March 10, 2005

The "B" Ark

Fatal ShoreI have a sneaky and growing suspicion that Douglas Adams might have read Fatal Shore. It started with learning that the First Fleet was led by one Captain Arthur Phillip. And it crystallized on getting to the rogue's gallery of officials sent out from England to work for Lieutenant Govenor George Arthur (yes, a different "Arthur") of Van Diemen's Land, who himself seems to have been a totalitarian and nepotistic Gradgrind.

"Arthur made no bones about the scope of his patronage or his bias toward military men. Given the quality of some of the civil officials the Crown sent, one can hardly blame him.

Dudley Fereday (1789-1849), a bankrupt coal magnate's son whom an English lord's patronage had made sheriff of Van Diemen's Land in 1824, turned out to be a relentless usurer, lending money at 35 percent interest. Arthur soon got rid of him, and of his uncompliant attorney-general, Arthur Gellibrand, and of anyone else who seemed either disobliging or short on moral fiber. He went after the customs collector, Rolla O'Farrell, who had arrived penniless in Hobart but amassed a fortune of more than £15,000 by creative venality. This man, Arthur told London, was a debauchee [sic] with the morals of a stoat, who lived with one of the prostitutes off the Princess Royal and had been fined for harboring and seducing female convicts. In 1831 England sent Arthur a judge, Alexander "Dandy" Baxter (1798-1836), whose ignorance and paranoiac sadism (while serving as Darling's attorney-general in New South Wales, he had battered his wife with a poker after she gave birth to twins) were such that Arthur would not have him in his colony. "I found him," he declared, "in a high state of neurotic excitement and such an habitual sot that it would have been a violation of all public decency to have suffered him to take his seat on the Bench." In 1826 Arthur received John Burnett (1781-1860) as his first colonial secretary -- a mewing, forgetful creature, who confessed to Arthur soon after getting to Hobart that "so extremely sensitive is my nervous system that everything which agitates my mind immediately affects my bodily health and brings on illness."...."
In other words, a bunch of useless bloody loonies.

"Ah, yes, that was it."

Posted by Martha Bridegam at March 10, 2005 05:33 PM
Comments

That's four posts without so much as a single hyperlink. Are you trying to get all Old School on us?

Posted by: Alan Allport at March 10, 2005 05:35 PM

Wot, blogs gotta have links?

Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 10, 2005 05:37 PM

There's a school of thought that says that a blog entry without a link isn't really a blog entry. I mean, having said that, there's a school of thought that says that this is the best film ever made, so one can't account for all opinions.

Posted by: Alan Allport at March 10, 2005 05:40 PM

In the last week with all the discussion on blogs and the reporters' shield law, etc., we've seen a lot of different definitions of what a weblog is, some more clueless than others. For example, in the SF Chron, this one as opposed to this one, the latter of which accurately says that "bloggers are just columnists without newspapers."

My own prediction, btw, is that all reputable webloggers will continue to keep their sources' secrets whether they're found to benefit from a shield law or not.

BTW back to Fatal Shore for a moment: I'm wondering -- partly selfishly, since I'm a writer without formal academic history training preparing to finish a landscape history writing project -- if the Hughes book is in any way not considered a "proper" work of history as a result of his being a writer with background mainly as an art critic. It's a good book of course, but just wondering what a professional historians' point of view would be.

Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 10, 2005 10:20 PM

Alan: That was some stretch bringing Withnail & I into this thread, but since you did I'll just say I only discovered it last summer, and while I wouldn't put it on the 100 best films ever list I did find it a lot of fun.

Martha: On the topic of fun and Van Diemen's Land, after you've finished Fatal Shore you might enjoy Matthew Kneale's English Passengers, a fairly comic novel centered on Tasmania of the mid-nineteen century.

Posted by: Bobby Farouk at March 11, 2005 06:48 AM

I'm wondering -- partly selfishly, since I'm a writer without formal academic history training preparing to finish a landscape history writing project -- if the Hughes book is in any way not considered a "proper" work of history as a result of his being a writer with background mainly as an art critic.

I don't know how it's regarded in the specialist field of Australian history. But I have seen it used as a set text at Penn and I would have no problem (aside from its length) in using it as a set text either.

Posted by: Alan Allport at March 12, 2005 04:22 AM

I wondered why Hughes was so sympathetic to Arthur Phillip. Then I got to the Rum Corps.

Posted by: Ben Brumfield at March 14, 2005 08:59 AM

It must be clarifying in a certain way to have definite proof that the founders of one's national economy were felonious monopolists. But then I gather Australia nevertheless has its normal quotient, and maybe more, of unreflective respect for business success.

Posted by: Martha Bridegam at March 14, 2005 01:05 PM

Australia nevertheless has its normal quotient, and maybe more, of unreflective respect for business success.

I wouldn't bet on that. It's certainly not in keeping with tall poppy syndrome or with what Hughes calls "mateship."

I remember a conversation I had with one of my sister-in-law's college friends in Perth. She commented on how the defining focus of Australian movies was the underdog. Forgetting my manners, I blurted "Odd, I thought that was the main theme of American movies." Much later I realized that what she was talking about was movies where the underdog doesn't win in the end.

Posted by: Ben Brumfield at March 15, 2005 07:08 PM