Southern Cross

Southern Cross (1980) by Terry Coleman – Arrow

Australia has never been a country particularly suited to doing things quietly.

It began its European colonial history with ships full of convicts, soldiers, ambitious officials and people who had generally not expected their next address to be quite so far from London.

Terry Coleman’s Southern Cross is a sweeping historical novel set against the early development of European Australia, following the fictional Susannah King, daughter of Governor Philip Gidley King, from the opening years of the nineteenth century through decades of colonial upheaval. Her life intersects with real historical figures and events, including French explorer Nicolas Baudin, and eventually reaches the era of the Eureka Stockade.

In other words, this is not a novel in which everybody remains conveniently in one drawing room discussing an inheritance.

There are governors.

Explorers.

Settlers.

Convicts.

Colonial politics.

Love affairs.

Family loyalties.

And an entire continent undergoing the rather disruptive process of having a new society imposed upon it.

Susannah provides the human thread through the story, allowing Coleman to turn a broad sweep of Australian history into a family saga rather than simply presenting a procession of dates, proclamations and men wearing increasingly uncomfortable uniforms.

And family sagas are useful things.

History may say that a colony expanded.

A family saga asks who married whom, who hated whom, who inherited what and why two relatives have stopped speaking to each other.

Usually much more informative.

As the years pass, Susannah’s family becomes increasingly entangled with the growth of colonial Australia, while the next generation finds itself pulled in different directions by the political and social forces transforming the country.

Which is inevitable.

Put two brothers into a historical novel and there is roughly a fourteen per cent chance they will open a successful business together and an eighty-six per cent chance they will end up representing opposing visions of the nation.

Southern Cross has the satisfying scale of the traditional historical blockbuster: a substantial story covering decades, mixing invented lives with real people and events while allowing the reader to watch a society gradually change around the characters.

It is history with bedrooms, arguments and bad decisions added.

Which, to be fair, is probably closer to how history actually happened.

Published originally in 1979 and appearing here in the 1980 Arrow paperback edition, it is very much the sort of big historical novel that once occupied airport bookshops, bedside tables and several uninterrupted evenings.

At around 450 pages, there is room for the characters to properly make a mess of their lives.

This copy is in Fair condition, with a faded spine.

The fading is noticeable, but entirely cosmetic, and gives the book the unmistakable appearance of a paperback that has spent years sitting faithfully on a shelf while sunlight slowly attempted to redesign the cover.

The contents, fortunately, have not faded with it.

Ideal for readers of Australian historical fiction, colonial sagas, family epics and novels in which personal dramas unfold against events considerably larger than anybody involved.

Also suitable for anyone who prefers learning history through characters behaving badly rather than through examination questions.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where faded spines are accepted as evidence of distinguished service and no paperback is rejected merely because the sun has had a go at it.

ISBN: 0099216906
Condition: Fair
Notes: Faded spine

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