by Boomert - Australians: Origins to Eureka, Volume 1 by Thomas Keneally 12 Jan 2010

Is Tom Keneally a novelist who also writes history, or a historian who also writes novels? The question is academic, but his skills as a novelist certainly explain how he can convincingly mould a cast of literally thousands of characters together into compelling social history. In the introduction to his latest offering, subtitled Origins to Eureka, Keneally pledges to tell ‘the stories of a number of Australians from the Pleistocene Age to 1860’. The book indeed begins with the prehistory of Australia, before detailing the lives of the first settlers prior to the arrival of the First Fleet. Readers may recognise material from his previous books such as The Great Shame and The Commonwealth of Thieves, and the author does apologise unnecessarily for recycling-- it would be hard to find better sources. Although the book doesn’t ignore the famous names it does concentrate more on the ‘bit-players’ of Australian history. The original Australians also merit extended coverage, especially the complex relationship between Bennelong and Phillip. This handsome, exhaustively researched book will appeal to the general reader and the avid historian alike, and this is only the first volume. This reader can’t wait for the second.

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine (March 2009, Vol 88, No 6.) is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2009, Thorpe-Bowker.