Daniel George Brock

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/to-the-desert-with-sturt/

When this was first published I was put off reading this by a review that described Brock as a self-righteous whinger, a lightweight who criticised the great explorer Charles Sturt, of whose expedition he was a minor member.

Let me say right off that the review was right: Brock has plenty of self-righteous, self-pitying moments. He records petty slights and grievances, and constantly finds Sturt and the rest of the leadership lacking, all the while keeping to the high moral ground, insisting that he doesn’t join in the general grumbling. He’s a snob and s prig and when things get desperate he’s a bit of a holy Joe, writing pages of Methodist piety. But he’s much more than that – he’s resourceful, has a romantic steak, and can spin a comic yarn. The book is fabulous. Where Sturt wrote for public consumption, Brock wrote for his mother: on his return to Adelaide, he bundled up the pages of his journal and posted them off home to England. And what you write to impress your mum and gain her sympathy is of course very different from what you write to convey your importance to the public, potential employers and posterity.

The most interesting thing about the journal, apart from the revelation that intrepid explorers can be as mean-spirited, disorganised, cliqueish and grasping as anyone else, is its string of encounters with Aboriginal people. There’s a sequence early on that unfolds like a scripted narrative: the party hear that ‘natives’ have attacked a travelling party somewhere to their north, and as a result they are in fear of being attacked themselves, but as they come closer to the place where the attack is said to have happened they learn that the factual basis for the rumour was a brutal, infanticidal attack on an Aboriginal family by members of Mitchell’s party of explorers.… (mehr)