robert fought the flames
That neared the ripened wheat
The farmer’s hand was nerved by fears
Of danger and of loss
And Robert fought the stubborn foe
For the love of Jenny Ross

But serpent like the curves and lines
Slipped past them and between
Until they reached the boundary where
The old coach track had been
“The track is now our only hope
There we must stand” cried Ross
“For nought on earth can stop the fire
If once it gets across.”

Then came a cruel gust of wind
And with a fiendish rush
The flames leapt over the narrow path
And lit the fence of brush
“The crop must burn!” the farmer cried
“We cannot save it now”
And down upon the blackened ground
He dashed the ragged bough

But wildly, in a rush of hope
His heart began to beat
For over the crackling fire he heard
The sound of horse’s feet
“Here’s help at last,” young Robert cried
And even as he spoke
The squatter with a dozen men
Came racing through the smoke

Down on the ground the stockmen jumped
And bared each brawny arm
They tore green branches from the trees
And fought for Ross’s farm
And when before the gallant band
The beaten flames gave way
Two grimy hands in friendship joined -
And it was Christmas Day.

Henry Lawson