they strayed inland, in some of our numerous excursions

A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay by Watkin Tench (1789)

A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson by Watkin Tench (1793)

Watkin Tench sailed in the First Fleet with Arthur Phillip but he does not write about "order and useful arrangement, arising gradually out of tumult and confusion" in the settlement; he describes a group of characters making progress at different speeds in the direction of more or less the same objective, or not personally and individually the same objective but one that they are all bound to by the presence of the country that they inhabit.

They all want to go on living, some of them by farming, some of them by stealing, some of them by escaping: there is the convict who stole a boat and sailed away into oblivion, never seen again, and there is a set of cows that left as well, and were never seen again, no sign of them, no sign that any convict or indigene had killed or eaten them, no trace, no hoofprint, a band of lost cows gone forever and immortal. No doubt they wanted to live too. In pursuit of this aim they allowed the continent to swallow them. They have haunted us ever since (not only Australians but potentially the entire reading world); they are there in Tench, they are there in The Voyage of Governor Phillip, they are a literary and historical presence, their exterior presences or physical spirits having been transferred into books and never into the slaughterhouse or, if you believe the evidence, into a human mouth, or the mouth of any animal.

But into the maw of books, which will never finish eating them.

In my former narrative I have particularly noticed the sudden disappearance of the cattle, which we had brought with us into the country. Not a trace of them has ever since been observed. Their fate is a riddle, so difficult of solution that I shall not attempt it. Surely had they strayed inland, in some of our numerous excursions, marks of them must have been found. It is equally impossible to believe that either the convicts or natives killed and ate them, without some sign of detection ensuing

The nation should be haunted by a terrible symbol of cows, and there should be a cow statue or cow monument. The lawn that grows over parliament in the garden city capital is waiting for its ghosts. The static cattle -- the Dororthy Wordsworth cattle, "which accident stamped a character upon places, else unrememberable," the Beckett cattle -- have walked off.

"We have finished being your message to the landscape or the landscape's message to you: we're away," they said. Then there are Ernestine Hill's dried cattle around the dead waterhole in her travel records; there is Clancy in Banjo Paterson, gone droving "and we don't know where he are." "As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,"

They have become everyday life, "the measure of all things" (Guy Debord) and the buttress of the extraordinary.

The writers that Stockdale excerpted in Governor Phillip liked to stay at the level of an observation or a fact, and record the plumage of the parrot without recording also their own personal encounter with a parrot (or Stockdale cuts out the story and yet I don't think so for their tones are so military and so scientific) but Tench has his own natural authorial motion, which is a vibration between anecdote and fact.

Proceeded to the settlement called the Ponds, a name which I suppose it derived from several ponds of water which are near the farms. Here reside the fourteen following settlers. [list of settlers] The Prospect Hill terms of settlement extend to this place. My private remarks were not many. Some spots which I passed over I thought desirable, particularly Ramsay's farm; and he deserves a good spot, for he is a civil, sober, industrious man. Besides his corn land, he has a well laid out little garden, in which I found him and his wife busily at work. He praised her industry to me; and said he did not doubt of succeeding. It is not often seen that sailors make good farmers; but this man I think bids fair to contradict the observation.

So all his facts spread out around an "I" who is involved in fact-generation, who measures the facts, who inserts himself into the facts, I spoke to him and he confirmed it ..., or on my observation or I saw or I went or I measured. "The natives around Port Jackson are in person rather more diminutive and slighter made, especially about the thighs and legs, than the Europeans. It is doubtful whether their society contained a person of six feet high. The tallest I ever measured, reached five feet eleven inches, and men of his height were rarely seen."

He is an agent of population, like the cows, who have multiplied themselves by roaming out. He is in the beetles -- he will live in the beetles -- he will abide in them -- he will plant his I -- with instruments -- with rum --

The hardiness of some of the insects deserves to be mentioned. A beetle was immersed in proof spirits for four hours, and when taken out crawled away almost immediately. It was a second time immersed, and continued in a glass of rum for a day and a night, at the expiration of which period it still showed symptoms of life. Perhaps, however, what I from ignorance deem wonderful is common.

accident stamped a character upon places

"Details give charm," writes Charlotte Brontë, placing a Romantic landscape in a room and transforming its details into her domestic items: the serene view is boring, the piqued spots of drama are vital, the grotesque detail is a treasure, the frightening vertigo element, the shocking grotto, or not shocking, it doesn't have to be shocking, it can be cattle and ponies as it is in Dorothy Wordsworth's Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A.D. 1803, after she decides that one lake is a disappointment because it has too much uniformity: "there is an uniformity in the lake which, comparing it with other lakes, made it appear tiresome. It has no windings: I should even imagine, although it is so many miles long, that, from some points not very high on the hills, it may be seen from one end to the other."

"Tiresome," is a word I have seen used about humans but never scenery, which leaves me with the impression that she is disappointed in this lake as if it is a person that has let her down. It is being that way on purpose. It refuses to give her a winding. An accident would have been enough for her, a cow could have done it. "We passed by many droves of cattle and Shetland ponies," she wrote later about a different landscape, "which accident stamped a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity of many a Highland region."

The cattle and ponies chewed the grass; the spirit of Accident had passed through them. They had been manifest Accidents as they were chopping up the daisies. The carriage vanished over a hill. Ann Radcliffe's prose comes across the herd in The Mystery of Udolpho where they fill the same role: they "[stamp] a character upon places, else unrememberable -- not an individual character, but the soul, the spirit, and solitary simplicity" of a country region. Functionally they are the same cattle.

These tremendous precipices were contrasted by the soft green of the pastures and woods that hung upon their skirts; among whose flocks, and herds, and simple cottages, the eye, after having scaled the cliffs above, delighted to repose.

The cattle are restful signs of human civilisation, gentle stoics in a paddock; nothing gives scale to a landscape like a sign of human habitation, wrote young Ruskin, though he took it back later when civilisation seemed too industrial for him: these people would not stop at cattle, they'd be in there with factories next. But Dorothy Wordsworth not worried about that, earlier than Ruskin, never anticipating a factory in the field where there is today possibly a supermarket. So she is calm in her pleasure. The Australian women I've been reading -- all born before 1900, all out of copyright -- like to pick up on flowers, I have noted, they tend to see flowers, and they will spend their poems describing flowers.

Bring flowers for the wearied one,
The wearied one of pain;
Bright flowers from the glorious sun,
Will give her joy again.
But, oh! seek them not from gardens,
Nor from the gay parterre,
Wander far into the woodlands,
For blossoms hiding there.

(from VII, in Lyra Australis, or, attempts to sing in a strange land (1854), by Caroline Leakey)

Again above thy fragile flowers
I bend, to bring their perfume nigh;
For only in the evening hours
Thy odors pass thy blossoms by;
But when the ministering day
Deserts thee with the warmth and light
That lulled thee, -- waking thou wilt pay
For these, in sweetness, to the night.

(from To the White Julienne, from Where the Pelican Builds and Other Poems (1885), by Mary Hannay Foott)

Myrtle, myrtle lying low,
With the moss about you creeping,
With the torrent round you leaping,
And the grand old mountain keeping
Vigil as the seasons go,
Still to me your music comes
Set in chords august, specific,
When a storm-voice, weird, terrific,
Beats across the waste Pacific
Like the roll of muffled drums.

(from Mountain Myrtle in the The Horses of the Hills (1911), by Marie Pitt)

They write about the larger items of the scenery as well, the cliffs and so on, "strange green hills and the glint of a far bay" (Marie Pitt again, Doherty's Corner) but they're drawn back to the tiny things in that huge continent, the flowers, always the flowers, little items; Leakey writes about violets, she writes about the primrose, she mentions bluebells, not the wattle, not an Australian flower. They miss British things in their colonial or just-Federated lives, they miss the peaceful cattle, they miss the village smoke coming up from chimneys, they want the churchbell but they see the bushland, Ernestine Hill in the 1930s saw the jungle gym of exhydrated cattle around a dead waterhole, and a character in Catherine Martin's Silent Sea wills herself to death in the salt brush because her mother has died. She loves her flowers, gardens of flowers, she cultivates them, she talks about them, she has opinions on the right colours for orchids, then she leaves the pocket of garden her mother has helped her to inhabit, she goes through the salt brush on a cart, she gets ill, she dies, poisoned by a landscape "gray, voiceless, sinister, for ever the same," or without windings, you could say: tiresome.

She could see the sky growing darker, even the sunset flush trembling into wanness, as the dust-storm raged with the fitful wails of a wind that rushes at its own wild caprice over boundless plains, without a solitary wall or hill, or even a line of trees, to impede its course.

"Not even herds," says Dorothy Wordsworth, passing in a carriage and looking, "it has neither cow nor pony." But Ernestine Hill journalistically struck and solemnly exultant about the hollow animals in the dead land.

extra bloodshed was useless

So the action in Dorothy Dunnett's world is not the action of her language, the imagined world is described but it is not present in the souls of the words, it is not sympathised with by its materials, the atom-word fights against its role, this fight was clawing at me, and my princess was offended by her pea.

Dunnett must have read over her books before she sent them to the publisher and the feelings that came between myself and her book must have never have struck her, instead she saw the substance of her language being the substance of her plot's action, and the same with the person who told me to read her work; they did not see a split between the language and the action, they were rapt and stayed up past their bedtime with the Lymond Chronicles. The queen gave her an OBE; there was an International Dorothy Dunnett Day in 2011 with another Day planned for this year, and people travel to the places whose names she has used in her books though probably not Timbuktu at the moment due to the fighting and the destruction of monuments.

So I feel like a person who swears they have seen a ghost when everyone else says, "There is no ghost," and I am Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, frantic over ribands.

Seeing the differences between myself and her I want to fill this gap out with a piece of reasoning to settle myself down, and I would like to decide that she was using her language unconsciously and not consciously, and that those well-mannered words she put directly into Macbeth's thoughts, one would hope ("He was sensible enough, one would hope, to realise that extra bloodshed was useless") were noises that came to her without shyness or premeditation; it must have seemed normal to her that a person should say that phrase, any person of any class or race, and this middle class formality in the mouth of a royal thug would never have seemed strange, never mind if she had read her draft a hundred times, though even when I remember that it is a modern translation of the imagined speech of an eleventh-century Briton (with the emphasis on translation) it still seems strange to me, this niceness, under the circumstances, which are bloody, and in the mouth of a man brought up among ancient Orkney sheep and hideous rocks.

She is everywhere in the book but she seems asleep, she seems to be using phrases because they are familiar. Patrick White -- going back to Riders in the Chariot -- seems alert in everything, and arch, alive, frustrated; not only does he have an opinion everywhere but he is aware of that opinion, and pushes it hard, often with disgust; every time he writes "brick houses" he is disgusted, and bristles with disgust. He is filled with force-points. The black goat is a force-point, he charges it with Mrs Jolley's foot, with the shock of that attack, the sudden cruelty, which is an emphasis, a Decadent technique, this violence, this sadism, and then maintains the shock with tension in the conversation that comes afterwards, about the goat, the aggression in the sentences, aggression generated between the characters but not released -- the goat is a multiple symbol but tension holds it tight, it does not dissipate. White's style is the fist-style. He likes diffusion but not dissipation. He places his opinion, you are never allowed to forget what he thinks of the brick houses, and his eyes exist throughout the book, his opinion looking out at you and pressing itself home in the arch placement of words; he writes a panopticon, you are always under surveillance, and the books crush in on you. "White ... does more than get under your skin; in his best work, he flays the reader bare," wrote Nicholas Shakespeare in the Telegraph on the nineteenth of October. I'm going to throw this in: he wants to make you hysterical.

Meanwhile the countryside in a book by Freya Stark or Ernestine Hill is filled with surprise performances, vaudeville acts, announcements, somersaults, nothing is completely expected, and at any moment another person might come on and entertain you with some strange behaviour. The right response (in the language of the books) is not hatred or disgust but it should include some kind of applause, in other words a description, which is evidence of the writer's attentiveness to this thing that is even more decisively not herself as she describes it. Ernestine Hill can see the man staring at a chicken and figure out his mental state from a distance, therefore she is not that man, and when she records him speaking to her then she is doubly not him. A sign of unity in these books would be silence.

here thinks a pink slip

I'm going back to the Matthews poem. Separation in this poem is not the state where you natively begin your life but a state into which you move by acquiring shame. Shame has been added to you and a new creature has evolved. The people in the bar have picked up a particular kind of shame and now their species of creature can be classified; it has particular attributes, which the poet describes like this: "None here thinks a pink slip | ("You're fired," with boilerplate apologies) | is underwear. None here says "lingerie" | or "as it were."" These are his characters, he reads their minds, he knows what they think about pink slips; he is possibly thinking of actual people he has met and as he judges their behaviour and speech ("We speak Demotic") he decides that if he said the words "pink slip" they would not think of underwear, he takes this belief, he makes this his hint, and why not a different hint, why "pink slip" and not -- unanswerable question, he's dead, and the whole brain gone.

His men are anonymous, they could be anyone, and anyone who has those experiences can have this shame, the narrator of the poem has shame, and it seems to be assumed that the reader will understand this shame situation as well. But separation in Freya Stark and Ernestine Hill is not attached to shame; it is a product of the material universe and they present it as a person's indigenous state, or at least the state that other people occupy when these two travel writers meet them, and those strangers exist there without explanations.

Hill's man in the gulley with the mad chicken does not have a history, or a reason for his chicken, he is a man with a chicken, the chicken is mad, and he is desperate, and there they are, these phenomena, without the explanation that would have accompanied them in the work of the other travel writer Peter Matthiessen; they do not come trailing clouds of glowing reason from a birth that the author has imagined -- their author does not soothe them -- she leaves them squatting on the page -- she exposes them -- the wind beats their peaks --

The world in Stark and Hill is primarily a material world, more sensuous in Stark's case, more sensationalist in Hill's, but material in both. This leads me, along a pathway that is open to myself though no one else, to the subject of Dorothy Dunnett, who was recommended to me months ago by someone who had been reading her at bedtime and couldn't get to sleep. Whenever anyone recommends anything I will say yes, unless I know of the author already, and then I tell the good kind person who is making the recommendation that I do not want to try the collected works of Lee Child.

Try James Patterson, said someone else, years ago, and when I opened the book I saw an entire paragraph taken up with the one word, "BANG." This kind of prose that was once upon a time experimental has caught on, I thought. The writer does not expect the reader to be confused by a sentenceless BANG. The last line in the paragraph before the BANG was something like, "He pulled a gun," or, "He fired his gun." What brains we have, I thought: we are able to see these three letters, gee yew en, and this BANG and we imagine that a man's finger has been resting next to a trigger, now has utilised his musculature in the drawing of that fingertip closer to his body, now a bullet has leapt explosively out of a hole (but we probably think all this in summary, we have a vague impression of an action which, if broken down, would look like this, but anticipated wholly has to be described with a word that is not like any of those individual actions or even hints at them; in fact it could describe a million other situations -- that word is threat -- or excitement --) and soon the two co-authors of this book might stop writing about the main character because he will have been described with the word "dead" though that is almost guaranteed not to happen for the rules of this genre forbid the realisation of that possibility, a situation that affects poetry too, or did in the 1790s because Wordsworth mentions it in the Preface to his Lyrical Ballads (1798), "It is supposed, that by the act of writing in verse an Author makes a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of association; that he not only thus apprises the Reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully excluded," and so, applying this same logic to the genre of serial detective action thrillers, I will predict that the hero of that James Patterson book was never described with the word "dead" and instead he was compelled to retaliate and destroy or disable the character whose existence led to the BANG.

From those two sentences I prophesy that piece of action. Anyone who has read Thomas Hardy's poems will be able to guess that I lifted the Wordsworth quote from the introduction he wrote for Late Lyrics and Earlier, which was published in 1923; following on from that you might decide that Henry Matthews one night in his local bar overheard a man saying, "Pink slip."

shared culture offers camouflage

Speaking of travel writers, their individualities and primal connectednesses, reminds me of Ernestine Hill, the Australian journalist who recorded the stories about the band in Darwin and the desperate cobbler down the gulley with "a ragged little hen, crazed with heat" turning "over and over in vertigo. 'It won't die,' he assured me. 'I wish to God it would'" -- she wrote -- characterising her book with an interest in the grotesque that Stark possesses gently and Matthiessen not at all, since he is in the market for a human race that is primally connected through its rituals, and not one in which an Australian can distinguish himself with non sequiturs and a chicken, this man separating himself from Hill twice, once with his chicken and once with his non sequiturs, which are not part of any ritual, or not a ritual that anyone would want to share with him, for the chicken-man is miserable, and the ritual is only the ritual of an Australian lonely madness, a state of mind that has been described by Henry Lawson in several venues, for example, The Bush Undertaker, and it is only a marker of unity in that people who are Australian and not mad do recognise it, and acknowledge it as a potential past-time in that national resource, the bush, "the nurse and tutor of eccentric minds, the home of the weird," writes Lawson, who lived for most of his life in Sydney but obtained insights by travelling between the towns of Hungerford and Bourke in 1892 during a drought.

This chicken-man, if he had appeared in Matthiessen, would surely have been useful in a different way, and the author would have placed his remark against a cosmic thoughtfulness; it would have had some correlation with Zen, or Buddhism; his despair might have been described as a possible prelude to enlightenment, it would have been one item in a large design that might have saved him if he had acknowledged it, and as we left the man we might have been allowed to imagine that he would submit to that realisation in future, or the author might decide that the existence of this vertiginous chicken was a message to himself, or at least he would have tried to set the man's behaviour in a smoother and more detailed context (he would have done this as smoothly and sympathetically as he explains the behaviour of two women at a Himalayan temple who are wary of himself and the other hikers) or at least the presentation would have seemed less stark -- but the journalist Hill is as thrilled as a newspaper; the man is not intimate with her, nor is his chicken, and she is not visited by any Zen enlightenment; she is visited by a sense of theatre, and presents the man like a performance.

Her grotesque scenes would not seem grotesque if Matthiessen had written them. Nothing in The Snow Leopard is grotesque when he describes it, not even the wise porter pretending to be a yeti and shouting, "Kak-kak-kak! KAI-ee!" around the campfire. These people would not seem so irreparably separated from the writer, the chicken man would not have been prized as though he were a star or remote comet, as Hill prizes him, or a natural phenomenon, like an intractable cactus.

If we are all primally connected by our rituals, as in the Matthiessen book, then a thing would have to be outside that historical context to seem grotesque, it would have to seem to have come alienly from elsewhere, but you could make it seem this by perceiving it to be so, you could announce that there is no connection between this alien thing and the rituals of the Nepalese: it is an anomaly, you could say, it is not part of proper humanity I do not see the join there, between ourselves and this thing, the points of reference I expect to identify in these cases are absent, and the join is perverse or wrong; it is a polluted join, says the writer, and this separation between ourselves is unnatural, as it was in a poem by William Matthews I was reading the other day

We speak Demotic
because we're disguised as ordinary
folks. A shared culture offers camouflage
behind which we can tend the covert fires
we feed our shames to ...

(part of The Place on the Corner, a poem from After All (1998))

a bustle and a little chearful song

Thinking about the Great Australian Loneliness -- and mourning a chance lost -- if only Ernestine Hill hadn't been a journalist, if only she'd, somehow, been able to merge (across the centuries) with Dorothy Wordsworth (died demented), who decided that she was not interested in publication, and therefore wrote freely, without the kind of journalistic latchhook that Hill feels obliged to insert. Then Hill could have concentrated on the appearances of things, and the contrasts that tickle her --

Under the baton of a Cingalese conductor, the strains of 'Dixie' are wafted across the Straits, none the less sweetly in that the ancestors of Solomon Salt, the big bass drummer, blew the conch and sounded the hide drums for the cannibal orgies of less than a century ago, and that the grandmothers of the smartly dressed audience were content with the green frilled skirt of a banana palm and a necklace of shark's teeth.

-- and there'd be no need for the propaganda parts, the lectures about half-castes, the exhortation urging city-women to travel to the outback and marry lonely men in the bush, an exhortation she sabotages in other parts of the book when she retails gruesome anecdotes of people out there suffering, dehydrating, dying, vanishing, going insane, and ending up in forgotten graves:

... many a lonely grave was by the track. Alas for man's mortality, the only one remembered was the post-and-horse-shoe monument of the engine-driver's dog, killed on the line.

She loves these stories. Here I realise, again, the intelligence of Christina Stead, who felt this excitement too, in the seething variety of human life, but, unsatisfied with the surface of her fictional earth, she dug for the core as well. Hill, too easily satisfied, or too happily engaged in her adventures, remains near the surface, pleased.

(It was only after I'd posted this that I re-read Randall Jarrell's foreword to The Man Who Loved Children and noticed: "Christina Stead can perfectly imitate the surface of existence -- and, what is harder, recognize and reproduce some of the structures underneath that surface.")

Wordsworth, in her journals, goes smoothly cleanly deep (not so much Stead's gung-ho delve), and touches -- just touches -- not hugging something as if to keep it, but touching and then releasing. She "was the very wildest ... person," said Thomas de Quincy, "the quickest and readiest in her sympathy," and the forces she writes about are wild, they move, they shift. She, in the cottage she shared with her brother William, is a steady lighthouse from which I see every aspect of the world stir and change. The moon waxes, wanes, falls behind clouds, the wind attacks a tree ("It bent to the breezes as if for the love of its own delightful motions"), and then there is rain, or a rainbow, or a storm. "The trees almost roared, and the ground seemed in motion with the multitudes of dancing leaves ..." She has a knack for the accurate word and the poetic shortcut: for example: noticing the similarity between the tails of swallows and those of fish.

They twitter and make a bustle and a little chearful song hanging against the panes of glass, with their white bellies close to the glass and their forked fish-like tails. They swim round and round and again they come.

In the first few pages of the Alfoxden Journal she sees sheep "glittering" in the sun. The sharpness of this word goes against the nature of literary sheep: usually fluffy, woolly, softly white, or, if lambs, playfully gambolling. But it is correctly evocative. Wordsworth is not unusual for the sake of being unusual, she is unusual for the sake of being right. She has her own kind of digging.

Romance got hold of Ernestine Hill, this bad habit of valuing things for the sake of the dramatic effect they cause, and she plants those effects solidly on the page, not moving them forward lightly as Wordsworth does. Hill likes to make declarations. "A hundred miles south-west of Darwin, the Daly River runs into the sea." "Honesty, humour, kindliness and discretion have made T.B. an outstanding character." "You will not find Jiggalong on any map." "The journey had a fatal precedent." "It is surprising what they fit in on Thursday." She talks about the "fires of romance" but underneath the hot language this style has a cold and uninflamed heart. Words are being used to manacle ideas in place and keep them still. Peake does this too, and part of Gormenghast castle's atmosphere of stillness comes naturally from this cold and fixed style, which he manipulates adroitly. It sympathises with his subject as naturally as Sterne's dashes suit the tangent-theme of Tristram Shandy. (Sterne's narrator, like the swallows, is always darting off. He swims round and round and again he comes.) Romantic style blockades Peake into a rare moment of ugliness when Titus reacts to the death of the Thing with a burst of egotistical and unempathetic joy. But Titus is less cold than his creator, who raised the Thing in order to kill her. And neither of them is as heartless as Ernestine Hill, who is willing to tell her unprepared urban reader that she should travel into the outback to marry a man who, if the rest of her stories can be trusted, is likely to be shy, reclusive, or mad. "No longer do they need the companionship of their fellows."

a fast launch in a costume

His latest job is diving after turtle from the deck of a fast launch in a costume that consists of Japanese boots. Most people prefer to wait until the mother comes up on the beaches to lay her eggs in the sand in summer, and then turn her over. Gregson is the first white man to emulate the black in an unfailing all-the-year-round method. To him, riding a turtle down into five fathoms is every bit as exhilarating as picking up your handkerchief in your teeth in a flying gallop across the Steppes.

I've been reading Ernestine Hill's The Great Australian Loneliness, a book that isn't as stark or as critical as the title and the cover photograph (two sepia people wary by a tent) let me expect. Her version of the Loneliness ("a magnificent empty land") is well-populated. Give her a huge desert with a single man in it and she'll write a sentence about the desert and half a page about the man. Hill was a journalist, an adventurer, and Loneliness was put together out of articles she wrote for "the Australian National Travel magazine, Walkabout," along with a collection of state newspapers, Herald, Argus, Courier-Mail, West Australian, all of which she thanks in the credits, "For [their] co-operation and most kindly consideration."

It was in July, 1930, that I first set out, a wandering 'copy-boy' with swag and typewriter, to find out what lay beyond the railway lines. Across the painted deserts and the pearling seas, by aeroplane and camel and coastal-ship, by track and lugger and packhorse team and private yacht, the trail has led me across five years and 50, 000 miles, a trail of infinite surprises.

She is patriotic --

Australia is like its own unique and glorious jewel, the opal. A great jagged square of colourless crystal, you must hold it up to the light to catch the flashing fires of romance.

-- and she punches up this patriotism with a combination of drama and journalistic phrasemaking, those "flashing fires of romance" (oh the ongoing determination of Australian writers, in that earlier time, to make their country interesting, and by extension themselves: well, why not: great thirsts there, and only human) that "flying gallop across the Steppes," or, imagining a man dying of thirst,

Horribly he licks his own salt sweat, and bites his lips for the blood

or, when she writes about the blackbirding of inland men to serve the Western Australian pearling trade, "With a clumsy cross the natives signed their death warrants." Occasionally she uses "nigger" to mean "Aboriginal," not in a deliberately cruel way, but usually in idioms, or, if dismissively, giving it to somebody else ("To some of the first white colonists, particularly the multitude of the gold rush, they were just niggers, the boys shot at sight, the women used brutally"), but, herself, casually, cheerfully, conversationally, not expecting anyone to take offence --

Bare as a nigger and nearly as black, Gregson has lived magazine-cover adventure since childhood, when he ran away from a merchant service training ship ...

I had a vision of 1930s Australia, a time in which popular magazines would blithely publish racial slurs, over and over again, for years and years and years. ("The true character or spirit of an age," wrote J. Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages, "is better revealed in its mode of regarding and expressing trivial and commonplace things than in the high manifestations of philosophy and science"* --: or, what seems ordinary to its contemporaries is evidence to the eye of the future -- or: we look at the past like bush trackers) This bare Gregson is the same man whose job it is to dive after turtles in his Japanese boots. He lives in a fading West Australian sea-port town named Cossack and works for an English soup company. Once dead, the greenback turtles are "butchered of their calipash and calipee, and boiled, shell and all, in steam-jacket broilers with distilled water, a few secrets from London chefs, and a liberal allowance of sherry -- three days from the sea to the soup-plate." Hill is delighted.

Showing their equestrian prowess of turtle-back down under, and battling against difficulties of water-shortage and isolation, the Cossacks of Cossack are so far winning through, and with an encouraging success beginning to realise the wealth of these tropic seas, and to introduce Australia's epicurean delicacies to the dinner-tables of the world.

Today, more than three decades after Hill died in 1972, the greenback is classified Endangered by the IUCN, and the dugong, which she suggests "may be 'floated' into a company," in other words, slaughtered and marketed for its skin, meat, and oil, is doing only slightly better at Vulnerable. I once worked in the same office as a woman who had a sideline in sea turtle conservation. This woman pinned turtle pictures to the wall in her cubicle, and kept statistics on hand in case you wanted to know how many eggs had been stolen, or how many turtle-mothers saved. She would have regarded Hill in something of the same way that Hill, in other parts of the book, regards Aboriginal Australians -- a primitive, a mental child, someone whose comprehension of complicated matters was inadequate, feeble, ruinous -- although my co-worker would have chucked these words at her with anger, with fury, probably shouting into the other woman's face, while Hill describes her fellow Australians as "children" with a kind of romantic pity. "A wild creature of the woodland, civilisation is his doom."

This romance is one of her weaknesses, I think. As long as a thing is dramatic and accords with the expectations of her audience, or her beliefs about those expectations (bushmen are lone gentlemen, pioneer woman are hardy angels, and the offspring of white and black parents are drawn, irresistibly, tragically, by their genes, to the primitive) then she will treat it as though it were true. Excited by the various surfaces and existences of things, she is less interested in their roots and causes. She is so indefatigably romantic that it flattens everything out. Triumphs and deaths are described with the same relish. Everything is overheated and sometimes it is crowded. Bruce Chatwin, cool, classical, and pointed, could have done a lot with some of the anecdotes that she scatters.

In one benighted gully I came upon a white man in a thatched log hut cobbling his boots with raw-hide. He did not arise when we drew up, he seemed too broken in spirit. In front of him a ragged little hen, crazed with heat, turned over and over in vertigo.

"It won't die," he assured me. "I wish to God that it would."

* I found Huizinga quoted in William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth, a book that makes an interesting contrast with this one. Heat-Moon travels too, but across one small area of Kansas, for six hundred pages. Give him a desert and a man and he'd write a chapter about each of them. He calls his book a "deep history."