Non Fiction

Ralph Wiltgen’s history of the founding of the Roman Catholic church in Oceania stands within a definite tradition: the recording by members of the various Christian denominations of the activities and personalities involved in their proselytisation of the heathen inhabitants of the Pacific islands. Works of the earlier century sought to eulogise the missionaries and encourage the faithful back home to continued support. Wiltgen’s approach shows the influence of far more sophisticated attitudes and scholarship. He has consulted dispersed and complex archival sources written in several languages, he has pieced together his intricate and detailed narrative in painstaking fashion, to describe the growth of Roman Catholic missionary activity in the Pacific from its commencement in Hawaii in 1825, to the existence of an arch-diocese, eight dioceses and eight vicariates apostolic in 1850. Pride in this achievement underlies his writing but does not lead into rationalisation or polemic.

It is a shame that animals have recently become infamous in books and film. For some reason, predators of man possess a morbid fascination, whether they are calculating killers or mindless machines of instinct. Culpable or not, the giant saltwater crocodile Numunwari is an enemy of the people in precisely the same fashion as the giant shark in Benchley’s Jaws.

Fifty years ago the sagas of maritime discovery were the monopoly of the historians; but today they have been taken over by the geographers, and especially by the practical geographers who themselves go down to the sea in ships. Australia is fortunate that its two major interpreters of the voyage of Torres – first Captain Francis Bayldon and now Captain Brett Hilder – are, or were, both blue-water navigators, with special experience of the waters that Torres crossed. Captain Hilder’s The Voyage of Torres is strictly the account of a voyage, and that voyage is analysed with consummate professional skill. The documents of Torres and Prado sufficiently supply the materials, but they are not materials which could be interpreted by an armchair theorist equipped with a school atlas. The guess-work distances sailed, the errors in the primitive observation of latitude, the absence of longitude, the crudeness of early cartography, the loss of some of the records – all of these produce conundrums which only an expert can solve. Earlier analysts, working over the same material, have come to different conclusions; but Captain Hilder’s comprehensive, scientific and authoritative analysis renders obsolete the conjectures of his predecessors, and settles for all time the details of the course sailed.

Whatever would we do without Geoffrey Blainey? If he did not exist it would certainly be desirable to invent him. Of all our historians perhaps only Manning Clark reaches such a wide audience: but while Clark's epic history is pitched at a prophetic level, Blainey’s various works are, literally, much more down-to-earth affairs. Yet they are full of ideas, new insights and questionings of old orthodoxies.

The best of a newspaper should be, or used to be, news. But in the electronic age, when sheer questions of the very survival of print media are raised often enough, mere news is not enough. The press has those functions of interpretation, comment and backgrounding which electronic news gathering rarely has time for or interest in, and one of the qualities which marks a quality paper is its activities in these areas. And the quality of those activities.

Shakespeare’s Dogberry, moving as usual beyond conventional platitude, roundly condemned all comparisons as odorous. Although this book consists entirely of essays in comparison, one need approach it with no Dogberrian apprehensions. Indeed it is one more manifestation of a recent and surely healthy tendency in the academic study of politics, namely, the willingness to take seriously political theories and ideas rather than merely engage in the ‘scientific’ study of political behaviour, itself often the excuse for an arid pursuit of near-meaningless statistics.

More serious works have been written on the life and times of W.M. Hughes than on any other Australian prime minister and, probably, any Australian at all. The little man got off to a flying start with his own books about himself and his amazing adventures, then Farmer Whyte among others came along and, to cap it off, there has emerged the very lengthy two-volume study of Hughes by L.F. Fitzhardinge, among the best and certainly the most elegant of our political biographies.

This book is a bird of most curious kidney. For the life of me I can’t see any raison d'etre for it. Not that James McAuley, with his wardrobe of fascinating hats, doesn’t cry out for a book, and not that Peter Coleman doesn’t have so many of the qualifications to write that book. But this work is not it. It’s thin, to the point of emaciation. It appears exactly four years after McAuley’s death, which, as literary biographies go, is but a day. Which puts me in mind of an Entebbe Raid or Teheran Hostages book, hitting the market while the event is still fresh. But McAuley’s career, for all its interest, lacks that brand of newsworthiness. And a book with so comprehensive a title as The Heart of James McAuley: Life and Work of the Australian Poet presumably aims to be more than a piece of ephemera.

The daughter of a prosperous-enough middle-class farming family in Devon, Elizabeth Veale received an upbringing and an education that stood her in good stead during her long existence in New South Wales as Mrs. John Macarthur.