History

Excursions Into Australian History

Readers of the Sunday Mail in Brisbane and the Sunday Mail in Adelaide have long been familiar

with George Blaikie’s inimitable,

light-hearted stories from Aus

tralian history.

WEEK in, week out, his stories seem to have been appearing for so long that we would not have been surprised to learn that Mr.

Blaikie was 94 or thereabouts.

However, we see from the dust jacket of a recently published col lection of his tales that he is only 49, and as an accompanying photo graph shows him to be in a pretty good state of preservation, it could be that he will go on to 94 to delight as yet unborn generations with the tales from his pen.

Back in the days when he was a schoolboy George Blaikie decided that if he could get at the human angles behind the dust and dates of history, the subject would be fun.

He began putting his theory to the test in 1950, and has since written more than 600 stories. Last year, some of these were collected in a volume called Scandals of Australia’s Strange Past.

The public apparently greeted this

volume with such whoops of joy that the publishers have been en couraged to follow it up with another collection, called Skeletons from Australia’s Strange Past.

The stories usually begin some thing like this: “We concede that Mr. David was one of the very best professional ratcatchers in Shropshire, England, in 1781. Nevertheless, we do not hesitate to criticise him for his utter failure to catch the rat who set his daughter. Molly, on the down ward path. The fact that the path ultimately resulted in Molly be coming one of the richest women in Australia was purely coincidental, and no credit to her old dad . . .”

They go on in much the same way.

We need scarcely say that readers seeking historical exactitude will not get much change from Mr. Blaikie’s stories. But those seeking amusement with an historical flavour will do rather well.—RL.

(Skeletons From Australia’S

STRANGE PAST. Rigby Ltd., Adelaide. 30/-.) ANEW book of Australian history of a very different kind is Dr.

J. H. L, Cumpston’s The Inland Sea and the Great River. This book, by the author of biographies of the explorers Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell, traces the exploration of Australia both by sea and land from the time of Torres, the Duyfken, Brouwer and Dirck Hartog, in the early 17th century, to C. T.

Madigan’s expedition into the interior in 1939 to fill in the last blank on the map.

As the title indicates, much of the exploration of Australia was motiv ated by a search for an inland sea and/or great river that were/was long believed to exist in the interior of the continent.

Both ideas, of course, were eventually exploded after much toil, sweat and suffering by a long line of explorers, although, as the author says in an epilogue, Australia did have great internal waterways in geological times.

In compressing the story of Aus tralia’s exploration into less than 200 pages, the author has provided a useful reference book.

The author, by the way, was the first Director-General of the Com monwealth Department of Health and is the father of Dr. John Cumpston, an historian in the External Affairs Department in Canberra, who has figured in PlM’s pages from time

to time.-

RL.

(The Inland Sea And The Great

RIVER. Angus and Robertson, Sydney. 42/-.)