What I'm Reading ATM
Storm of Time: An historical novel by Eleanor Dark.
Storm of Time, by Eleanor Dark, is available from Blue Mountains City Council Library.
It is the second book of a trilogy.
The first book in the trilogy is titled
The Timeless Land.
The volumes were once on the compulsory reading list for higher school student in Australia. It's probably about time they are added once more.
It's been over twelve months since I began reading the trilogy.
The Timeless Land I found more than captivating. In fact, to say the least, the book was an eye-opener.
My Australian history, in reality, amounts to nothing more than what was dished out by the New South Wales Education Department's school curriculum of Australian history way back in the fifties and the sixties.
Of course curriculum is mostly taught without emotion, especially when one considers that what was being related to students occurred around two hundred years ago.
What most of us have come to realise too, is that history was, in the past, and no doubt is in the present, coloured by the narrator.
Eleanor Dark surprisingly, appears not to take sides in what I have read thus far.
She succeeds, I think, in personalising, for the reader, the First Settlement of Australia.
I could, from a fairly young age, recite to all and sundry the names of the first four Governors of Australia, in the correct order, that is:
Captain Arthur Phillip, Captain John Hunter, Captain Philip King and Captain William Bligh, then followed by Captain Lachlan Macquarie. These early figures of Australian history, were, on the whole, faceless men to me. ( Apart from images and illustrations in my text books, encyclopaedias, etcetera) I never felt that they had a particularly extraordinary task to complete.
Bligh, I always believed was a bit of a rogue, who deserved all that eventuated as a result of his governing methods. Did I ever think that he may have had a personality, a family, (including a wife he left behind in England due to ill health), hopes and aspirations?
In my childish beliefs, I thought he got everything he deserved.
On the other hand, I truly believed that wool pioneer, John Macarthur, could do no wrong.
How misguided I was. But that's the picture my school education painted.
The Timeless Land will introduce you to the realities of what faced newcomers to this, at that time, unknown land.
The reader discovers how Mother England simply abandoned the members of the new settlement, convict, government, and free settler alike.
One will follow the intrigue initiated by free settlers to advance themselves and add interest to an otherwise sometimes-irksome life.
The reader will become to know well, all the characters mentioned above, to perceive them as concrete with all their hopes, dreams, perceptions, ideals and misgivings. Macarthur, especially, will be found to have been manipulative, self-seeking, disruptive and opinionated.
In
Storm of Time Bligh will be found to be a Governor who's reputation preceded him, even though he was honourably acquitted after the loss of the
Bounty.
The convicts, miscreants as there were, often faced with choices that could only lead to crime, were used and abused by the free settlers and sometimes embraced by the Aborigines.
Indigenous Australians were probably the most misunderstood beings in the whole saga.
One must be reminded though, that Dark used her imagination to fill in the gaps to recreate what is probably the most formative part of Australian History. Her research (In the early part of the twentieth century) involved many hours of delving into records in such public places as the New South Wales State Library.
With only a matter of pages remaining for me to read of
Storm of Time, I look forward to the final book of the trilogy;
No Barrier, and the crossing of the Blue Mountains.
