Mini-Review # 2 - Girt
After the bland vanilla puree of Geoffrey Blainey’s A Shorter History of Australia, it’s nice to chew on the spicy meat platter that is David Hunt’s Girt. The two books couldn’t be more different — Blainey likes to take a birds’-eye view of matters, focusing on material, economic, and political factors to give an overview of 230 years of history; while Hunt narrows his scope on the 50-year period post-Botany Bay landing and tells the story at ground level, bringing us into the lives of a handful of colourful characters who moulded the beginning of the colonial experiment.
The first thing you notice is just how funny and playful the writing is, especially compared to Blainey’s. Just about every paragraph lands on a punchline, to the point where you wonder if Hunt hasn’t painted himself into a corner early on, forcing himself to keep up the joke-per-minute pace of a Dave Barry end-of-year column. He pulls it off, for the most part, though I did find myself wondering whether a certain passage was sarcastic or not a few times in the book.
Hunt even takes a tongue-in-cheek shot at Blainey early on, when he discusses the problems of trying to deal with Aboriginal history in accounts of the early days of Australia:
All Australian historians must wear either a black or white armband so that their views on Australian history and British settlers/invaders can be readily identified.
Members of the Black Armband School believe that Australian history started about 60,000 years ago, that Aborigines have been left out of Australian history, and that the British invaders and their descendants have been giving Aborigines the rough end of the pineapple since 1788.
(…)
Members of the White Armband School believe that Australian history started with Captain Cook in 1770 and that Aboriginal people, if they in fact exist, stumbled across Australia by accident, that nothing bad has happened to them since – but if it did, which it probably didn’t, that was also an accident.
Beyond that early chapter on the initial migration from the Asian mainland 60,000 years ago, there isn’t a lot about Indigenous history as a whole. Instead, there are snapshots of particular individual’s lives, like Bennelong’s and Pemulwuy’s, as they come into contact (and conflict) with the British. This zoomed-in approach to history matches the rest of the book’s, which ironically gives Girt a “Great Man theory of history” feel as a whole. Except most of the men here are not “great” at all. They come across as a bunch of grifters, swindlers and degenerates, bumbling along through life until they either get stabbed in the back or die of syphilis. It’s as if Blackadder the Third had been set in colonial Sydney rather than Regency London.
Just a look at some of the chapter titles can give you a glimpse of the tone of the stories in the book—”Rum, botany and the lash”, “A wretched hive of scum and villainy”, “Rotten to the corps”. Hey, I guess that’s what happens when you found a country in a hostile land with a bunch of ex-thieves and low-ranking British pirat… em, sailors.
All in all, though, it’s a bloody fun yarn and just the right thing to get into after Blainey. Next up, it’s Philip Knightley’s Australia: A Biography of a Nation.