Reviewed by Richard Tutin
How often have we thought that it would be great to go on an adventure? In asking this question I refer to the desire to travel to far flung places where few have gone before us. We could say that there aren’t many places left in the world where this can be done. As we look at this book by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, we could ask if having an adventure has a particular edge to it. Is it done, for example, to further economic and political aims?
Gelder and Weaver’s focus on Australia’s colonial story reveals the complex and diverse nature of both the adventure itself and the narratives that flowed from it.
As they point out in the opening chapters, nations sent agents out to new and often distant places. They went for various reasons. Some wanted power and prestige while others desired to make their fortune. The sending nations wanted to expand their imperial credentials as well as having the power, prestige and economic riches that came with it.
The British were not the only power to cast their colonial eyes in the direction of the Great South Land as it was then called. They were though the ones who successfully staked their claim even though the land had an indigenous population who ultimately had no say in the decision-making processes.
The arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 began the colonial adventures that Gelder and Weaver discuss. Given the diverse reasons why people set off on an adventure in the first place, the material under examination shows how people responded to their situation within the fledgling communities that were being developed. Gelder and Weaver would like readers to believe that those who went on an adventure to and within Australia did so to further the colonial cause. They point to the journals and articles of the time that cast the Australian landscape and its indigenous people in particular ways. This has reinforced, they say, attitudes that are still evident today especially when it comes to relationships with our Indigenous or First Nations people.
While I can agree with some of their arguments, I do believe that those who arrived as convicts did not see themselves as part of any colonial cause. They were essentially prisoners, and the land was one giant prison. Many prisoners had one aim in mind and that is to escape from the confines of their incarceration. The difficulty was where to go. The land was a great unknown. Some thought they could reach China and so a myth narrative was developed to support that idea. Others escaped their jailers and ended up living with the local tribes.
Those who did stay found that serving the colonial cause was their only option especially when the land began to be opened up by exploration and more settlements were established. Again, the narratives that were produced needed to encourage new settlers to come using their own adventure as a means of furthering the colonial interests.
Gelder and Weaver ask us to reflect on the legacies of Australian colonisation. These legacies run deep in our cultural heritage. Whether we, as a nation, can leave them behind remain to be seen. Only time will tell.
Ken Gelder is an Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Melbourne.
Rachael Weaver is an ARC Future Fellow in English at the University of Tasmania and a 2024 Visiting Scholar at the State Library of New South Wales.
Together, they have written several titles including The Colonial Journals, and the emergence of Australian literary culture (2014), Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy (2017), and The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (2020).
Colonial Adventure
by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver
(2024)
MUP
ISBN: 978 052287 954 4
$29.99; 192pp