Watson - Caledonia Australis: Scottish Highlanders on the Frontier of Australia

Don Watsons book, Death Sentence , was the Australian Booksellers Association Book of the Year 2003. His previous book, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart , won the Age Book of the Year, the Age Non-Fiction Prize, the Courier-Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies Colin Roderick Award. His essay, Rabbit Syndrome , won the Alfred Deakin Prize. In addition to books and essays, he writes films, and gives occasional seminars and lectures on writing and language. His most recent book is Watsons Dictionary of Weasel Words .

Throughout the book, and it is one of the many distinctions, the prose has an almost classical eighteenth-century symmetry, enlivened by the play of sardonic wit A brief review cannot do justice to the qualities of Caledonia Australis , especially to a reverberation which sounds beneath the prose, like a ground bass. Instead of ideology there is compassion and sympathy; the judgements are, on the whole, restrained and shaped by the complexities of the issues; and the reader can apply the authors remarks to much of modern Australian life.

PAUL DE SERVILLE, THE AGE

Watson has an imaginative span, a love of place and a sympathy for his subjects akin to the best in Manning Clarks writing. This is a melancholy book, taking as its theme the public tragedy of the extermination of a people and the private tragedy of one man.

MICHAEL McKERNAN

Much of it is sheer impressionism and much of it very effective indeed. His account of the erasure of Aboriginal society is moving and profoundly disturbing; his treatment of the transforming effect of colonisation on the character of the colonists, an ambitious and important theme, should be given serious consideration in Australia and Scotland.

PROFESSOR ERIC RICHARDS, FLINDERS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

Watson has not only thoroughly traced his story back to its Scottish roots, but has told it in such a way that he has restored the tonalities of other times and other places. The writing is terse and often exceptionally good.

JIM DAVIDSON, ABC

For [the Scottish settlers] the Presbyterian religion was a view of the world, rather than a series of practices. They came to own a great part of Australia. Watsons book makes clear that to understand them (and Australian history) you have to go back to the world of John Knox and John Calvin. All history is ultimately theological.

EDMUND CAMPION, THE BULLETIN

Watson is out to crack the shell of myth encasing McMillan today. What emerges is something remarkably like the Calvinist dual personality so familiar from Scottish literature. Angus McMillan was not simply one sort of fellow who pretended to be another sort of fellow. He acted so differently in different contexts that any notion of a morally coherent personality breaks down. The Victorians were quite unable to deal with this scale of inconsistency except by fancies of Satanic possession. Even that was beyond the Victorians of Victoria, Australia, who created a safe, benevolent, kindly McMillan whose name is now commemorated in a stretch of water, a mountain, numerous streets, an annual memorial lecture and a motel.

NEAL ACHERSON, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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Caledonia Australis

ePub ISBN 9781742744681
Kindle ISBN 9781742744698

A Vintage book
published by
Random House Australia Pty Ltd
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First published by William Collins Pty Ltd, Sydney, in 1984

This Vintage edition published 1997
Copyright Don Watson 1984

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Watson, Don 1949.
Caledonia Australis

Bibliography
Includes index
ISBN 0 09 183555 0.
ISBN 0 09183 555 978 2.

1. Scots Victoria Gippsland History 19th century.
2. Australia Emigration and immigration-History.
3. Scotland Emigration and immigration History 19th century. I. Title

994.560049163

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