1 comments about OLD MAN FOG (Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry).

1. Haviland's book is an interesting if not entirely successful experiment in ethnographic literature. Or perhaps we should say, Haviland's and Roger Hart's, since he goes further than most anthropologists in crediting the person who provided him with the information. It is well to remember that we anthropologists do not so much write books as craft accounts of the experiences that people allow us to have into books.
   Haviland weaves together three strands in his work: Hart's life story as an elder from the Barrow Point region, the myths of the Barrow Point people (as reconstructed by Hart), and documentary data from the modern history of northern Queensland. He finally accompanies Hart on a journey back to his homeland. Haviland is more aware and more clear than most that an ethnography of a contemporary Aboriginal or any other native group cannot be straightforward reportage but must always been pieced back together from the fractured memories of the survivors of the modernization process. The resultant book, he warns, will always seem more integrated and unified than the experiences that went into it. His book cannot help but suffer from the same defect. He presents a refraction of his disjointed experience of Hart's disjointed memories, but a book that really presented the experience as it felt in the first place would be impossible to read. The whole project is worthwhile not only for what we learn about Aboriginal culture but about anthropological knowledge and the construction of one kind of account and literature out of another.

No comments about The Rat: A Football Braveheart.

No comments about The Civilized Surveyor: Thomas Mitchell & Australian Aboriginals.

4 comments about The Singing Line: Tracking the Australian Adventures of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors.

1. An interesting effort by a distant, if not vague relation to an historically insignificant figure, albeit one from whom myths form with their customary accuracy. What bits of research and experience are fairly presented are harmed, in my view to no benefit, by gratuitous asides regarding her apparently long-suffering companion, family and (soon to be former?) friends. One must wonder what would have been the book had the author not worked for a newspaper, which one might suspect arranged its serialization gratis. The photos beg for the book guillotine.



2. I was fortunate enough to have the chance to live in Melbourne Australia for more than three years. I have experienced large parts of the journey Alice and her husband undertake in their quest to better understand her ancestor's experiences in creating the first telegraph line across Australia.

   I found the book to be very Alice Thomson-centric. She seems to glorify all aspects of her journey while continually placing Charles Todd higher and higher upon his pedestal. I was hoping she would rekindle some of my own memories of the Australia outback. However, Ms. Thomson invariably spends paragraph after paragraph describing her husband's illness or her own tiny adventures driving the Land Cruiser or walking around Coober Pedy. Her descriptions of the local towns and environs is terse, quick, and dull. I do not recommend this book to anyone except Alice Thomson and her immediate family.




3. I bought this book because I am interested in the early explorers and travellers in to the Australian hinterland and because I was about to travel to some of the same areas the author had visited. I found the bits about Todd, the man who came to Australia to look at the stars and ended up connecting Australia to the outside world by a telegraph wire, quite interesting. Although I thought perhaps Alice Thomson was a bit confused as to whether the story was about Alice Todd (the great grandmother for whom she was named) or Charles Todd who laid the line. And I could see where she was coming from in trying to relate the story of her own travels with her husband in the same area and the Todds adventures. But again I'm not sure she pulled it off exactly. By exaggerating her own hardships, she underplayed the genuine difficulties the Todds endured and both stories lost credibility - for me, anyway. But what I really disliked about this book was its horrid comments about Australians and the way they live, in these so-called remote areas. She makes it sound as though one hour out of Adelaide she was alone in the world with people almost unrecognisable as human beings. Spare us the "don't come the raw prawn", "strewth cobber" cliches (which are always only used by the English, anyway). And I hope she feels ashamed at the way she treated people who went out of their way to help her, for a few cheap laughs. In great frustration (it was so nearly a good book) I eventually threw it on the campfire, unfinished, at Lake Eyre, halfway along the Singing Line.



4. This was truly an amazing book. The author involves you in the very foundations that build up the Australian telegraph system - you become part of the history as she takes you through the life of her great-great-grandmother and grandfather. It reveals, once again, how many people gave up so much so that we can have a secure foundation in our society. Well worth owning.

No comments about Sisters.

No comments about The Envoy From Mirror City.

No comments about Robert Prenzel 1886-1941.

No comments about Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola.

No comments about "Over There" with the Australians (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press).

1 comments about Patrick White: A Life.

1. I found the biog hard to put down, unlike White's fiction which I find easy to put down! Marr has written a scholarly yet entertaining biography, and you really feel you come to know something about an Australian icon - our only Nobel laureate in literature.

   In everything i have read (including White's own portrait of himself, Flaws In The Glass) he comes across as a horrible man - a misogynist, but with some political principles with which I might agree.

   Nevertheless, that is not the point of literature, or art, to be loved by one and all. White's voice certainly added immensely to the cultural life of this country, and it is worth getting to know something about his life and works. Marr's book is an excellent place to start.