Book review: Geographic History of Queensland

*THE WORKER*

BRISBANE APRIL 13, 1895.

Books for the People.

Meston's “Geographic History of Queensland.”

Some books organic. You feel that if you were to divide them in two they would bleed. Other books are a mechanical conglomeration of inorganic elements. If divided into a hundred parts each part would remain intact and unimpaired. The “Geographic History of Queensland” belongs to the latter category. This work is neither a history nor a geography. It is neither a text book nor a book of reference. In some respects it is everything; in other respects it is nothing. It is everything inasmuch as it contains an enormous number of facts relating to Queensland; it is nothing inasmuch as the facts are presented without any sense of proportion, and without any attempt to organise them into a living and organic whole. Professor Clifford once defined science as organised knowledge. If the definition is a correct one, Mr. Meston's book is one of the most unscientific ever published.

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But despite its unscientific character the book is in many respects a valuable one. It contains a large amount of information which perhaps nobody could have collected but Archibald Meston. Who but Archibald Meston would place on deathless record the fact that an aboriginal threw a cricket ball at Clermont 146 yards on the 2^nd day of January 1872?

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With loving care Mr. Meston has collected thousands of curious facts which but for him might have remained forever in the silent depths of oblivion. He is more an antiquarian than a scientist or a historian. He is the Captain Grose of Queensland. One might almost say of him what Burns said of Grose:

Of Eve's first fire he has a cinder,

Auld Tubal Cain's fire-school and fender,

That which distinguished the gender

O' Balasm's are;

The broomstick of the Witch of Endor

Weel shod wi' brass.

Mr. Meston has the defects of his qualities, but in his own special line he stands supreme.

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The book is a strange mixture of dry facts and eloquence. Sometimes we have pages of dry scientific nomenclature without any attempt to explain them to the general reader, and sometimes we have pages of the most flowery eloquence ever written by the pen of man. After a page or two, dealing in a jaunty manner with the Pscphoto pulcherriaus, the Pilla strepitaus, the Aquila audax and other things we come upon a passage like the following;

“Eternity is throned there on these dark rocks among the wild whirlwind of waters, and speaks to you in solemn tones of the Past and the present and the Evermore.” Now I humbly confess that that passage is too much for me. I cannot represent, in imagination, Eternity (with a capital E) throned on dark rock's or on rocks of any kind. I cannot imagine Eternity speaking in solemn tones of the Past, the Present and the Evermore – all with capital letters, by the way. Eternity and Evermore are synonymous terms. If, therefore, Eternity is in the habit of talking about the Evermore, Eternity is exceedingly egotistic and ought to be ashamed of itself. In his description of Queensland scenery Mr. Meston is frequently sublimes. But be evidently forgets that there is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, and he sometimes takes the step.

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In spite, however, of its undoubted defects, the book has much to recommend it. It is a perfect mine of information. No doubt, as the author admits, the information is “largely scattered, like gold in an alluvial field.” But it is there, and it exists in larger quantity than in any other book on the subject. The history of Queensland has yet has yet to be written; indeed it has yet to be made. But the future historians of the young nation will owe a debt of gratitude the brilliant, and in some respects unique, author of the Geographic History of Queensland.

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The following passage is a fair sample of Mr. Meston's eloquence at its best:

SCENE FROM THE SUMMIT OF BARTLE FRERE.

“Human voice or pen can give but a faint idea of the abysmal gloom of that tremendous solitude. We were surrounded by a world of clouds, even the rocks within a hundred yards above and below us but faintly seen like tombstones in the morning mists. Never before did I experience the same sensations. Rising over all was man's sense of his own unspeakable insignificance. It seemed as if I had been suddenly ushered, like Ulysses, into the realms of death,

Where side by side along the dreary coast,

Advanced Achilles' and Petroclus' ghost.

In fancy the spectral clouds assumed the shape of some Tiresias rising from the awful shades. The lighter mists were driven by the winds swiftly along dismal avenues of enormous vapours, moving slowly onward, black as night and silent as the voiceless graves. Imagination pictured the solemn phantoms of departed ages stalking gloomily along through colonnades of majestic clouds. The pale kingdoms marshalled their mournful ghosts. Once only, and for a few brief seconds, did we behold the dark form of Wooroonooran, through a wind divided chasm of rolling clouds, apparently far above us, a vast black shape revealing itself, and disappearing again in the realms of gloom. And once only did the clouds lift like a mighty curtain from the mountains to the north, displaying gigantic shadows resting in the umbrage of the peaks, and myriad columns of snow-white vapours shooting upwards from the ravines below, as if we stood over the abode of Lucifer, and in the nether depths.

All hell unclosed

Its mounded oceans of tempestuous fire.

And then the sunlight came with all the varied glories of the dawn, and clouds became “red, yellow, or ethereally pale,” and radiant rainbows spanned with their curving splendours the many-hued abyss; and for a few moments we stood the centre of a hundred sunsets, lost in the magnificence of all the splendid shapes and colours of the wondrous God-created dome which over arches this mysterious earth.”

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The book is well printed, well-bound, contains upwards of 200 pages, and is to be sold at 3s. 6d. All who are interested in the geoeds of Queensland, in its geological formations, its geographical divisions, its plants and animals; in the strange manner and customs of its aborigines; in the origin and development of the pastoral industry; in in the discovery and extension of our goldfields; and indeed in everything that a patriotic Queenslander ought to know, will find the Geographical History of Queensland a veritable encyclopaedia.

PROMETHEUS.