Kith and kin
Jan Morris
• TI!e. Adventures of an Emigrant in Van Diemen's Land William Thornley (Robert Hale £2.80) Of all the parochial attitudes that characterised the General Election the other month, the one that depressed me most was the assumption that Great Britain was a middling sort of nation much like many another. I hold this untruth to be self-evident, for it seems to me that Britain is a nation unlike any other on the face of the earth. It is an island; it is a monarchy; it is immensely old; it conducts itself uniquely; it is the fount of the only world language; it ruled within living memory the greatest empire of history; and most arrestingly of all, perhaps, like it or not it is,a 'mother country.' Four great democracies, four and a half if you count South Africa, owe their existence and their character to the energies of the British, and long after the Industrial Relations Act is lost in limbo, and the names of Thorpe, Callaghan or even Gormley are no more than nostalgic fragments of the folk-memory, the great English-speaking nations of the old Empire Will remain our most fascinating testimonials.
-"Even this gentle degree of jingo would have been suicide at the hustings, so tormentedly self-belittling have the British become (or at least the English, for one can hardly accuse the Scots of over-modesty, and my own slogan for Plaid Cymru in CaernarVonshire, apt as it turned out, was simply Wales Wins!)
I am aroused to it partly by the dismal narrowness of the election, in which foreign affairs scarcely figured at all, except in the context of withdrawal, but more immediately by the intriguing book I am here reviewing. It is not a new book. `Thornley's Journal,' as it is apparently known to Australian bibliophiles, was a well-known Victorian chronicle of adventure. First published in the 1840s, it ran through several editions, and was translated into German and Dutch, before fading into the particular literary recess reserved for forgotten best-sellers. At least this is what its present editor, Mr J. S. Mills, tells us in his introduction. I had never heard Of the book before, and I sometimes wondered in the course of reading it, as a matter of fact, Whether it was all genuine, or was no more than a mild Antipodean hoax. But no, Mr Mills is Scoutmaster of the First Claremont Troop, and though a critic must always, of course, Be Prepared for Third Eyes or Vinland Maps, I think we may accept his text as authentic, if heavily edited. Actually, it is not quite spectacular enough
• to be a fraud. It is the simple narrative of an English emigrant's experiences in Tasmania, then called Van Diemen's Land, during the Years of convict transportation. It contains some fairly hair-raising adventures ("I looked Up and beheld the hideous visage of one of the savages glaring on me with his white eyeballs"), and some moderately terrible. calamities ("There's the farm burnt down," said Crab, "and all the sheep the Lord knows Where, and there's Miss Betsy taken ill, and the Missus is poorly"). Mostly, though, it is the record of a long, hard slog, cheerfully undertaken, honestly pursued, and crowned at the end with that dual success, moral and Material, which is the prize of the dauntless Pioneer.
What made me wonder, now and then,
about its truth was the extraordinary familiarity of its central characters. Thornley himself was a Croydon corn merchant, fallen upon hard times, who sold his all to start afresh in the remotest of the British .settlements (white population 2,000, mostly convicts). In Tasmania he hitched up with a lugubrious Shropshire shepherd, Samuel Crab, and together with Mrs Thornley, her aged mother, and the five Thornley children, they established a sheep farm on 1,200 virgin acres granted by the Crown near the north shore of the island. There was nothing there at all, except trees. They had to cut their own clearing, build their own shelters, chart their own boundaries. The nearest shop was fifty miles away. The country was inhabited by nomad aborigines of doubtful intention; murderous bushrangers roamed the place; the only labourers were ticket-of-leave men.
Yet those self-reliant, self-sufficient, indomitable builders of Empire were ordinary citizens of Croydon. We know them well. They are with us still. The Scots like to think they made the Empire, but it seems to me that the English were really the best of all pioneers. They blended more easily, adapted more absolutely, and became not Irish-Americans, or Australian-Scots, but simply Canadians or New Zealanders. Perhaps they had more to escape from, or less to cherish. Certainly this very English group of people on the banks of the Fat Doe River seem to have progressed with an altogether admirable modesty and diligence, good without being priggish, enterprising without being greedy, and always mercifully able to laugh at themselves.
I would guess that the Thornleys grew rich over the generations, and became Tasmanian aristocrats, with their wide acres impeccably husbanded and their country houses handsome in dressed stone. It is a sad commentary on the English social system that if they had stayed in Croydon, they would probably hardly have progressed at all. Mr Thornley might have graduated into Rotary, perhaps; Mrs Thornley might have acquired some more genteel vowels; but dogged and unassuming as they were, fierce when the need arose, brave, imaginative, if they had stayed in Surrey they would be petty bourgeois even now, loyally voting Tory at the polls, perhaps, but to this very day not quite gentry.
Yet translated to that distant island, thrown among the convicts and the aborgines, given an axe and a thousand acres, they proved to be winners after all. They gambled, and took the stakes. It is worth remembering them, all the millions of expatriate Thornleys, and recognising that they are not merely our kin, but actually ourselves in mirror-image, when the politicians drone on with their grey vendettas, and Great Britain shrivels herself, year chosen Size. after election, down to
h Jan Morris's selective autobiography, Conundrum, is about to be published by Faber and Faber.
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