Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’m off for a fortnight to Chile and Cuba. Think of it.  A 61 year old woman. There by herself. Very rudimentary Spanish. What could possibly go wrong?

Join my on my (mis)adventures at my other blog Land of Increasing Sunshine – or, in approximate Spanish La Tierra Más Soleada

2007, 262 p & notes

Transit Lounge

In 1912 it was said that when the real story of Alexander Malcolm Jacob was written, it would be invested with more wonder and mystery than “even in our strangest dreams we never imagined it could possess.”(p.247)

Well, it took a hundred years, but in this book John Zubrzycki has probably got as close to the “real” story as anyone else is likely to do. Mr Jacob – diamond merchant, magician and spy – was happy to embroider and dissemble about his actual origins, but for the civil servants of the British Raj who escaped to the Indian hills of Simla to escape the summer heat, Mr Jacob was a celebrity. His shop was full of  gems, curiosities and wonders, he lived in a opulent mansion ‘Belvedere’ and he was sought out for his magic and mystical skills and political contacts. He appeared in multiple newspaper articles, essays, books and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim  (albeit, not under his own name but as Lurgan Sahib).  He dealt with Indian princes and maneuvered the shadow world of British spies operating in the Far East, and yet he ended up largely impoverished, living on a rather miserly pension before his death in 1921 aged 71.

Many rumours spread about his origins –  Jewish? Greek? Polish? Italian? – but Zubrzycki has tracked his birthplace down to a small town in Turkey, near the Syrian border. He was actually Catholic, but in a world obsessed with spiritualism, he attracted Theosophists and the adherents of Madame Blavatsky. He arrived in Bombay in 1865 penniless, and within 12 years had achieved celebrity status. His greatest, and as it turned out, most damaging challenge was to sell the Imperial diamond, the largest brilliant-cut diamond in the world, to Mahboob Ali Khan, the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad in 1891.  Fabulously wealthy and opium-addicted, the Nizam liked gems, and Jacob undertook to bring him the diamond from Europe on approval, hoping to make a hefty profit for his efforts. But the sale ended up in court and here, if perhaps anywhere, Zubryzycki got closest to discovering what may be the truth about Alexander Jacob.

The book is framed as the author’s search for the ‘real’ Mr Jacob, and the author strolls onto the page quite frequently as he hunts for locations, searches for documents and seeks an elusive photograph of him. It certainly seems as if Mr Jacob is reaching out from the grave, sometimes thwarting some of his efforts (as in when he finally tracked down Mr Jacob’s grave only to find that it had just been destroyed), and permitting “just in time” discoveries at other times (as when he found the decrepit Belvedere mansion, just before its demolition).  In this case, Australian readers benefit from the six year lag between the book’s publication in 2011 and its recent release through Transit Press in Australia, as in the meantime he found the much-sought-after photo to add a physical presence to such an elusive subject. The author has an engaging style, whipping up interest at the start of each chapter, and if he digresses it’s because they’re such interesting alleyways into which he is being drawn.

We are taken on a fascinating journey into an India of  the scarcely-imaginable wealth of its Indian Princes and the rather disdainful manipulation of British colonial politics. There is a fluidity in Mr Jacob’s life as he defies national definitions and flits in the shadows of spies and diplomats.  There’s little attempt- and I dare say, little scope- for any exploration of Mr Jacob’s personal life, and in this he is just as slippery and elusive as in his professional life. It’s a rattling good yarn, as Mr Jacob knew himself in his various retellings and embellishments, and you can’t help but be imbued with Zubryzycki’s passion for such an enigmatic character.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: review copy from Transit Lounge Publishing.

There’s an interesting curated story on the Victorian Collections website called ‘Another Night’. Inspired by Geoffrey Blainey’s Black Kettle and Full Moon, this narrative links different objects on the Victorian Collections website related to lighting and night-time.

Victorian Collections is a repository for digital images from different museums and historical societies in Victoria. It includes both paper-based images and photographs of catalogued physical objects.

The curator, Kitty Owens, has put together a selection of postcards and photographs and images of candles and lamps.  There’s a fascinating photograph of the inside of the Richardson’s house at Harmony Vale in the Dandenongs around 1895. It’s a fairly humble house, with the family gathered around the fireplace and the light spilling in from the window.  It’s very different to the image of Villa Fortuna, an opulent mansion stuffed with furniture and objets d’art, lit by (curiously mis-matched) chandeliers. There’s photos and an artefact from a ‘switching-on’ ceremony when the electricity came through. I’m not aware of local NBN-switching on ceremonies- perhaps we’re all too jaded.

Well worth a look!

https://victoriancollections.net.au/stories/another-night

2016, 304 p.

When you see Nick Brodie’s book on a bookstore shelf along with other Australian titles, with its dominant ‘1787’ emblazoned on the front, you tend to do a bit of double-take. Did someone make a mistake? Wasn’t it 1788?  There has been a constant and increasing uneasiness with 26 January being celebrated as Australia Day (something I’ve written about several times in this blog) but in this book Brodie bumps all this debate to one side, exhorting us that “‘If we broaden our gaze, our story will get bigger”. 

There are some history books where, having read them, you know there has been a shift in your awareness.  You return to ideas and concepts that you had never questioned before, and see them anew.  I’m thinking, for example, of Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate in the World and to a lesser extent Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu; I’m thinking of Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language,  Zoe Laidlaw’s Colonial Connections or the first of Henry Reynold’s work that you might read. Tom Griffith’s book Hunters and Collectors changed my mind about museums, and as a more distant example,  I suppose that Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance would have had a similar effect at the time of publication.  To this list, now I’d have to add Nick Brodie’s  1787.  He eschews the idea of our continent sitting isolated at the bottom of the globe and instead knits Australia into  Eurasia and a trading network frontier that connected the northern and southern hemispheres. Although the book is called ‘1787’ (a curious choice given his challenge to what he calls  “the arbitrariness of epochs”) it spans the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and expands its view to the  current peripheries of Australasia, including New Zealand (have I offended?), Tasmania, New Guinea and the Torres Strait.

He does seem rather fixated on the emphasis on 1788, or rather, he keeps asserting that ‘we’ are. Certainly the Australian history I was taught did include the Dutch and the Macassans and  I suspect that his somewhat conspiratorial view of the ‘lost’ness  these ‘hidden documents’ is a little overblown.

However, what Brodie does in this book is create a narrative from the writings of Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and French mariners and contextualize those encounters into a broader Eurasian trade and Enlightenment-culture picture. He starts his book with the narrative of Don Diego de Prado y Tovar, an officer under the command of Pedro Fernandes de Quiros, who travelled the Pacific during 1606 and encountered the fringes of New Guinea. He highlights that  Islamic, European and Chinese powers converged in the islands to the north of Australia, and spends quite a bit of time on Tasman’s expedition for the VOC (Dutch East India Company). He shows that Dampier led not one, but two voyages to New Holland, and while respectful (as one must be) of Cook’s seamanship, he writes a detailed narrative of Cook’s largely unsuccessful attempts at interaction with the indigenous inhabitants . He is very aware of the constructed nature of the documents he works from.   He looks carefully at Cook’s corrections and amendments between the drafts and published copies of his journals, and considers them against Banks’ writings as well.  He cites directly from primary texts; he slows down for particular episodes; he makes pithy and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations.

I had not realized that Cook went to Van Diemen’s Land, and for me the really new part of this book came in the section ‘Forward Operating Bases’ which places Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand as the bases of repeated encounters. The usual post-1788 narrative is that both VDL and New Zealand were settled from Sydney, but his enumeration of repeated visits by English and French expeditions that deliberately sailed for Adventure Bay( 1773 and 1777) and Frederick Henry Bay (1772) in Van Diemen’s Land and Ship Cove in New Zealand (1770, 1773 -several times-1774, 1777) challenges that view.  Ships in an expedition became separated from each other; they returned to shelter in the hope that the other ship would do likewise; they deliberately let loose farm animals in the hope that they would breed and form a land-based food supply, and they tried to encourage agriculture.

None of these journeys are accidental drop-ins: instead they are a manifestation of both the trade and knowledge networks that criss-crossed the globe.  Nor were the indigenous people they encountered always completely ignorant either: knowledge spread within Australasia as well.

Brodie has an engaging, easy tone and he sustained the energy of his writing throughout.  I do wish that there had been a map beyond the  16th and 17th century reproductions he includes within the colour plates in the middle of the book.  It’s written for a general readership, with no footnotes.

There is much to admire here, but as I found when reading his earlier book Kin, there is a brashness and self-promotion in his approach that does not sit well with me. He doesn’t need to engage in the sniping at unnamed historians who have ‘duped’ their readers and colleagues by fixing only on 1788, and I find his condescension towards other historians, their readers, and anyone who has ever studied Australian history, unpleasant. ‘Dupe’ can be a noun as well as a verb, and no-one likes to be told that they have been stupidly misled.   It is a stance spelled out in the ‘not-a-prologue’ (his chapter heading, not mine),  repeated over again in opening each chapter and reiterated in the ‘not-an-epilogue’. His insistence on his contrarian, “me against the historians” argument becomes wearing after a while.  I had thought, with Kin, that it was a reflection of his young age and impatience.  Perhaps it still is.  Despite his sneering at ‘historians’, he is an academically trained and recognized historian himself, and he’s too good to engage in such blatant self-promotion.  He’s a prolific worker (with already another book in the wings), stunningly telegenetic, and good at publicity.  It amazes me that he hasn’t been snapped up for television work.

That said, this is one of those books that makes you see things differently.  By shifting the frame to Van Diemens Land and New Zealand, he shifts Australian history subtly on its axis, and he does, it’s true, reframe the whole Captain Cook/ 1788 story. That’s quite an achievement.