1st published by Duffy & Snellgrove 2002, 2nd Edition published by New South 2021
Narrative non-fiction
Award-winning writer; novelist and essayist
Foundation of Australian Literary Studies’ Colin Roderick Award
NSW Premiers Literary Awards |People’s Choice
UNSW Press Bragg Prize for Science Writing
Editor of the Griffith Review
Ashley Hay is a novelist and writer, and for a number of years editor of the Griffith Review.

Gum, her second foray in ‘narrative non-fiction’, comprises 10 essays loosely connected on
the theme of the genus Eucalyptus, from observations by Europeans – English and French –
on first sighting the grey green forests blanketing the eastern coasts of Australia and Tasmania; to the endeavours of naturalists and systematic botanists to civilise this continental family of wooded plants that dominated the Australian floral canopy from south to north and east to west; to capturing the imagination of European artists, explorers, writers and poets, challenging all to reassess their educated ways of looking.

The peculiarly Australian allure of the eucalypts has induced a morbid, compulsive response: from Banks’ commissioned but never published florilegium comprising expensively engraved lithographic plates of botanical material accumulated on the first Endeavour voyage, never printed in his lifetime; to Max Jacobs’ globe-trotting promotion of eucalypts as a wonder crop for developing countries in the equatorial zones; to Stan Kelly’s ambitions of illustrating the upwards of 900 identified species using specimens he began collecting while driving trains across the continent; to William Macarthur’s display of timber samples presented at the Paris Exposition of 1855; and wrapped up in Murray Bail’s gothic novel Eucalyptus requiring a suitor to meet the father’s challenge of reciting in alphabetical order species names for the three hundred trees planted out on his block.

It is happy hunting ground for Hay, who like the father in Eucalyptus has absorbed the rich emanations of this tree as an emblem of what it is to feel truly Australian. Her stories are of obstinate, driven individuals; of delusions and dead ends; of a brotherhood of solace and folly. She would have us see the story within a larger story of the European desire to subdue the landscape; reduce its native forests to usable products; and order for the eye, accustomed to full shade or none; to straight lines and worked planks; to fuel or fibre. Indeed this second enlarged edition twenty years after first publication indicates a degree of absorption by the author herself.

A fair weight is given to Michael Jacobs’ role in popularising eucalypts as a replacement fuel source for poor countries in the tropics. Gums provide a fast-growing cash crop, holding soil, while valuable as construction material. The message caught the same wave as Norman Bourlaugh’s revolutionary high yield grain varieties that fuelled the drive to lift the world out of poverty, hunger and environmental decline. Hay takes the story forward to its less than glorious dénouement.

Perhaps it is in the nature of narrative nonfiction that we are invited to accept the jolts as we move from a case history in botanical systematics; to the founding of the Melbourne Botanical Gardens; to the fight for the forests in the 1970s; to debates over fire in the Australian landscape. My disappointment was in the subject scatter. The rapid spread of the genus to all corners of the continent and its adaptation to all climates, soils and elevations, something that has occupied observers from the time of the First Fleet to latest speculation with the onset of major climate shifts, is raised but not pursued. We learn about forestry, and its attendant politics and practice from the perspective of those defending old growth eucalyptus forests from clear felling. We have insight to the European reaction to gum dominated landscape; we have hints on the management of this landscape pre-settlement; and a delightful story of trees woven into the account of first contact in Botany Bay.

As narrative it succeeds, but I do have reservations on accuracy – eg the reference to 1080 on page 192 is not correct; water tables tend to rise when trees are felled (contrary to what is said at p197) – and, surprisingly, editing could have been more thorough. Mitchell is an important figure in the history of settlement. I was disappointed to find his practice of clearing peaks of trees to obtain lines of sight conflated with an ambition to subdue the landscape: he, like most in the colonial administration, was trained to a role. The transcribed field log of the trip the author refers to – when Mitchell called on the dying Oxley on his way out – gives a different picture of the man. Despite valuable notes and references, the lack of an index is a drawback in an essay collection based on extensive and often deep reading.

Gum as a companion for a south coast beach holiday is hard to beat. Skip over the sweeping declarations; glory in the sideways glances; absorb the histories of men alone in the landscape with their obsessions and the monuments they create. But don’t neglect the landmark references from which this author has drawn. Indeed her expansive bibliography is a true anchor to this endeavour in the tradition of Anne Moyal’s Platypus, Eric Rolls’ A Million Wild Acres, and George Seddon’s Searching for the Snowy.1st published by Duffy & Snellgrove 2002, 2nd Edition published by New South 2021

The hidden history of Australia’s other bushrangers by Meg Foster, UNSW Press 2024

Travelling up the New England Highway at the start of the university term I would pass the giant granite tors of the Moonbis, a range of hills glowering over the Tamworth plain, gateway to the New England Plateau. One of these natural monuments has been designated “Thunderbolt’s Rock” and adopted as a local landmark by the village of Uralla. The memory of Thunderbolt thus serves Uralla the way that the Kelly gang lives on in Glenrowan, although Captain Thunderbolt, an alias for Frederick Gardner, could boast none of their theatrics, nor their suitably fiery downfall. Thunderbolt’s last stand was a squib to a career that included his spectacular escape from Cockatoo Island aided (or not) by the gallant Mary Ann Bugg, one of Meg Foster’s subjects in her portraits of the other side of bushranging. My other youthful encounter was through Robbery Under Arms, Rolfe Boldrewood’s roistering tale of cattle rustling. The fictional protagonist Captain Starlight was modelled possibly on Harry Redford, not to be confused with Frank Pearson, a historical bushranger who went under the same name. There is a bridle path called Starlight’s track into the Nattai valley which would have provided a fine hideout for him, his confederates and their pilfered stock even if the association lacks credence. This boy’s own account has been spoofed delightfully by Randolph Stow in Midnite – the Story of a Wild Colonial Boy staring Captain Midnite and his ambiguous and ruthless siamese companion Khat, that high school students are encouraged to study for its historical and literary insights.

Meg Foster would have none of this. Bushranging was a trope to cement in the mind of Australians the ideal of manhood and defiance of authority: a blueprint for a white male version of history. They find their ends in prison gallows yards or unlamented in lonely graves, these men and boys who had taken to robbing settler huts and highways for a living. To expose the myth-making, Foster has provided four portraits of the hidden history: non-white, non-male and non-European miscreants, who had through a variety of circumstances taken to the roads as fugitives from the law.

We are introduced to Black Douglas, scourge of life on the Victorian goldfields; Sam Poo, a threat to law-abiding society in the Liverpool Plains; Mary Ann Bugg, masterful survivor and loyal concubine to Frederick Gardiner, the “gentleman bushranger”; and the Governor brothers, whose bloody deeds in turn of the century Mudgee have been celebrated in book (Thomas Keneally)  and film (Fred Schepisi). Foster takes pains with the stories behind these figures, choosing to frame them as overlooked or underwritten, or dismissed because they did not fit the still-prevailing racist and masculinist image of bushranging.

In Foster’s account, this image is too narrowly populated by fortune seekers or anti-establishment fugitives of various stripes within the European male genre. The haunted eyes in Nolan’s graphic strip are both anti-hero and anti-establishment, contrasting colonialism’s blue serge-denominated order with a sun-bleached empty landscape; while Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang reduces Irish revolt to a rough and ready soap opera: in both cases the flavour is male and white. Females and non-Europeans have no place in this story. Her subjects emerge from the shadows of history, and from court files, with whatever further documentation is available to rebalance the popular imaginary.

Foster has made a useful contribution to documenting life beyond the law in 19th-century Australian colonies. However, I am not sure that she has made her case: should we now champion these subjects rather than Captain Thunderbolt or members of the Kelly Gang? Should we concede that not being white and male did not bar anyone from breaking the law? Or should we note the miserable ends that those who were caught came to; and the clever ways others like Mary Bugg could game British Justice and the sexual mores of the time, to live out respectable lives? I do not see the fates of Douglas (never convicted of a capital crime, fading from view as a petty criminal), Poo (poorly defended in court, hanged for a murder he probably did not commit), or the Governors (hunted down but defiant, and hanged for a crime of passion that had little to do with robbery) as connected one to the other, nor as illustrating a suppression thesis. Each had a popular reception at the time; in no case was the justice handed down free from scrutiny; neither can it be said that justice was denied, despite popular sentiment favouring violent retribution.

The book is introduced with a page of encomiums from well-known authors and historians. I would not wish to gainsay them. However, I found its argument unconvincing, and too close to its origins as a research thesis; neither coherent nor refreshing. I am inclined to blame these shortcomings, not on Foster’s talents as a writer or historian, but on her argumentative framework. The bushranger topos will survive this assault, and anti-antiheroes such as those described by Foster emerge as interesting historical figures, each offering insights into mid- to late-century colonial society.

Review appearing in the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol 109 part 2, Dec 2023