James Boyce

Before reading Richard Flanagan’s new book, Toxic: The rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry, it is useful to remember that Australia’s southern isle was once the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. During the first fifty years of the colony’s existence, a small ruling élite achieved a near monopoly over the island’s most lucrative natural resources, the subservience of the majority convict population, and considerable profit from the public licences and patronage associated with political power. Far from these privileges ending with the cessation of transportation, self-government allowed the establishment to so entrench their interests that no substantial separation existed between the promotion of them and the functions of the state.

It is wonderful to immerse oneself for days in the precise, elegant, passionate words of historian Inga Clendinnen (1934–2016), as this welcome collection of her writings enables one to do. Clendinnen’s distinctive voice comes through: warm, confidential, witty, and driven by a fierce intelligence. All her major writings are here – essays, articles, lectures, memoirs, and extracts from her books – deftly selected by James Boyce, a historian thirty years younger than Clendinnen and himself a highly original thinker and writer. As Boyce observes in his perceptive introduction, ‘Clendinnen’s subject was nothing less than human consciousness.’

Gambling is part of Australia’s self-definition. The way we like to tell the story, lads at Gallipoli went over the top with a two-up kip in one hand and a rifle in the other, while exchanging tips for the Melbourne Cup ...

Henry Lawson epitomised the weather-beaten laconic when he said: ‘Death is about the only cheerful thing in the bush.’ A century later, Bill Bryson, in Down Under (2000), picked up where Lawson left off: he defined the ‘real Australia’ as places where ‘no sane per­son would choose to live’. Somewhere in between, Patrick White created one of those dubious entities, a sweat-stained eccentric in an undaubed slab hut who told the explorer Voss that the country ahead of him was all stones and thorns, a place where anyone crazy enough to go out there might celebrate a ‘high old Mass ... with the skull of a black­feller and his own blood’.