Volume 53, Number 18 · November 16, 2006
Amnesia in Australia
By Caroline Moorehead
Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era
exhibition catalog edited by Patricia Tryon MacDonald
Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 144 pp., Aus$59.95
The Fatal Shore
by Robert Hughes
Vintage, 688 pp., $18.95 (paper)
A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia
by Thomas Keneally
Nan A. Talese, 400 pp., $26.95
The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
Canongate, 334 pp., $24.00
The Ballad of Desmond Kale
by Roger McDonald
Sydney: Knopf Australia, 638 pp., Aus$32.95
The Marsh Birds
by Eva Sallis
Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 252 pp., $14.95 (paper)
The Infernal Optimist
by Linda Jaivin
Sydney: HarperCollins Australia, 329 pp., Aus$27.95 (paper)
On one of the southernmost tips of Sydney's vast natural harbor, a grassy bluff overlooking a sea that stretches unbroken until it reaches the coasts of Antarctica, lie the graves of early Australian settlers, those who made the journey to this new world in the 1800s and never went home. Something of the harshness and unhealthiness of those times is reflected in the many tombstones of children. There is Little Bill, dead at the age of eight, Florence Philomena Hefferman, not quite five, and Ellen Berresford Ismay, two years and nine months, whose parents laid her to face the ocean with the words 'What hopes have perished with you our daughter.' Stretching as far as the eye can see, in this windy and hilly cemetery of 78,000 people, are Italians, Cornishmen, South Sea Islanders, Frenchmen, men and women from Kentucky, Kansas, and Wales, and a great many from Ireland, driven into exile by the potato famine that lasted from 1845 to 1849.
Review, 4555 words
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