AUSTRALIAN COLONY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 526, 22 July 1949, Page 18

AUSTRALIAN COLONY

LAND LOOKING WEST. By Malcolm Uren. Oxtord University Press. Geoffrey Cumberlege, 21/-. DWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD was in the habit of referring to the Swan River Settlement whenever he _ wished to illustrate the manner in which

a colony should not be founded. This book does little to correct Wakefield’s view. The Swan River settlers were ill chosen; the land, which was not surveyed in advance, was sold or granted in haphazard fashion. As a result, the colony, which formed the nucleus of what to-day is the State of Western Australia, barely survived its first few years of existence. ‘Treated with extreme parsimony by the Imperial Government, it was frequently left for long periods without supplies, and whether its inhabitants enjoyed qualified abundance or sank to famine level depended upon the uncertain arrival of supply ships.. Once. or twice the settlers were reduced to the verge of starvation, while on one rare occasion they were able to boast possession of every necessity with the single exception of fish sauce. The colony owed its survival very largely to the capability and exertions of its first governor, Sir James Stirling, the one outstanding figure in the book. Indeed, Mr. Uren. never seems quite certain whether he is writing a history or a biography. Nor is he apt in his choice of what to select and what to reject from the mass of material at his disposal. _He appears, in fact, to have surrendered to a sense of compulsion which forbade him to omit many trivial details that could well be dispensed with. In his anxiety to inform us exactly on every point, he falls into the ‘sin of repetition. On five separate occasions, for instance, he tells us, directly or indirectly, that Drummond, the official agriculturalist, was without salary. The early history of the founding of British colonies consists very largely of correspondence between. enthusiasts eager to settle the new world and officials of the Colonial Office, anxious that nothing shall be done whatever. This play of hopeful suggestion and’ discouraging reply, conjures up a vision of active, ambitious, well-meaning men suffering agonies of frustration on the one hand, and, on the other, of comfortable secretaries penning dull effusions in ponderous officialese to be submitted for some minister’s signature. The vision is not a pleasant one; the actual process is unedifying, and its narration should be reduced to a minimum. In Land Looking West, Mr. Uren has allowed the preliminary correspondence to monopolise a large part of his first seven chapters. Apart from these shortcomings, the author’s research has obviously been thorough and conscientious. If he ‘has failed to produce a work that will be read for its own intrinsic literary or historical merit, he-has at least written a reliable and definitive handbook for people with a special interest in Western

Australia:

R. M.

Burdon