A small selection on this occasion, as follows:
- The Astonishing History of Ballarat: Vol. 1: 1851-1855 [Doug Bradby];
- ‘Sturt Street’ Ballarat’s Grand Boulevard, a credit to the city” [Doug Bradby];
- Australian Foreign Affairs, Issue 13; and,
- ‘Falling Man’ [Don Delillo]
‘The Astonishing History of Ballarat: Volume 1: 1851-1855; by Doug Bradby, published in 2018; 180 pages; This was a fascinating little read in which the author draws on various newspaper reports, correspondence, etc, to bring a more intimate depiction of the early years of Ballarat, and the conditions under which the early gold diggers [later, miners] endured in those first few years after the gold discoveries.
From Collins Booksellers, we read: – “In 1851, Ballarat was a tranquil and beautiful valley. By 1855, it had become the thriving centre of the world’s largest alluvial goldfield. But how did such a feat occur when at the beginning, diggers had little or no knowledge of where to look for gold or how to extract it from the gravel and quartz? From finding specimens of gold at Poverty Point and Golden Point, to sinking 60-metre shafts through wet and dangerous earth, this book reveals the journey undertaken by the diggers as they mastered the complex Ballarat East goldfield in the exciting years of 1851-55. It was an astonishing intellectual and physical achievement. The diggers of Ballarat extracted an astonishing two million ounces of gold, and Ballarat would never be the same again.”
The author introduces each chapter with
- [1] a list of intriguing questions examined in the chapter, and
- [2] the cast of characters referred to in the chapter.
Many of the chapters end with a ‘Report Card’ on the progressive state of Ballarat at that time. Briefly, each chapter covers in broad terms the following topics, generally expressed in ac somewhat amusing fashion:
Chapter 1. 1848-50. The Discovery of Gold in the Port Phillip District. How a shepherd found Victoria’s first gold but failed to produce a goldrush.
Chapter 2. The Discovery of Gold in Victoria. How a publican, a squatter, some more shepherds, a doctor, and an ex mailman, found the gold that produced the Victorian goldrush.
Chapter 3. The Discovery of Gold at Ballarat. How the Ballarat gold field was discovered by Thomas Hiscock at Buninyong, and by old John Dunlop and young James Regan at Poverty Point, and by Old Tom Brown of Connor’s Party at Golden Point.
Chapter 4. The Genesis of Ballarat. How the diggers arrived, mined, lived, and governed themselves at Ballarat.
Chapter 5. The Exodus from Ballarat. Why the diggers left Ballarat when they had found less than 1% of Ballarat’s gold.
Chapter 6. The Monster Nuggets. Why Sarah Sands from Ballarat was introduced to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle.
Chapter 7. Settling Down on Ballarat. How and why some diggers settled permanently at Ballarat as miners.
Chapter 8: Mining in the year of Eureka. How the miners tackled the problems of shepherding and the mining consequences of the Eureka Stockade.
Chapter 9. The Gravel Pits. How the miners of Ballarat Flat learnt to work ‘in the water.’
Chapter10. Towards the Tableland. What the miners did when they hit a ‘wall of rock.’
‘Sturt Street’ Ballarat’s Grand Boulevard, a credit to the city” by Doug Bradby, published in 2021, 32 pages. Another fascinating look at a part of my ‘home town’ and one aspect of it’s history – some more interesting stories about the origins of Sturt Street, how it and the grid of streets around it were planned as they were [a sharp contrast to the eastern goldfield areas of the town], and the interesting stories of gold leads and sunken rivers under many parts of the central CBD area, and around the Sturt/Lydiard Streets intersection in particular.
The October 2021 edition of the Australian Foreign Affairs [Issue 13] titled ‘India Rising’ Asia’s huge question, presented a number of essays dealing with subjects such as
- our next great and powerful friend?, based on an assumption that Australia can no longer depend on traditional allies such as the UK or the USA, but has become part of a new polar arrangement;
- past reflections on reactions to Indians in Australia, as both migrants and studentshere; and
- the views of Australia and India toward each other.
In essence, these and other examine the future of India, described as a rising giant whose unsteady growth and unpredictable political turns raise questions about its role and power in Asia. It explores the challenge for Australia as it seeks to improve its faltering ties with the world’s largest democracy, a nation whose ascent – if achieved – could reshape the regional order.
This Issue also included a rather interesting historical perspective of former Prime Minister, Paul Keating [and his government’s ] interactions with Indonesia during the 1990’s, and the effect of those relationships, in particular on the tragedy, and future of ‘East Timor’
Finally, a comment on ‘Falling Man’ by Don DeLillo, published in 2007, 246 pages – I had previously read ‘Mao II’ by this author, and I should have taken heed of my brief comments about that earlier book before deciding to [purchase this one!!
About Mao II I wrote [back in March 1993] that “A lot different to what I expected with the terrorist issue almost on the periphery of the story. At times difficult to follow the wanderings of the mind as portrayed through the writer, at other times, very real and down-to-earth description of everyday events. A brilliant description of the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei and of other events of that era – described as the ‘cutting edge of modern fiction’!!”
In Falling Man – which deals with the aftermath of 9/11 and it’s affect on a group of individuals, with again, the event itself – the falling of the towers, and the lives and feelings of the terrorists involved leading up to the event – very much on the periphery of the book contents. To be honest, I found those aspects of the book the most interesting, while the lives and activities of the selected individuals, post 9/11 somewhat mundane. True, I guess the writer was using those characters as examples of the thousands of lives affected in many ways by the attack on the twin towers – but personally, as I read through it, I could feel myself thinking thoughts to the affect of ‘get on with it’ and ‘why do we have to be plagued with this rubbish’ – the constant references to the poker games a prime example that ‘got up my goat’!!
Yet I imagine that the term ‘the cutting edge of literature’ would perhaps rightly be applied again in this case by true modern literary critics – I bow to their professional qualities and viewpoints – but the nature of that ‘literature’ just simply didn’t appeal to this reader. With the exception perhaps of the final few pages – which actually got to the moment of impact and the ‘imaginary’ [though no doubt real] scenarios that followed, as those in the Towers attempted their escape downwards, whether that was via the stairwells, or jumping to their inevitable deaths from the windows – the basis of the title ‘Falling Man’!!
At the time of this book’s publication [2007], DeLillo had published some 13 novels and 3 plays, so obviously his style of writing appeals to many.
However, to give readers the opportunity to determine the book’s value for themselves, the following is the basic description of the book as used in the promotion of it by various book sellers, and on the book’s jacket –
“There is September 11 and then there are the days after, and finally the years. Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate lives of a few people.
First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he’d always imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his estranged wife, memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more planes. These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of history”
And from at least one professional reviewer, we read [appropriately enough] from the New York Times [27/5/2007] by Frank Rich
No matter where you stood in the city, the air was thick after the towers fell: literally thick with the soot and stench of incinerated flesh that turned terror into a condition as inescapable as the weather. All bets were off. New Yorkers who always know where they’re going didn’t know where to go. Cab drivers named Muhammad were now feared as the enemy within; strangers on the street were improbably embraced like family under a canopy of fliers for the missing. Such, for a while anyway, was the “new normal,” though the old normal began to reassert itself almost as soon as that facile catchphrase was coined. Today 9/11 carries so many burdens — of interpretation, of sentimentality, of politics, of war — that sometimes it’s hard to find the rubble of the actual event beneath the layers of edifice we’ve built on top of it. (Or built on top of all of it except ground zero.)
In his new novel, Don DeLillo shoves us back into the day itself in his first sentence: “It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” He resurrects that world as it was, bottling the mortal dread, high anxiety and mass confusion that seem so distant now. Though the sensibility and prose are echt DeLillo, “Falling Man” is not necessarily the 9/11 novel you’d expect from the author of panoramic novels that probe the atomic age (“Underworld”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Libra”) on the broadest imaginable canvas, intermingling historical characters with fictional creations. With the exception of Mohamed Atta, who slips into the crevices of “Falling Man” as an almost spectral presence, DeLillo mentions none of the other boldface names of 9/11, not even the mayor. Instead of unfurling an epic, DeLillo usually keeps the focus on an extended family of middle-class Manhattanites. If “Underworld” took its cues from the kinetic cinema of Eisenstein, “Falling Man,” up until its remarkable final sequence, is all oblique silences and enigmatic close-ups reminiscent of the domestic anomie of the New Wave. In DeLillo’s hands, this is not at all limiting or prosaic. There’s a method to the Resnais-like fogginess. The cumulative effect is devastating, as DeLillo in exquisite increments lowers the reader into an inexorable rendezvous with raw terror. Humor is not this novel’s calling card………………. The narrative ends in the rubble and it is left to us to create the counternarrative,” DeLillo wrote. “People running for their lives are part of the story that is left to us” because “they take us beyond the hard numbers of dead and missing and give us a glimpse of elevated being.” An event like 9/11 cannot be bent to “the mercies of analogy or simile.” Primal terror — “the cellphones, the lost shoes, the handkerchiefs mashed in the faces of running men and women” — has to take precedence over politics, history and religion. “There is something empty in the sky,” he wrote. “The writer tries to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space.”
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