Impressively knowledgeable, and very moving historical novel.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. Two opposed cultures inexorably work themselves out.ĭespite minor echoes of Great Expectations and Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith: an original, Kneale blends together their several stories adroitly, in a suspenseful piecemeal narrative that climaxes when thoseīegun in the 1820s extend 30 years into the future, the 'English passengers' arrive at the port of Hobart, and the destinies of Gentleness and threaten their very existence, and Peevay's choleric 'Mother,' who swears revenge on the white men who haveĪbused her (and, in fact, becomes a kind of warrior queen whom her white educators will, in their innocence, rename Most importantly, a wily native named Peevay, whose intimacy with the 'visiting' English will test his people's innate Officials and their families 'sealer' (and sailor) Jack Harp, for whom aboriginal women are sexual game ripe to be taken and, Potter's theoryĮmerges in several narratives dating from 1820 and thereafter, in which we meet a number of Tasmania's colonial governing Lowest of all the races-or species-of men, being bereft of even the most rudimentary skills.' The answer to Dr. What Potter terms 'scientific interest,' seeks evidence to support his notion that Tasmanian aborigines represent 'the very Garden of Eden did exist: on this remote island off Australia's southern coast. Pair of 'passengers.' Reverend Geoffrey Wilson aims to disprove the claims of geology by demonstrating that the biblical

(rather grandly named) Sincerity, seized for smuggling, then 'put up for charter,' and hired to sail to Tasmania by an unlikely In 1857, Captain Illian Kewley blandly relates the misadventures of the ship he commands, the A richly satisfying debut, comparable in many ways to Andrea Barrett's The Voyage of the Narwhal, that uses nearly 20Ĭarefully distinguished voices to tell the convoluted story of a 19th-century expedition to Tasmania and a stalemated conflict

The english passengers