REX - Regional Express

OUTThere Magazine l Jan-Feb 2013

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historyfocus 82 The Great Race by David Hill is published by Random House, RRP $34.95. Map: Hollandia Nova detecta 1644 / Thevenot's Relations de divers voyages curieux, Paris, J. Left: Author David Hill is fascinated by the characters who make history. most of the account was done by the botanist Francois Peron, and Peron so detested Baudin that he mentioned Baudin by name only once in the entire account – and that was when he died! He simply wrote, 'Commander Baudin ceased to exist,' full stop," says David, laughing. Though he sometimes finds the research exhausting, David insists on doing it personally as he believes it is only by reading the journals that he gets the full story and can write authoritatively. "I could get a researcher to read all of the journals and summarise the interesting bits, but then I wouldn't have the knowledge of the whole expedition that I think I'd need," he says. The thing David enjoys most about these historical tales is the people. "It's the characters – it's not just the story – and I suppose that's the point of difference. I don't write so much about events, I write about the people who were central to those events and I tell their stories." At various stages of writing the manuscript for The Great Race, David wondered if readers would think it was the stuff of fiction. "This is one of those classic cases where fact is stranger than fiction, and a lot of history is like that." It's the story's "bad boys", in particular, that David finds fascinating: "Flinders was as flawed as the next person, but that's what makes him so interesting. Otherwise he'd be a pretty colourless fella." David's favourite character and the real hero of the story is the pirate William Dampier. "You know, you ask adult Australians who discovered Australia and a lot of them say Captain Cook. Well, Cook and the British were relative latecomers and relatively minor players in this story. "Seventy years before Cook, the first Englishman to come to Australia was Dampier. He came first as a pirate in the early 1690s and then he became the first European to come to Australia twice when he was sent back as the commander of a naval vessel in the late 1690s to see if Australia was worth settling." Dampier's story inspired Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. He was "commended as a natural historian by none other than Charles Darwin and his oceanography and mapping was commended by both Baudin and Flinders – a hugely influential figure," David enthuses. "Do you know why people like Cook and Flinders dominate the history we're taught at school? I think it's because they were regarded as good men, good boys, whereas Dampier raped, pirated and pillaged around the world and was regarded as a bad boy! I think that's why he was denied his rightful place in history. I might just do Dampier next!"

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