Western Australia

‘A father is God to his son,’ declares the father in David Whish-Wilson’s story ‘The Cook’, just a split second before he is shot dead by his drug-dealing son. Thus begins this special edition of Westerly, which marks not only the magazine’s sixtieth year of publication but also the retirement of its two standing editors, Delys Bird and Tony Hughes-d’Aeth.

The first attempt to settle Western Australia, in 1827, failed. This book brings home that the second attempt, in 1829, was also very fragile and could well have failed. By 1850 there were still only 5900 non-Aboriginal people in the colony. By any measure, this was well short of the critical mass of population needed to sustain development in such a remote and vast outpost.

In the closing years of the twentieth century, historians combined to produce large reference volumes of national history. Some were stimulated by anniversaries, notably the dictionary, atlas, gazetteer and chronology, guide to sources and compilation of statistics that were published by Fairfax, Syme and Weldon for the Bicentenary. Some were initiated by publishers, such as the Companion to Australian History (1998) that Graeme Davison, John Hirst, and I edited for Oxford University Press.

Scattered across Lake Ballard, a vast salt lake north of Kalgoorlie, are fifty-one androgynous abstracted cast-iron alloy figures created by British artist Antony Gormley in 2002, all based on scans of the inhabitants of a tiny goldfields settlement. Gormley described his figures as ‘strangers in a strange land’. It is not too wild a stretch of the imagination to see them as explorers or prospectors driven by powerful dreams to wander endlessly across a shimmering landscape. One of these figures provides an evocative cover image for Land of Vision and Mirage.

This book is concerned essentially with the impact of the environment upon Europeans in Australia. It sets out to test C.E.W. Bean’s thesis that during the Great War the most effective Australian soldiers came from the bush. It does this in relation to men from Western Australia, arguing that the West was one of the most predominantly bush areas of Australia, and therefore that there, if anywhere, the influence of the bush should show up in the achievements of soldiers.

‘The feelings aroused in us by our old buildings are difficult to define. But they are none­the-less powerful feelings. There’s something of a dream-like quality in going back into the past; of projecting oneself into history; of identifying oneself with outstanding personalities and events in our national story; or perhaps with the simple and unknown pioneers who patiently laid the foundations of today. We, as heirs to this story, become one with our history. And the old buildings, which are visible reminders of that history, become ours in a very personal way.’