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Pamela Statham

A Life on the Ocean Wave: Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific from the journals of Captain George Bayly 1824–1844 edited by Pamela Statham and Rica Erickson

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October 1998, no. 205
Greg Dening reviews 'A Life on the Ocean Wave: Voyages to Australia, India and the Pacific from the journals of Captain George Bayly 1824–1844' edited by Pamela Statham and Rica Erickson

A white-haired, white-bearded Captain George Bayly peers benignly out at us from the 1885 photograph frontispiece of A Life on the Ocean Wave. With epaulettes to his black uniform jacket, braided sleeves, a sword at his side and a ceremonial captain’s head-piece on the table beside him, Bayly looks the quintessential retired man of the sea. He looks like a man Charles Dickens should have been describing. We should be meeting him in some sea-side parlour, in some sailortown tea-palace. He looks as if he has a story to tell.

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‘Look up, Speak Nicely …’

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May 1982, no. 40

The four books reviewed here may be divided into two categories: the first, consisting of The Gosses: An Anglo-Australian Family, by Fayette Gosse, and Dinkum Mishpochah*, by Eric Silbert, is family biography, while the second, into which fall The Tanner Letters, edited by Pamela Statham, and Don Charlwood’s The Long Farewell, is the reconstruction, by means of such primary sources as letters and diaries, of the Australian past. Though these are very broad classifications, they serve to highlight the differences as well as the similarities between the members of each group.

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