- Email: [email protected]
Henry Parkes
226
REVIEWS
A. W. MARTIN, Henry Pukes (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980. Pp. xiii+ 482. AS644.00) E. M. WEBSTER, Whirlwinds in the Plain: Ludwig Leichhardt-Friends, Foes and History
(Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980. Pp. xi+462. A9644.00) Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Prussia in 1813 ; Henry Parkes in England in 1815. Growing up in that post-Napoleonic generation for whom fame was the spur to individual achievement, each of them emigrated as a young man to New South Wales. Parkes went in 1839, a needy artisan with a wife and young family; Leichhardt arrived in 1842, a medical student evading military conscription. Leichhardt became an explorer, leading in 1844-45 an overland expedition across north-eastern Australia which discovered much of the best pastoral country in what later became Queensland. He hoped to follow this with a transcontinental crossing to the Swan River; but his first attempt in 1846-47 turned back after privations and squabbles, and his second expedition in 1848 vanished entirely, leaving Australian folklore with one of its great unsolved mysteries. If Leichhardt was a symbol of those who challenged a harsh environment and perished young, Parkes came to personify vigorous old age. In 1848 he was still no more than an obscure Sydney shopkeeper. Gaining a reputation during the next few years as radical activist and editor, he entered the New South Wales legislature in 1854. Self-educated and self-confident he soon made a name but created antagonisms, especially among Irish Catholics. He was 57 before he became premier in 1872, but then held office for 13 of the next 20 years, and in old age put himself forward as the most strenuous advocate of Australian Federation. Although he died in 1896, five years before its achievement, he is commemorated as a founding father of the Australian Commonwealth and his name was given to the administrative quarter of Canberra. Meanwhile Leichhardt’s reputation dwindled. Even in his lifetime he was criticized as a foreign interloper. Subsequently survivors of his first two expeditions inflated their own glory at his expense. The last of his fame was eroded by the anti-Prussianism of two world wars, and in 1941 A. H. Chisholm, a reputable ornithologist but a curmudgeonly historian, produced what has since been accepted as the definitive debunking of Leichhardt in a work successively entitled Strange New World (1941) and Strange Journey (1973). E. M. Webster has sought to redress the balance in Leichhardt’s favour. She builds on the three-volume translation of the explorer’s correspondence edited by Marcel Aurousseau for the Hakluyt Society in 1968, and in addition has submitted all the available manuscript material to minute and critical exegesis. Her case is largely convincing and she establishes beyond reasonable doubt that Australian historiography has penalized Leichhardt as an amateur and a foreigner. Unfortunately in refuting Chisholm and Leichhardt’s other detractors her argument at times grows diffuse, and the mass of supporting detail overwhelming, so that readers unacquainted with the history of nineteenth-century Australian exploration might be at risk of losing their way. This is a pity, because Leichhardt needs rescuing from the mythmakers. More too needs to be done to place Australian exploration within the context of nineteenth-century exploration generally. The 150th anniversary of the Royal Geographical Society has revived interest in this global approach, not only as a means of appreciating the problems of individual expeditions in a comparative context, but also in order to look further at the role of the explorer in the development of medicine, science and anthropology. In this context Webster has provided a helpful contribution towards a greater realism about the nature of nineteenth-century exploration. Sir Henry Parkes pursued a largely urban existence. His interest in rural pursuits went no further than acquiring in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales a country estate in imitation of the Warwickshire landlords who dispossessed his yeoman father in the agrarian recession of the 1820s. For historical geographers concerned with the public environment he has some importance as the first Australian politician to take a serious interest in the reservation of national parks. Yet this represents only one small aspect of
REVIEWS
227
his marvellously protean career. An orator transcending crudities of grammar and accent, a poetaster who enjoyed hobnobbing with Tennyson and Carlyle, at times a constructive and imaginative statesman, at others a vain and petty schemer, Parkes brought to Australian public life a stormy energy and resilience which led contemporaries to call him “next to Sir John MacDonald the greatest statesman the English colonies have produced in our generation” (Political Science, June 1893). Parkes now has a biography which is fully as good as Donald Creighton’s classic study of MacDonald. Allan Martin has displayed masterly skill and meticulous care in capturing the subtleties of Parkes and his milieu. The result has more than an Australian interest, and can be recommended to those interested in nineteenth-century imperial history, to those who would follow the influence of overseas transplantation on working-class radicalism, and to anyone with a taste for an admirable biography of a complex and significant personality. G. C. BOLTON
Murdoch University
C. G. C. MARTIN, Maps and Surveys of Malawi
(Rotterdam:
A. A. Balkema, 1980.
Pp. x+270. Hfl. 105. E2140) This book will strike many readers of the Journal as old fashioned, even antiquarian, in its approach. It has no theoretical expectations, nor does it provide a satisfactory synthesis of the history of mapping in this recently independent African country. The author, now Senior Lecturer in Surveying at the University of Cape Town, was employed in the Colonial Survey of Great Britain and it was partly as an act of professional dedication that he was encouraged to compile such a volume while a few of the personalities-and more of the records-could be easily interrogated. In this task he has been assisted by contributions from a number of other ex-colonial surveyors, or reprints of their articles and memoirs, but these have only been superficially integrated into the narrative. As a result Maps and Surveys of Malawi is a chronicle of events and technical episodes which in arrangement and content wavers between the Empire Survey Review and a late-Victorian volume of the Geographical Journal. Despite the title, indicating that maps might be treated as fully as surveys, the book is primarily concerned with the annals of field surveying in Malawi rather than with its cartography as a whole. Throughout, the emphasis is on dramatis personae, instruments, and a wide range of field techniques and observations, so that the book offers a compendium of records of individual expeditions and surveying assignments, of quotations from unpublished reports and technical documents, and of extracts from land ordinances, all well spiced with anecdotes about, and reminiscences from, the parties concerned. Indeed, in places, it has the sound of an oral history about it and for anyone wishing to get the feel of how European control-in a technical sense-was imposed as an instrument of imperial policy on the land of Central Africa, then here is a record from the grass roots. Simplistic notions of an orderly mapping akin to some of the Mid West land surveys in nineteenth-century North America must be dismissed. From the first exploratory surveys of the Zambesi valley, in the late 1700s onwards, a motley cast of surveyors has slogged and sweated its way across the territory. After early pioneers such as Livingstone, there followed a succession of government surveyors, military engineers, detachments from the Survey of India, District Commissioners, private fortune seekers, as well as the hydrographers who, as in some still from the African Queen, nosed their way up the Zambesi or around the shores of Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi). The common factor for most of these heroes was that they were British, and the book is a record also of developments from the perspectives of the Foreign Office, Admiralty House, Kensington Gore and, later, the Department of Overseas Surveys. On the other hand, despite a few mentions of native reserves, there is little on the social consequences of these cartographic activities for the people whose land was being so measured, bounded, and
REVIEWS
A. W. MARTIN, Henry Pukes (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980. Pp. xiii+ 482. AS644.00) E. M. WEBSTER, Whirlwinds in the Plain: Ludwig Leichhardt-Friends, Foes and History
(Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1980. Pp. xi+462. A9644.00) Ludwig Leichhardt was born in Prussia in 1813 ; Henry Parkes in England in 1815. Growing up in that post-Napoleonic generation for whom fame was the spur to individual achievement, each of them emigrated as a young man to New South Wales. Parkes went in 1839, a needy artisan with a wife and young family; Leichhardt arrived in 1842, a medical student evading military conscription. Leichhardt became an explorer, leading in 1844-45 an overland expedition across north-eastern Australia which discovered much of the best pastoral country in what later became Queensland. He hoped to follow this with a transcontinental crossing to the Swan River; but his first attempt in 1846-47 turned back after privations and squabbles, and his second expedition in 1848 vanished entirely, leaving Australian folklore with one of its great unsolved mysteries. If Leichhardt was a symbol of those who challenged a harsh environment and perished young, Parkes came to personify vigorous old age. In 1848 he was still no more than an obscure Sydney shopkeeper. Gaining a reputation during the next few years as radical activist and editor, he entered the New South Wales legislature in 1854. Self-educated and self-confident he soon made a name but created antagonisms, especially among Irish Catholics. He was 57 before he became premier in 1872, but then held office for 13 of the next 20 years, and in old age put himself forward as the most strenuous advocate of Australian Federation. Although he died in 1896, five years before its achievement, he is commemorated as a founding father of the Australian Commonwealth and his name was given to the administrative quarter of Canberra. Meanwhile Leichhardt’s reputation dwindled. Even in his lifetime he was criticized as a foreign interloper. Subsequently survivors of his first two expeditions inflated their own glory at his expense. The last of his fame was eroded by the anti-Prussianism of two world wars, and in 1941 A. H. Chisholm, a reputable ornithologist but a curmudgeonly historian, produced what has since been accepted as the definitive debunking of Leichhardt in a work successively entitled Strange New World (1941) and Strange Journey (1973). E. M. Webster has sought to redress the balance in Leichhardt’s favour. She builds on the three-volume translation of the explorer’s correspondence edited by Marcel Aurousseau for the Hakluyt Society in 1968, and in addition has submitted all the available manuscript material to minute and critical exegesis. Her case is largely convincing and she establishes beyond reasonable doubt that Australian historiography has penalized Leichhardt as an amateur and a foreigner. Unfortunately in refuting Chisholm and Leichhardt’s other detractors her argument at times grows diffuse, and the mass of supporting detail overwhelming, so that readers unacquainted with the history of nineteenth-century Australian exploration might be at risk of losing their way. This is a pity, because Leichhardt needs rescuing from the mythmakers. More too needs to be done to place Australian exploration within the context of nineteenth-century exploration generally. The 150th anniversary of the Royal Geographical Society has revived interest in this global approach, not only as a means of appreciating the problems of individual expeditions in a comparative context, but also in order to look further at the role of the explorer in the development of medicine, science and anthropology. In this context Webster has provided a helpful contribution towards a greater realism about the nature of nineteenth-century exploration. Sir Henry Parkes pursued a largely urban existence. His interest in rural pursuits went no further than acquiring in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales a country estate in imitation of the Warwickshire landlords who dispossessed his yeoman father in the agrarian recession of the 1820s. For historical geographers concerned with the public environment he has some importance as the first Australian politician to take a serious interest in the reservation of national parks. Yet this represents only one small aspect of
REVIEWS
227
his marvellously protean career. An orator transcending crudities of grammar and accent, a poetaster who enjoyed hobnobbing with Tennyson and Carlyle, at times a constructive and imaginative statesman, at others a vain and petty schemer, Parkes brought to Australian public life a stormy energy and resilience which led contemporaries to call him “next to Sir John MacDonald the greatest statesman the English colonies have produced in our generation” (Political Science, June 1893). Parkes now has a biography which is fully as good as Donald Creighton’s classic study of MacDonald. Allan Martin has displayed masterly skill and meticulous care in capturing the subtleties of Parkes and his milieu. The result has more than an Australian interest, and can be recommended to those interested in nineteenth-century imperial history, to those who would follow the influence of overseas transplantation on working-class radicalism, and to anyone with a taste for an admirable biography of a complex and significant personality. G. C. BOLTON
Murdoch University
C. G. C. MARTIN, Maps and Surveys of Malawi
(Rotterdam:
A. A. Balkema, 1980.
Pp. x+270. Hfl. 105. E2140) This book will strike many readers of the Journal as old fashioned, even antiquarian, in its approach. It has no theoretical expectations, nor does it provide a satisfactory synthesis of the history of mapping in this recently independent African country. The author, now Senior Lecturer in Surveying at the University of Cape Town, was employed in the Colonial Survey of Great Britain and it was partly as an act of professional dedication that he was encouraged to compile such a volume while a few of the personalities-and more of the records-could be easily interrogated. In this task he has been assisted by contributions from a number of other ex-colonial surveyors, or reprints of their articles and memoirs, but these have only been superficially integrated into the narrative. As a result Maps and Surveys of Malawi is a chronicle of events and technical episodes which in arrangement and content wavers between the Empire Survey Review and a late-Victorian volume of the Geographical Journal. Despite the title, indicating that maps might be treated as fully as surveys, the book is primarily concerned with the annals of field surveying in Malawi rather than with its cartography as a whole. Throughout, the emphasis is on dramatis personae, instruments, and a wide range of field techniques and observations, so that the book offers a compendium of records of individual expeditions and surveying assignments, of quotations from unpublished reports and technical documents, and of extracts from land ordinances, all well spiced with anecdotes about, and reminiscences from, the parties concerned. Indeed, in places, it has the sound of an oral history about it and for anyone wishing to get the feel of how European control-in a technical sense-was imposed as an instrument of imperial policy on the land of Central Africa, then here is a record from the grass roots. Simplistic notions of an orderly mapping akin to some of the Mid West land surveys in nineteenth-century North America must be dismissed. From the first exploratory surveys of the Zambesi valley, in the late 1700s onwards, a motley cast of surveyors has slogged and sweated its way across the territory. After early pioneers such as Livingstone, there followed a succession of government surveyors, military engineers, detachments from the Survey of India, District Commissioners, private fortune seekers, as well as the hydrographers who, as in some still from the African Queen, nosed their way up the Zambesi or around the shores of Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi). The common factor for most of these heroes was that they were British, and the book is a record also of developments from the perspectives of the Foreign Office, Admiralty House, Kensington Gore and, later, the Department of Overseas Surveys. On the other hand, despite a few mentions of native reserves, there is little on the social consequences of these cartographic activities for the people whose land was being so measured, bounded, and