King of the Australian Coast: The Work of Phillip Parker King in the Mermaid and Bathurst 1817-1822

By Marsden Hordern, Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2002, 440 pages, paperback, 17 colour illustrations, 34 b&w illustrations, 7 maps, $49.95. Reviewed by Peter Stanley in the August 2004 issue.

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Marsden Hordern's complementary works on two British naval surveyors of the Australian coast have been reprinted after gaining a state history prize apiece. They describe the work of Phillip Parker King and John Lort Stokes who, twenty years apart, led a succession of naval missions to explore and chart the coasts of northern Australia. Hordern's books deserve both the accolade and the fresh circulation following the new editions. The prizes suggest that the popular taste inclines more to what might be regarded as old-fashioned narrative history rather than the clever but esoteric expressions of the post-modernist persuasion. Indeed, these works represent an implicit challenge to younger historians: is his approach an aberration or is it an example? Is Hordern like Stokes, who described himself as a 'steady plodding old fashioned fellow'; or is he an insightful researcher and a skilful writer? Hordern has much more of the latter than the former, though he is still a throw-back to a time when a work of history needed no more justification than its desire to record a facet of the human past.

Marsdern Hordern's books were born when he served as an officer of the Royal Australian Navy in the South-West Pacific in the second world war. As the skipper of a Fairmile motor launch he was conscious of navigating through waters first charted by James Cook and Matthew Flinders. These books bear the sign of practical knowledge -- often Hordern describes the experience of finding a way through the shoal-strewn and tidal waters of northern Australia, and often evokes the experience, both the wonder of sailing beneath a tropical sky and the uncertainty of sailing toward unknown or uncharted dangers. But the young Sub-Lieutenant Hordern was already conscious of Australia's maritime heritage. Like many Australians at that time he had heard stories of the great explorers at school, and had also heard stories of exploration from his grandfather. Hordern is in this a relic: how many young Australians today know much of the great journeys of exploration that preceded the continent's occupation by Europeans?

These are books written by a dilettante -- albeit a knowledgeable and skilful one -- for leisured readers. There is an immense amount of value within them, but readers will reach it by patiently reading about the incidents in the voyages, the weather, and encounters with hostile Malays, friendly colonists, unco-operative dockyard officials, various animals and much more besides. Hordern will not be rushed to get to the interpretative meat: and why should he? These are his books, he enjoys telling a long story full of detour and detail, and he does it well.

It is likely that less indulgent readers might overlook Hordern's books, if only because they cannot take the time to follow his leisurely progress. For those without the time to spare, let me suggest that working scholars might find it worthwhile to dip into Hordern's books. This is narrative history in form, but it is informed by the concerns of social history as it has developed over the past fifty or so years. The problem is that the analytical insight is swamped by the sheer narrative detail; as if readers were also sharing a long ocean voyage and have nothing better to do than read.

One of the themes which run through both books is the encounter between indigenous and Europeans. Hordern uses the sources -- all except the landscape European -- to their limits. By telling a series of stories of the protagonists Hordern quietly offers a commentary on the varieties of first encounters. In February 1838, for example, James Emery, a lieutenant in HMS Beagle, ran a race against an anonymous Aboriginal at Cygnet Bay. Barker lost, perhaps because he could not bring himself to run naked; one of several such incidents in which European sailors sought to challenge Aboriginals physically, and with mixed results. Indeed, Hordern demonstrates a lively eye to inter-racial interaction throughout both books, offering useful evidence. These books could well be used as the basis of a tutorial or essay asking students to identify the nuances of contact history.

For example, students of Aboriginal-European conflict differ over the range, accuracy or effect of Aboriginal spears, a question bedevilled by the paucity of evidence available. Hordern repeatedly returns to this subject, picking up on comments and observations made by the historical actors. Both King and Stokes speculated about the effectiveness of Aboriginal spears, and the latter even watched spear-throwing competitions between Aboriginals and colonists at the Swan River. On their various voyages the two encountered spears in earnest. In August 1820, for example, one of King's officers, John Roe, was attacked while bogged in soft sand on the shore of Goulburn Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Stokes actually was speared in December 1839 at Point Pearce, near the mouth of the Victoria River, south-west of where Darwin was later founded. Hordern collates and reviews the contemporary evidence and invites us to reach insight into the psychology of some Aboriginal peoples defending their country. He concludes that Aboriginals only took the trouble to throw accurately and powerfully when it really mattered to them: competitions and the harassment of harmless strangers did not count, but in hunting or in actual combat they became, as Stokes found, dangerous.

Hordern's books also suggest an equally rich strand of insight on environmental history, as well as more expected connections with maritime or imperial history. For example, between them King of the Australian Coast and Mariners are Warned! trace a great chain of patronage and training among Royal Naval navigators in Australian waters. Stokes served under King in the Beagle, and Flinders assisted King, while Flinders was a midshipman to Bligh, who had in turn served under Cook. He demonstrates that the mapping of the Australian coast was a product of Britain's naval and commercial superiority, and effectively sketches in both books the cartographic machinery of empire, an aspect that tends to be lost in concentrating upon the Australian experience primarily.

Hordern is a skilful writer with an eye to the humorous, the dramatic and the ironic. He uses the journal of Benjamin Helpmann to counterpoint the more ponderous official record. He has a propensity to tell us more than we may want to know -- a reflection of the logs or journals which form his main source. Curiously, a significant shortcoming common to both books is that while Hordern is clearly abundantly knowledgeable of the ins and outs of the Australian coastline, the books' maps are on too large scale to allow readers to follow the detail of the narrative. Too often the careful and evidently expert narrative of the tracks followed by ships or ships' boats was nullified by the absence of maps on which to follow his descriptions.

Marsdern Hordern's accomplishment has been not only to provide a detailed -- perhaps too-detailed -- account of the achievements of two great navigators who charted long stretches of the coast of northern Australia. He has also opened the way to using King's and Stokes's experiences as a point of departure for either re-considering current preoccupations or for gathering fresh insights into areas of historical enquiry of greater concern to historians today. The result is to suggest that old-fashioned narrative is by no means a form whose course is run. Refreshed and informed by an awareness of historians' current preoccupations and concerns -- in environmental and Indigenous issues in this case -- Marsden Hordern's two studies provide a thought-provoking example of how narrative history can carry within it the potential for analytical insight.

Citation

• Peter Stanley. 'Review: King of the Australian Coast: The Work of Phillip Parker King in the Mermaid and Bathurst 1817-1822 by Marsden Hordern' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), August 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• Phillip Barker King stands with Cook and Flinders in the history of the exploration and charting of Australia's coastline. Noted maritime historian Geoffrey Ingleton considers him 'the greatest of the early marine surveyors'. the puzzle is that, while the achievements of his revered predecessors have been recorded and raked over by successive generations, this is the very first telling of King's story.
  
  Phillip Parker was the son of Philip Gidley King, the third governor of New South Wales, and godson of Arthur Phillip, the first governor. Unlike Cook and Flinders, who were Englishmen exploring a remote shore, King was Australian-born. Indeed, he was the first native-born Australian to achieve flag rank in the Royal Navy.
  
  During his energetic, fruitful life King was, as Marsden Hordern puts it, 'naval officer, explorer, hydropgrapher, administrator, astronomer, geologist, artist, writer and pastoralist'. King of the Australian Coast focuses upon his work as explorer and hydropgrapher.
  
  In a series of gruelling voyages between 1817 and 1822 King charted most of the north-west coast of Australia from the eastern tip of Arnhem Land all the way round to Cape Leeuwin and King George Sound. His major discoveries include Exmouth Gulf, Port Essington and the Alligator, Liverpool and Prince Regent rivers. He surveyed Macquarie Harbour in Van Diemen's Land, and the treacherous waters inside the Great Barrier Reef to Torres Strait, filling gaps in the work of Cook and Flinders.
  
  Marsden Hordern is a splendid storyteller. Having immersed himself in the log books, journals and personal papers of King and his companions, he creates for the reader a sense of following, engrossed, in their wake. The hazards of reefs, shoals and treacherous tides are ever-present, as is delight in the unfamiliar wildlife and curiosity about the Aboriginal people. Track charts keep the reader solidly located, and armchair mariners will relish fold-out facsimiles of the charts painstakingly prepared by King and J. S. Roe.
  
  The question left hanging is this: Had King been a less capable, good and faithful servant of the Crown, and more inclined to the excess and ineptitude of some other early explorers, might his name also be a household word today?

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