Hallmarks of Geoffrey Blainey’s career include his spectacularly good titles and his masterful command of prose. Devotees of Blainey have long admired both qualities in such books as The Tyranny of Distance, A Land Half Won, The Rush that Never Ended and Triumph of the Nomads. In his most recent book, Black Kettle and Full Moon, Blainey has triumphed again.
The immediate impression Black Kettle and Full Moon gives is of a weighty volume in which Viking has given more care to the text than to the illustrations. The font is generously sized and spaced, spread over a significant number of pages. But though it has been dressed with period images on the cover and on the inside, these seem to lack the punch and creativity that might have otherwise completed a terrific book.
The unusual and valuable thing about Black Kettle and Full Moon is that it covers a forgotten period of Australian history—the years between the 19th-century gold rushes and the cataclysmic days of the Great War. The historical consciousness of most Australians, if they have one, tends to jump from the Eureka Stockade of the 1850s, landing momentarily at federation, to Gallipoli and the birth of the Anzac legend. The period that Blainey recovers here is a forgotten one in our national memory, yet he considers it to be both ‘crucial’ and ‘fascinating’.
This is mostly a social history of Australia, but it’s not a rehash of the many others now in circulation. It pays close attention to the details of everyday life for earlier Australians. This is not a ‘big picture’ history. Rather, it looks at what people ate, drank and read; where and how they shopped; how they told the time, cast light into a darkened room and forecast the weather.
Black Kettle and Full Moon has two parts. The first resonates with Blainey’s earlier books, in terms of technology and science. An interest in such things as climate, gas lighting, printing, shipping and cameras is quintessential Blainey. Indeed, in some ways this book is what his Tyranny of Distance set out to do 40 years ago: it praises the scientific advancements of Australians and captures the way that technology shaped their everyday lives. As he says, the story starts out with candles and billy tea, and concludes with ice cream and the telephone.
A combination of science and myth ruled many aspects of Australian life during this time: an