In our current Melbourne [Victorian] lockdown of the past six months or so, the Coachbuilder has managed a degree of reading, and I would like to refer to three recently read books, and the in particular, the author of one of them. The books range from Australian history, one fictional, one real history, to a light novel, while the author we look at is Australia’s Geoffrey Blainey.
[1] Recently, I finished reading [out in my sunny backyard] ‘A Room Made of Leaves’ by Kate Grenville, published in 2020, 322 pages. A wonderful little mix of fact and fantasy/fiction about Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the ‘so-called’ Father of the Australian sheep industry.
Who was John Macarthur? Wikipedia describes him thus – John Macarthur (1767 – 10 April 1834] was a British Army Officer, entrepreneur, politician, architect and pioneer of settlement in Australia. Macarthur is recognised as the pioneer of the wool industry that was to boom in Australia in the early 19th century and become a trademark of the nation. He is noted as the architect of Farm House, his own residence in Parramatta and as the man who commissioned architect John Verge to design Camden Park Estate in Camden, in New South Wales. He was instrumental in agitating for, and organising, a rebellion against the colonial government in what is often described as the Rum Bebellion,
But was he deserving of the generally historical, and in the main, favourable picture the books have of him?
“What if Elizabeth Macarthur-wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney-had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented. Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none- ‘this’ Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear-at last!-what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought. At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age- the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality. Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of The Secret River is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of our most original writers.”
Let’s hear from the author herself
The idea for A Room Made of Leaves was sparked nearly twenty years ago, when I was doing research for The Secret River, a book set in the earliest years of the British colony in Australia. I came across some of the letters of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of John Macarthur, a junior officer who arrived with his family in Sydney in 1790.
Australian history, like most histories, is a bit light-on when it comes to women, because they left so little behind. Even when they were educated enough to write letters or journals, those writings are bland, sedate things, suitable to be shared in any genteel parlour. Women at that time had no choice but to be bland. Without any power over any aspect of their lives, they were obliged to go along with a social and legal system that equated them with children. They might have talked together about what they felt about that destiny, but none of them could risk putting it in writing.
Elizabeth Macarthur’s letters are no different. She and John and their infant son landed in a new, raw, violent, hungry penal colony – a thousand convicts and a couple of hundred guards – six months’ sail from home. Yet from her letters – unrevealing, cheery, impersonal – you’d never know any of that.
More interesting to me was what she wrote – or didn’t write – about her husband. The son of a draper, John Macarthur had no prospects other than what he could make for himself, and in Sydney he lost no time in squeezing every drop of advantage out of the place and his position there. His letters – far from bland and sedate – show him to have been a clever, ruthless bully, a dangerous man to cross, violent and unforgiving towards anyone who tried to go against him.
Yet from Elizabeth’s letters there’s not the faintest shadow of any of that. Reading her letters, you’d think he was a kindly, cheerful, reasonable man beloved of all around him. Either he was a completely different man at home, or her letters are beautiful lies.
Enter William Dawes, another junior officer in the Sydney of 1790. Dawes emerges from the record as a very likeable man: warm, selfless, with great integrity. He was the colony’s resident astronomer and Elizabeth Macarthur asked him for lessons in “a few easy stars”. However, stars turned out not to be as easy as she thought and, she says, “I mistook my abilities, and I blush at my error.”
I blush at my error! In the context of her otherwise bloodless letters, those five words blaze off the page with an unmistakable erotic charge. Suddenly – for the only time in all the many pages she wrote – she’s a flesh-and-blood woman. What might have happened after Mrs Macarthur blushed?
Those five words are where this book started. What they told me was that she wasn’t as bland and boring as her letters might suggest. She lived – or at least wrote – behind a mask, and just for that one instant, the mask slipped.
A body of myth has grown around Elizabeth and John Macarthur. Generations of schoolchildren have learned that John Macarthur more or less singlehandedly bred the Australian Merino sheep that until recently was the basis of our economy. All over Australia, streets and schools are named in his honour. The myth about Elizabeth is that, when John was away in England for two long periods, she kept the family sheep empire going, a loving, industrious, pious helpmeet to her husband.
The slipping of the mask gave me a way to sneak in behind the myth and explore something more interesting, and possibly more true. The way I put it to myself was that Elizabeth Macarthur had written the fictional account of her life, in those bland letters. I was going to write the non-fictional account, the truth that she couldn’t ever risk putting on paper. It would take the form of her secret memoirs, hidden in a tin box tucked away in the roof of her house. I’d pretend that I’d found these memoirs, and that I was simply transcribing and publishing them. The joke-within-a-joke would be that the story would be based on the real documentary record, and would even include quotes from Elizabeth Macarthur’s real letters. Fact and fiction would overlap and allow a fictional woman of the past to do what would have been impossible for any real woman of that time: to put down in writing what she really thought.
It was an exciting project to try to give Elizabeth Macarthur the voice she could never have had. She was a remarkable woman, to have managed the gigantic enterprise of the family business at a time when women were expected to be helpless and ignorant and stay at home with the children. She was on her own – for four years during her husband’s first absence, nine years the second – in a brutal society, yet she came to thrive. By the time Macarthur came back from that second absence, he was overwhelmed by mental illness, but the business his wife had managed so well was the richest in the colony.
But as I wrote, I realised that this was more than a book about an extraordinary woman. It was about the dangerous power of false stories, false surfaces, myths, and the way they can erase the truth. Women were not the only people whose voices were silenced. In the Australian context, the other great silencing concerns the story of the Aboriginal people. The accounts left by those early settlers are the only written accounts of that history, but as Elizabeth Macarthur warns us, Do not believe too quickly!
I travelled to Devon to research Elizabeth’s childhood, and spent many hours at Elizabeth Farm and other locations around Parramatta. I drew on as many primary sources as I could find: the parish records of Bridgerule in Devon, archives in the State Library of NSW, Governors’ correspondence, and contemporary accounts of early Sydney. A Room Made of Leaves had found its form and content by the time Michelle Scott Tucker’s biography of Elizabeth Macarthur was published, and I didn’t draw on that book in writing my own, but Michelle was helpful in advising me how to contact Macarthur descendants to let them know of the book (which I did as a courtesy to them). My reading of the primary sources has sometimes led me in a different direction from other writers about Elizabeth Macarthur. But what I think we all share is admiration for that remarkable woman.
This book isn’t history. It’s fiction. But, like most historical fiction, it starts in the same place history does: in the record of the past left to us in documents, oral traditions, buildings, landscapes and objects. Historians devise one kind of story from those sources. Fiction writers devise another kind. Those sources are flawed, partial and ambiguous. For that reason, the stories that come out of them, although starting in the same place, can end up very differently. But what historians and writers of historical fiction have in common is an urge to understand that past: what it meant then, and perhaps more importantly, what it means now: for us, living in the world that’s been shaped by that past.
[2] ‘Mines in the Spinifex: The Story of Mount Isa Mines’ by Geoffrey Blainey, published in 1960, 278 pages, a very interesting read, and depiction of the various mistakes and miscalculations made in Mt Isa getting to where it is today [or at least in 1960, when the book was written]. In it, Geoffrey Blainey shows his lifelong skill as a writer of history. As one reviewer wrote at the time of the book’s publication – ‘Amazing book. Blainey is such a great author! He combines dense information with literary poetics, making his histories fun and readable’..
Commentary on the book some years after it’s publication, it was noted that the development of Mt. Isa was formidable, akin in many ways to the mining of Grasberg…remote, extreme temperatures, extreme transport required, and a huge deposit. Since the book was written in the ’60s it leaves a lot of what is now long past history out. But it is interesting to note that Xstata owns it now, and is now actively mining what in the book were deposits of lower grade to be saved for the future. Most amazing about Isa are the decades that it took to become profitable and the type of men who despite all the odds keep believing in it and moving it forward, until it could become a mine with greater riches than Broken Hill. If only more money had been available to develop it early on, what a different story we would have, and perhaps another mining giant company born of it. (
Another reviewer described it as a thoroughly enjoyable and informative documentary of not only Mount Isa Mines, but also prospecting and mining in general in northern Australia (mainly in Queensland). Also a good historical account of associated business ,politics and unions from the ‘struggle years’, during which individual miners and small mining operations struggled to scrape together a meagre existence, up to the more prosperous years, following the discovery of more productive ore-bearing lodes and the transition to large scale operations. Highly recommended for those who love Australian history and are proud of our heritage, including the spirit and achievements of our pioneers.
I also recently read ‘Me & Emma by Elizabeth Flock, published in 2004, 280 pages – a bit of light reading in the midst of two somewhat heavier books I am was making my way through at the time. An intriguing story, set I believe in the backblocks of ‘poor’ America, and written through the eyes and words of an 8 year old girl, who feels the responsibility of protecting her 6 year old sister, Emma [who often seems much older than the story teller] and even trying to protect her indifferent mother, from the brutal attentions of their stepfather. A story which has you wondering at the outcome, while all along, having a fairly good idea as to how it will end – only to be way off course, with an unexpected twist, despite various vague clues along the way. I’ll say no more on that score, don’t want to spoil the storyline for potential readers. A nice little read, albeit somewhat disturbing in view of the nature of the abuse by the stepfather, and the seeming disinterest of the mother to the welfare of her girls, or even of herself!
Here are three short reviews, which creates even more intrigue for the potential reader.;
[Goodreads]: The title characters in Me & Emma are very nearly photographic opposites–8-year-old Carrie, the raven-haired narrator, is timid and introverted, while her little sister Emma is a tow-headed powerhouse with no sense of fear. The girls live in a terrible situation: they depend on an unstable mother that has never recovered from her husband’s murder, their stepfather beats them regularly, and they must forage on their own for food.
Stop here and you have a story told many times before, as fiction and nonfiction in tales like Ellen Foster, or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings –stories in which a young girl reveals the horrors of her childhood. Me & Emma differentiates itself with a spectacular finish, shocking the reader and turning the entire story on its head. Through several twists and turns the reader learns that things are not quite the way our narrator led us to believe and everything crescendos in a way that (like all good thrillers) immediately makes you want to go back and read the whole book again from the start.
[Booktopia]: Narrated with simplicity and unabashed honesty, Elizabeth Flock’s critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling novel Me & Emma is a vivid portrayal of a child’s indomitable spirit, her incredible courage and the heartbreaking loss of innocence
In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other eight-year-old; playing make-believe, going to school, dreaming of faraway places. But even in her imagination, she can’t pretend away the hardships of her impoverished North Carolina home or protect her younger sister, Emma.
As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunken stepfather, abuse their momma can’t seem to see, let alone stop.it. After the sisters’ plan to run away from home unravels, Carrie’s world takes a shocking turn; and one shattering moment ultimately reveals a truth that leaves everyone reeling.
[Industry review]: “Me & Emma is really two stories in one: the page-turning events and how the reader reacts emotionally as he or she colors in the picture. I personally questioned how such young children could manage to survive this string of horrors unscathed. It is a tribute to Flock’s literary talent that she answers that silent question with her unexpected ending and without compromising the book’s complexity or tenor.”-
Finally, a look at the author of ‘Mines in the Spinifex’. Admittedly, I always maintained a close interest in his career, after a year as a student in his Economics History classes at the University of Melbourne, and have collected a number of his books. The following little bio has been sourced from various publications.
Geoffrey Norman Blainey AC FAHA FASSA (born 11 March 1930) is an Australian historian, academic, philanthropist and commentator with a wide international audience. He is noted for having written authoritative texts on the economic and social history of Australia , including ‘The Tyranny of Distance’. He has published over 35 books, including wide-ranging histories of the world and of Christianity. He has often appeared in newspapers and on television. He held chairs in economic history and history at the University of Melbourne for over 20 years. In the 1980s, he was visiting professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University. He received the 1988 Britannica Award for dissemination of knowledge and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2000.
He was once described by Professor Graeme Davison as the “most prolific, wide-ranging, inventive, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, most controversial of Australia’s living historians”. He has been chairman or member of a wide range of Australian Government and other institutional councils, boards and committees, including the Australia Council, the University of Ballarat, the Australia-China Council, the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the Australian War Memorial. He chaired the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. His name sometimes appears in lists of the most influential Australians, past or present. The National Trust lists Blainey as one of Australia’s “Living Treasures’ He currently serves on the boards of philanthropic bodies, including the Ian Potter Foundation since 1991 and the Deafness Foundation Trust since 1993, and is patron of others.
Biographer Geoffrey Bolton argues that Blainey has played multiple roles as an Australian historian: ‘He first came to prominence in the 1950s as a pioneer in the neglected field of Australian business history…He produced during the 1960s and 1970s a number of surveys of Australian history in which explanation was organized around the exploration of the impact of the single factor (distance, mining, pre-settlement Aboriginal society)…. Blainey next turned to the rhythms of global history in the industrial period…. Because of his authority as a historian, he was increasingly in demand as a commentator on Australian public affairs’.
Educated at Ballarat High School, Blainey won a scholarship to Wesley College, before attending Melbourne University where he studied history. He worked as a freelance historical author writing mainly business histories such as The Peaks of Lyall; Gold and Paper; a History of the National Bank of Australasia; and Mines in the Spinifex. Blainey accepted a position at the University of Melbourne in 1962 in the Faculty of Economics and Commerce. He held the positions of Professor of Economic History (1968-77); Senior Lecturer 1962; and from 1977-1988 he occupied the Ernest Scott Chair of History at Melbourne University. Professor Blainey also held the chair of Australian studies at Harvard University.
Geoffrey Blainey was appointed the foundation Chancellor of the then University of Ballarat (UB) in 1993 after an illustrious career at the University of Melbourne. He was installed as UB Chancellor in December 1994 and continued until 1998. The Blainey Auditorium at the Mt Helen Campus of UB is named in his honour. Blainey, always a keen exponent of libraries and the acquisition of books, has donated part of his extensive book collection to the UB library
In 2000,.as noted above, Professor Blainey was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia for service to academia, research and scholarship, and as a leader of public debate at the forefront of fundamental social and economic issues confronting the wider community. At that time [at UB] the University’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Kerry Cox said ‘Geoffrey Blainey guided the new and inexperienced university through its first four years with a benevolent but firm hand. This time was challenging as the university strove to make a place for itself in higher education, grappled with funding cuts and the eventual merger with neighbouring TAFE institutes. For those at the university fortunate enough to work with Geoffrey Blainey during his time as Chancellor, they witnessed first hand his humility, and we are proud of his role in our history.’
In 2002 the degree of Doctor of Letters was conferred on Professor Blainey in recognition of his contribution to the University of Ballarat and the community in general. The same year Blainey donated a collection of material to the University of Ballarat. Included in this collection are historical books, papers and other material relating to the early history of mining and the central Victorian goldfields. A second generous donation of material was received in 2005. ‘The Geoffrey Blainey Mining Collection’.
As an economic historian, Blainey challenged the conventional view, questioning accepted contemporary understandings of European settlement of Australia as a convict nation, Aboriginal land rights, and Asian immigration. He is described as a ‘courageous public intellectual, a writer with rare grace and a master storyteller’. In a reassessment of the life of Blainey, ‘The Fuss that Never Ended’ considers his ideas, his role in Australian history, politics and public life, and the controversies that surrounded him. He was always popular with students. According to the Melbourne University home page ‘When Geoffrey Blainey spoke to final-year students in the Friends of the Baillieu Library HSC Lectures in the 1970s, the Public Lecture Theatre was packed to capacity and his audience carried copies of his books to be signed, a tribute to what Geoffrey Bolton characterised as his “skills in interpreting technological change in admirably lucid narratives that appealed to both specialist and non-specialist audiences”. Among his most popular works are the ‘The Rush that Never Ended: A History of Australian Mining’; ‘The Tyranny of Distance’; ‘A Shorter History of Australia’; ‘A Short History of the World’; and ‘The Origins of Australian Football’……………………………………………
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