The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 7 November 2007
by Matthew Kneale
History is littered with the stories of weak peoples and cultures being dominated and crushed by stronger ones. The clash reflects the varying rates at which cultures have developed. Almost inevitably, though, one is dominant and one assimilates or dies. The case of the Tasmanian aborigine is one of the more complete eradications of a culture in the past couple of centuries. The British Empire used Australia and Tasmania as prison colonies, figuring they could make Britain clean and peaceful by shipping their criminals overseas. Of course, this didn't work. At any rate, as the settlers became more settled, and Tasmania became more British, the Tasmanian aborigines were pushed back, reduced, and finally, in their pure form, eradicated. A couple of episodes, such as the Black War, are notably tragic. In this wide-ranging novel, Matthew Kneale visits the history of Tasmanian natives, crafts a brilliant retelling of their sad story, and depicts a brutally realistic and nonchalant Britain as it perpetrates a genocide. He tells the story from the point of view of Peevay, an aborigine of mixed race who witnesses his culture from the time when tribes roamed freely to the time, only forty years later, when they are near extinction. The British settlers and their leaders purport to be "civilizing" the natives, but, when presented with an educated and well-spoken native man, dismiss his behavior as childish copy-cat aspiration. The aborigines would do better to be resigned to their sad fate. The casual nature which Kneale portrays here is brilliant. It doesn't necessarily take an active program of eradication, merely a brutal neglect, an overarching arrogance, greater technology and firepower to utterly destroy the native culture. Kneale extensively taps the historical record for his story, and weaves a compelling, well-researched and depressingly tragic tale.
The book would be unrelenting but for the fact that Kneale also threads the story of a British expedition to find the Garden of Eden. The good ship Sincerity, which is a smuggler's vessel, gets chartered by a bumbling vicar, a callous surgeon with twisted ideas of race, and a boyish botanist. The ship's captain, Illiam Quillian Kewley, is a funny man from the Isle of Man. His language is littered with Manx-English words, and he has an abiding distaste for British arrogance. In fact, throughout the novel, the British are depicted as the most arrogant and condescending of peoples. Anyway, the twisted, if somewhat repetitive, journey of the Sincerity is a wryly comic relief to the interwoven tale of the Tasmanian natives. Kneale tells his story from the shifting first-person accounts of four or five primary characters and a number of smaller characters appearing once or twice each along the way. It is an engaging style. Ultimately, the book's most compelling story is that of the loss of Peevay's people. The Edenic expedition doesn't have quite the power of that more archetypal historical tragedy. Overall, with bursts of brilliance, this is a powerful book.