Graham Seal

I picked up "Condemned: The Transported Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire" after finding out that my 3x great grandfather and his son were sentenced to transportation in the mid 1800s. According to the book, it was a practice that had been going on for centuries by that point and, including the Home Children shipped out of Britain once transportation of convicts was halted, lasted for about another century more. There were a dizzying amount of places that people were transported from and to and the treatment ranged from brutal to almost benign at times. This interesting account gave me more clues for research so all is good.… (mais)

Beginning with the arrival of the first peoples in Australia about 70,000 years ago, Seal follows the many arrivals and journeys of Australians and visitors to their island. The stories of transported convicts were interesting and provided more detail than usual about the colourful characters and the dire conditions they left behind. The most entertaining chapter was about Tigga, a cat found in a garden in County Armagh, Northern Ireland. His microchip revealed he was from Australia, via London, England, where he had been treated by a vet. The puzzle of his travels was eventually solved but sadly he died while in care and it was Tigga's ashes that made the journey back to Australia. Mark Twain's visit to Australia was another highly entertaining section. His witty remarks are as funny now as they were when delivered. Wisely, Seal's stories are not chronological but enticingly jump around in time. From historical to contemporary, the comings and goings of Australians are fascinating.… (mais)

This is a collection of essays, memories, poems, etc. of the effects of war and after on soldiers from Australia and a few from New Zea;and. The book starts with a history of Anzac the word and where it came from. Australian soldiers are known as Diggers and we are entertained with several explanations of where the term came from.

The main content of Seal's book is the brief memories of the main battles in which the Australian military took part. Gallipoli of course provides the majority of the stories followed by Flanders. New Britain and Vietnam are included but because they seem to be minor events overshadowed by the fighting in Gallipoli and Belgium and thus seem to get short shift here.

There are chapters on the home front as well which illustrate the impact of war on the folks back home. This is an entertaining volume and very readable. Large parts of it were in the soldiers own words taken from their letters and memoirs.… (mais)

The Savage Shore by Graham Seal is exactly what its subtitle portends: a collection of stories. Seal, professor of folklore at Curtin University, Western Australia, presents an easy-to-read narrative history of the numerous shipwrecks and explorations made by Europeans before the fleet of Captain James Cook landed at Botany Bay on January 26, 1788 (celebrated each year as Australia Day, a national holiday). Indeed, one of the main points Seal intends to demonstrate that “Australia was finally encountered, revealed to some extent and settled long before [that] official date of non-Aboriginal occupation” (256). Australia is, for Seal, “a communal story” (259) of varied, diverse encounters between Europeans (of different stripes) and Aborigines (of different stripes). The Savage Shore tries to demonstrate this by recounting the many interactions between indigenes and newcomers.

Seal tells these tales in a gripping fashion and there is much here to interest the casual reader. There are no illustrations, however, and only one meager outline map of Australia, when several detailed maps would have been helpful. For a scholarly reader, however, the book has some significant problems. Seal’s zeal to counter the idea that Australian history begins in 1788 is laudable. (Indeed, The Savage Shore serves as a corrective to the idea that, as Paul Carter posited in The Road to Botany Bay, that Australia did not conceptually exist in the European mind until Cook and Flinders gave it names.) But the notion that Australians (or well-informed readers outside Australia) actually think Cook was the first European to reach Australia in 1788 is a straw man at best. (It is akin to believing that most intelligent Americans know nothing of the Viking voyages and think Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas in 1492.) Worse, though, for a scholarly reader, is that there is no new information here. Seal has simply synthesized previously published material. His too sparse endnotes refer mostly to widely-published secondary sources like books, periodicals, and news websites. There are very few primary sources cited and those are only a smattering of previously printed material. Seal, a folklorist and not a historian, did no archival research in original documents. Indeed, Seal twice derisively refers to museums as “history zoos” (249, 261). What must he think of archives? For what are archives if not “history zoos” made for paper? The dearth of primary sources is a major drawback for a serious researcher in the history of exploration.

Though Seal has no overarching thesis, he does make a few points in his final chapter. He recognizes some patterns in the pre-Cook explorations and shipwrecks that historians of discovery will recognize from other regions. He also highlights the fact that more than three hundred Europeans were castaways on Australia’s shores before 1788, people who interacted with (and probably reproduced with) the continent’s first peoples. These relationships between Europeans and Aborigines were complex. Seal also shrewdly observes: “Just as it is inaccurate and unhelpful to think of indigenous Australians as a single group, so it is to think that all colonisers were heartless thugs intent on destroying the many different cultures and lifestyles they encountered in Australia” (254). Seal wants to ensure that the stories of these encounters will serve Australia as a “richer mythology and history” (258). He succeeds on this score.… (mais)