TheBanyanTree: Travels with a purpose 1

[Peter Macinnis]

This is my record, of things I need to note.  It occurred to me that if 
you are willing to skip-read, you may enjoy bits of it, so here it is.

As you lot are aware, I string words together for profit, but last year 
was something of a disaster year, with very few highlights in a storm of 
desperately bad writing.  No matter, we all have off-periods, and there 
were external distractions that I can blame for my lousy output, but I 
decided at Christmas that the rot had to stop.

I have never done fiction – I have tried a few times, but I could never 
successfully complete something, but a job I had to do last year 
required some short fictional interludes in a straight history, and my 
editor suggested I think of having a go at it.  I think she had in mind 
a one-off, but I tend to grandiose plans, and I came up with a scheme 
for a series of 9-11 titles in the juvenile-YA market, historical 
fiction dealing with the period 1850 – 1865 in Australia, featuring a 
boy who starts out at 10 in Cornwall, comes to Australia, and knocks 
around the colonies.

His two unusual and defining characteristics are that he knows about 
steam engines, having learned to operate, manage and fix them in a tin 
mine in Cornwall, and he has been given training and experience in 
collecting and preserving plant and animal specimens: in the 19th 
century, home-grown naturalists like this were not uncommon – even 
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace began that way, as complete 
amateurs.  That aside, he is a quick study, and so he picks up better 
skills along the way.  (By the way, he is probably fleeing an accusation 
of murder, though I may ditch that later – I don't think it is going to 
work.  He is running from something, probably involving smugglers and an 
accusation.  Don't worry about it . . .)

The mid-19th century saw steam engines coming into Australia in large 
numbers, where they were used to drive flour mills (our sluggish 
water-courses are ill-suited to water-mills), river, harbour and ocean 
vessels of assorted sizes, to power stampers that were used in crushing 
gold-bearing quartz, and many other uses as well.  Australia was rich, 
with gold being won easily in many places, and so it expanded rapidly, 
as the gold profits were ploughed into new projects.  People with skills 
were in high demand: most of the steam engines came in as self-propelled 
items, and were in parts that could be shipped to a country place and 
assembled, or they might occasionally be assembled, driven there, and 
then set in place as static engines.

The period from about 1835 to 1865 saw a massive expansion in 
"exploration", which mainly involved following Aboriginal tracks and 
drawing maps to fill in the interior of an obsessively-detailed coastal 
mapping system, and after about 1852, there was a huge increase in the 
number of people from other societies arriving in Australia – German and 
other radicals fleeing post-1848 Europe, Italians, American adventurers 
coming via California, Polish nationalists, Chinese seeking gold, and 
from about 1860, Afghans, who were brought to Australia to help manage 
camels which were increasingly being brought in to assist in inland 
expeditions.

Small-minded politicians tell us that we need more "history", by which 
they mean the rote-learning of the dates of battles that involved the 
English (but only the ones they won, let's forget anything north 
American after Quebec), the "discovery" of Australian rivers and 
mountains, and other macho alpha-male Anglocentric events.  They don't 
tell us to look into the story of the Chinese gold-seekers who walked 
hundreds of miles from where they landed in South Australia through 
semi-desert to get around a poll tax levied by the colony of Victoria 
(designed to keep the Chinese out).

They don't tell us to look at the inter-colonial squabbles that led to 
paddle-steamers working the Murray-Darling system, and they don't tell 
us to look at the people who did the real work of exploration – the 
convicts, the servants, the Aborigines who went on almost every trip, or 
the people of many nationalities who filled key roles in those voyages. 
  They want us to concentrate on the men who pioneered Australia while 
ignoring the women who managed the homesteads and the families (and 
occasionally went exploring), and they absolutely want nothing about any 
acts of bastardry practised against the local inhabitants.

Well, those are exactly the sorts of stories I plan to weave into a 
fictional series, and that means I need to go trotting off to start 
gathering in material and events that can be woven into the narrative. 
It will take a number of trips, but I decided it was time to get 
started.  In the end, I may drop the fiction idea altogether, but there 
is the makings of something here, the story about the real Australia.  I 
plan to gather the material, and then see later how I want to package it.

So a recent Sunday saw me heading off on a 2000-kilometre jaunt around 
the area close to Sydney.  If I get the series off the ground, I will 
need to see the stories published in order, but I am starting on one set 
in about 1861 or 2, on a paddle steamer on the Murray River, which was 
navigable for about 1300 miles, and in a time before the railways spread 
out, that was important to the agricultural economy where transport was 
otherwise by lumbering bullock-carts.  The paddle steamers hauled barges 
as well, and in Australia's boom-and-bust rivers, where drought 
alternates with flood, the skippers had their work cut out.

If all goes well, the paddle steamer story will be one of the last in 
the series, but it is the one I plan to write first, so I can start 
working out what needs to go before.  I am concentrating on that one, 
but gathering material right across the board, and just in case I drop 
the fiction idea, I am using double notation, with the actual events 
recorded and then keyed into the fictional story line.  Everything is in 
a spreadsheet, by the way – that is how I plan all my books.

Anyhow, I began by heading for the national capital, Canberra, bearing a 
large box of family archive papers for a cousin who has been looking 
into matters of family history.  I stopped first at Paddy's River, 
thinking that some scenes could be set at such a place – it seems little 
changed, apart from the signs warning of a major optic fibre cable 
running across the river here.  I drove on, and popped in at the small 
town of Marulan to buy the first of a series of local histories.

These books are usually written and self-published by an older 
inhabitant, who gathers as many pictures as possible, and uses those to 
guide the story, ending up with the last two thirds crammed with 
mentions of as many residents and families of the district as possible, 
so everybody will buy the book.  As a rule, interpretation and causes 
are badly handled, but the basic facts, the figures and dates will 
always be good, and some of them have made the effort to go and read 
microfilms of the local paper, so an Albury history can reveal that the 
Chinese passing through there in 1860 spoke fluent English, the men 
having been on the gold fields for about five years.

Local histories alert me to areas that I need to pursue in assorted 
libraries, so I grab them as I go.  They cost about $30 each, so I get 
my alerts to useful facts at about $3 to $5 each.  Once, Marulan did 
well out of people coaching south from Sydney, and it is far enough away 
that it still gets a few travellers heading north, who decide night is 
falling and so they should stop.  For the most part, banking, medical 
and other services have transferred to other larger towns within half an 
hour by fast driving.  It has insufficient charm to establish itself as 
a tourist attraction, but still it tries.  Marulan was declared a 
village in 1835, and now it is sinking, slowly, back to that status once 
again.

I drove on down the highway and turned off to Collector, a small town, 
about half an hour out from the national capital, where a bushranger 
shot a policemen in 1865.  In the 1860s, the alluvial gold had cut out, 
and large companies were hiring expert hard-rock miners to win quartz 
that was fed through steam-driven stampers: unless you had capital, 
there was little chance of winning gold any more, so men turned their 
hands to highway robbery against the gold shipments: in the Australian 
parlance, they turned bushranger.  I stopped at the pub where it 
happened, even though this involved driving off the main highway, 
because I need a bushranger incident or two in 1864-5.

I stayed with my cousin and his wife overnight, and we worked through 
the papers.  One of them was a love letter written by a great-aunt who 
was drowned at 22, crossing a flooded river on a horse.  She wrote the 
letter the night before, and has been preserved by the family, who 
clearly overlooked the fact that it was addressed to another woman, yet 
to be identified.  Usually, such things are censored, destroyed, but 
here is a fascinating social document.  We plan to transcribe it and 
distribute copies in enough places to ensure that the next Dark Ages 
cannot kill off her story.

I am unsure at this stage how I will weave that element in, but I hope 
to use it in some form.  Annie was a schoolteacher who had applied for a 
transfer from her rural school, been given the move, and then cancelled 
it, just before the drowning.  Her life was in turmoil, that much is 
clear, but there was hope for her.  Nobody saw her drown, but we are as 
certain as we can be that she was filled with joy and love when she 
died.  I think that deserves some degree of honour.

My cousin noted my interest in bushrangers, and drew my attention to a 
book which records that our great-grandfather was the local JP when a 
bushranger named Thunderbolt got away with the Presbyterian minister's 
stipend, and chaired a fund that raised almost 37 pounds, including a 
guinea from the parish priest.  This happened in 1867, in the New 
England district, far from my target areas, but that will come in handy. 
  Somewhere, with maybe a bit of translation and trimming.


-- 
  _--|\   Peter Macinnis, feral word herder, & science gossip.
/     \  Inexplicable events coordinator and former designer
\.--._*  of medium & large-scale mistaken identity matrixes.
      v   http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm