Around Australia by Book
‘Around Australia by Book’ is a two volume account of P G Henry’s anti-clockwise lap around the Great Southern Land. Volume I, ‘Around Australia by Book – Real Australia’, concerns the trek across Northern Australia.
Thea Astley sites ‘real Australia’ north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Her fiction is played out there in towns with made-up names. Like Franzi Massig in Astley’s Drylands, Henry purchases a secondhand van and drives to real Australia using Joan Lindsay’s Hanging Rock, Miles Franklin’s Possum Gully, D H Lawrence’s Mullumbimby, Christina Stead’s Fisherman’s Bay and Patrick White’s Bristol Maid as stepping stones.
He crosses over with David Malouf’s Tess Hyland who comes into her own when real Australia is declared a war zone in 1942, pressing on through A Descant for Gossips in St Lawrence and Remembering Babylon in Bowen to get as far beyond Townsville as the Girl with a Monkey. Astley got as far as the Palmer River and struck gold with It’s Raining in Mango; Henry doubts the veracity.
The campervan tracks overlanders westward and we learn about Burke and Wills’ drunken camel problem from Tim Flannery’s The Explorers and the prompt for Federation that came (according to Alan Moorehead in Cooper’s Creek) of the Victorian Establishment’s having to co-ordinate the search for the hapless leader of their much-ballyhooed expedition.
Surviving an encounter with mat caravaners, Henry crosses the Barkly tableland to the highway John McDouall Stuart mapped with sober horses and realises he does not belong in Jeannie Gunn’s Never-Never. Dwelling there in the malarial swamp surrounding the Roper River on the western shore of the Gulf of Carpentaria, countless numbers of pioneers succumb soon after taking possession from the first inhabitants. Surprisingly sanguine about the threat posed by the crocodile, they’re no match for the mosquito and tick.
Irene in Peter Carey’s A Long Way From Home adopts Scottish Presbyterian Don Watson’s implicit suggestion in The Bush that real Australia is much the same west of Charles Todd’s Telegraph as east whereas her navigator takes a leaf from Irish Catholic Mary Durack’s Kings in Grass Castles. The East Kimberley Duracks were not in the race with their West Kimberley neighbours. Four minutes south of the Tropic of Capricorn, in the Pilbara, the wheels fall off for Henry, too, and he’s more at sea than the characters in Tim Winton’s Dirt Music.
Volume 1 of the ebook, ‘Around Australia by Book – Real Australia’, is now available from the following retail stores:
Angus & Robertson
Booktopia
Rakuten Kobo
and for those who use a Kindle e-reader
Note: in the event that the copy you purchase falls short of the standard with respect to the format (if there’s no cover, for example) please contact us via the email address, downunder@aroundaustraliabybook.com, and the problem will be rectified.
