Pioneers in Australia
The Hentys. By Mamie Bassett. (O.U.P. £3 3s.) Tins is a fine work of scholarship, carefully documented. 10 addition, it is an exciting story of the emigration of a large fared from England during the years 1829-31 to that distant land- Australia—and of the life they made for themselves there.
The conditions prevailing in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, concisely described by the author, were such that men of substance were willing to transplant themselves', their families, servants and cattle to an almost unexplored land which promised opportunities on a scale unknown in England. For Mr; and Mrs. Henty; their seven sons and one daughter, to leave England for Australia was a mighty enterprise. As a beginning, a ship wns chartered and three of the Henty sons with farm labourers, servants, sheep (150 bleating merinos), cattle and blood horses, set sail on din four-months-long journey across the world.
The Henty story is one of achievement; success did not fall into idly waiting hands as a benefit conferred by kindly nature. It svos, something for which they had to strive hard, risking much, and many years passed before wealth and security were theirs. In England the Hentys had been farmers, lawyers and business men; in their new land they were all those and more—pioneers who ventured into lonely country and lived there, bankers, shipowners who sailed in their own ships on treacherous seas, and on occasion they engaged in the romantic (and undoubtedly profitable) business of whaling.
Henty father and Henty sons were men of action and integrity kindly, honest, courageous, industrious, loyal. These are sterling qualities, rightly prized. It is, therefore, a sign of my own weakness, that, though they always seemed to me worthy, they at times lacken the human tang of frailer spirits. Their letters, which have been so well arranged that letters and narrative have become one, ats stimulating because this was a new venture in a new land, but they are queerly impersonal. Marriages take place, homes are built, children are born; all, it seems, dispassionately. I longed to knov, more about the black sheep of the family, John, who failed as a property owner and deserted his wife.
But in compiling the story of the Hentys, Mrs. Bassett has made! memorable contribution to Australia's recorded history with a work that is a tribute to all pioneers who helped to Tound that country.
MARJORIE ROBERTS0r1
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