A nice kind of intelligent
Journey to Eureka is the third in Kerry Greenwood’s very enjoyable series of first-person historical narratives by teenagers following A Different Kind of Real (on the 1919 Spanish influence pandemic in Footscray) and The Long Walk (on the 1930s Depression in Footscray and the Great Ocean Rd).
It is a deeply intelligent and highly readable book, giving readers an excellent insight into mid-C19th migration to Australia and the effects of the gold rush. Kerry is not enamoured of the myth-making about Eureka, having bothered to read the original documents (something she recommends at the end of the book to folk). Governor Hotham comes off badly as a weak man pretending to be strong but, as Kerry pointed out elsewhere, an uprising which could be suppressed by 200 soldiers in less than two hours is not much of a revolutionary outbreak. (Geoffrey Blainey once described it as a riot by foreign tax evaders: it had no effect on the constitutional development of Victoria, which went down the same path as all the other antipodean colonies, though the way mining was taxed was altered.)
I particularly liked the characterisation. One got a strong sense of real people in a real society doing things for understandable reasons. Something the adaptation of Welsh myths enriched rather than undermined. A strong fictional entrée to a highly mythologised bit of Oz history.
It is a deeply intelligent and highly readable book, giving readers an excellent insight into mid-C19th migration to Australia and the effects of the gold rush. Kerry is not enamoured of the myth-making about Eureka, having bothered to read the original documents (something she recommends at the end of the book to folk). Governor Hotham comes off badly as a weak man pretending to be strong but, as Kerry pointed out elsewhere, an uprising which could be suppressed by 200 soldiers in less than two hours is not much of a revolutionary outbreak. (Geoffrey Blainey once described it as a riot by foreign tax evaders: it had no effect on the constitutional development of Victoria, which went down the same path as all the other antipodean colonies, though the way mining was taxed was altered.)
I particularly liked the characterisation. One got a strong sense of real people in a real society doing things for understandable reasons. Something the adaptation of Welsh myths enriched rather than undermined. A strong fictional entrée to a highly mythologised bit of Oz history.