SOF 48 / July 2001 SOF 48 / July 2001 IAN STUBBS joins the search for the Garden of Eden - in Tasmania - and discovers "English racism, now refined but still with us" murder in paradise English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (Hamish Hamilton), £15.99 This was the novel which won the coveted £26,000 Whitbread book of the year award by the casting vote of the chair of the panel, the lyricist Tim Rice. Kneale beat Lorna Sage's biographical Bad Blood and the bookies' favourite White Teeth by Zadie Smith, the one that fills all the railway bookstalls.
Kneale fictionalises the historic events of a 30-year period in the middle of the nineteenth century when the native people of Tasmania were almost wiped out. The story, set in a shameful period of British colonial history, is about the voyage of a clergyman, the Rev Geoffrey Wilson, and his attempt to find the original Garden of Eden in Tasmania and to disprove the atheistic challenges of the Victorian geologists.
It is related in the voices of twenty main characters, similar to the structure of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. English Passengers is about the affairs of Wilson and his colleagues aboard the sailing ship Sincerity with its captain and crew of devious Manxmen. It also includes the experiences of members of the prison population in exile on Van Diemen's Land, as well as the story of a group of native aboriginal people who are exiled to their "reserve" on Flinders Island.
These people impact upon each other with tragic consequences but Kneale tells it with humour. The tale moves from suspense and mystery to violence and cruelty, to cunning and stupidity, to comedy and gutwrenching poignancy with all the pace and excitement of a Boys' Own yarn. The novel is the result of extensive research into this historical period and some of the characters are based on historical figures. One of these, Tayaleah, is based on a real Tasmanian aboriginal child who was found lost and wandering in 1821 and who was sent to Lancashire to be educated. He did well at his studies, but died shortly after he returned to Tasmania.
Kneale is very interested in language and has Tayaleah speak as he imagines an English-educated Tasmanian aborigine at that time might have done. His mother in the novel, Walyeric, is inspired by a real and formidable woman who learned to use firearms, fought the whites and, even when she was captured, organized her fellow captives into a rebellion. She had learned enough to swear fluently in English.
Some have criticised the novel because of the way in which the aborigines are painted as the goodies and all the whites are the baddies. I think Kneale has drawn them as representative figures of their day - native aborigines facing annihilation of their people and way of life; a clergyman who cannot reconcile the findings of science with his beliefs about the inerrancy of the Bible; a prison governor who cruelly represses inmates in the cause of their improvement; a scientist dazzled by new findings of flora and fauna but blinded by cultural prejudice; seamen who have their own little earners as part of the twilight economy of colonial expansion. He wants us to engage with the greed, cruelty and stupidity of the period but also with the kind of thinking that saw the English as the most superior race and the Tasmanian aborigines as the most inferior, somewhere between men and the apes.
The novel is a portrait of English racism now refined but still with us in discussions about immigration and refugees and promulgated by the tabloids and in the impact of contemporary English passengers who are tourists in the two-thirds world. It can still be seen in evangelical campaigns to bring to the light in our day those judged to be in darkness.