Oddly, perhaps, for someone whose ancestors probably participated in the genocide against the Tasmanian Aborigines, I was disturbed less by Kennedy’s violent end than by the plight of Jacky Jacky. I understood enough to know that he was as much a stranger in that jungle as Kennedy; to the ‘wild blacks’, they were both intruders. So Jacky Jacky ran. But where did he run? To the ‘relief ship’ eventually – but how did he know where to find it? What were his first words when he got there? Did he have to explain who he was? Was he met with praise or suspicion? Did questions like this echo through his head as he ran, or was he confident of the wisdom and decency of his European ‘masters’? Whatever, he got a nice shiny breastplate for his trouble. We can be pretty sure that Kennedy would not have got a gong for bringing Jacky’s diary home.

At first glance, Hughes-d’Aeth’s subtitle seems to locate his book in the ‘The Story of’ genre of popular historical writing. His is not the whole or the only story of the Picturesque Atlas. The jacket notes are strangely tentative in promoting it as ‘a sort of biography of a book’. As an exercise in histoire du livre, Paper Nation does not match the breadth and depth of Robert Darnton’s The Business of Enlightenment (1979). Hughes-d’Aeth does not, for example, discuss the impact of the vast centennial publishing projects on the wider economy – those tons of imported paper, the distortion of the labour market – but he has a sharp appreciation of the book as object, showing how its images bleed into the text, text seeps into the images, and borders are used to create illusions of depth. Hughes-d’Aeth’s elegant, insightful writing helps demolish false distinctions between the verbal and the visual. We are taught at primary school that the spoken/heard is different from the drawn/seen – and that the written word is verbal. But it is only potentially verbal. In itself, in its unspoken state, writing is visual. Hughes-d’Aeth is alive both to visual images as ‘texts’ and to the visual impact of the written text. Paper Nation bears comparison with such books as Paul Carter’s The Road to Botany Bay (1987) and Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language (1992). It is a major contribution to the history of how we have shaped ourselves in our own minds.

The Picturesque Atlas was one of a string of publications that sought to capitalise on the 1888 Centenary celebrations – Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia (1887–89), Victoria and its Metropolis (1888), Australian Men of Mark (1888), to name a few. Paper Nation begins by placing the Picturesque Atlas firmly within the context of colonial publishing. Writers were selected as much for their social and political connections as their literary abilities. The general editor was Andrew Garran, former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and soon-to-be parliamentarian. Other writers included James Smith, the Argus art critic who ruled Melbourne’s cultural life with a rod of iron; William Traill, founder of the Bulletin; and New Zealand newspaper mogul Henry Brett and his sidekick T.W. Leys, editor of the Auckland Star and a driving force behind the establishment of the Institute that would eventually become Auckland City Library. Lesser lights included the novelist Ada Cambridge. The artists were selected with similar purpose: Julian Ashton, lured from the Australasian Sketcher by a lucrative three-year contract; Bulletin artists William Macleod and Frank Mahony. Good solid chaps who, under the direction of American Frederic B. Schell, could be relied on to strike just the right celebratory note – picturesque and studiously inoffensive. Macleod’s notebook, for example, shows that he contemplated a drawing of ‘Convicts Fishing’ but was persuaded instead to produce a vignette ‘to represent food … fish, berries’.

Not that they were a bunch of washed-up fuddy-duddies. Far from it. Dullness doesn’t sell – any marketing manager can tell you that. Hughes-d’Aeth’s exploration of the ‘pagespace’ of the Atlas reveals the tricks and techniques that gave the artwork an air of originality without upsetting the order of anybody’s universe.

It was, in short, good corporate stuff. The company formed to publish the Atlas was indeed a huge, bureaucratic corporation – and the bureaucratisation became a selling point. The back covers of the forty-two subscription parts included a list of the departments and their managers: Art (Frederic B. Schell), Engraving (Horace Baker and George Andrew), Topography (D. McDonald). Imagine a TimeLife or Marshall Cavendish publication sporting an organisational chart! But the point was to establish the Atlas as the ‘authorised version’ of Australian history and geography: the Company’s massive resources would ensure that the facts it presented were accurate and, more importantly, that consensus would prevail over controversy.

How successful was the propaganda? Hughes-d’Aeth is stronger on the influence of the artwork than on the influence of the text, citing numerous examples of Picturesque Atlas images used to illustrate twentieth-century books. There is much more to be said, if only speculatively, about readers’ responses to the text. The Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company had a tendency to sue the pants off any subscriber who tried to cancel – notwithstanding that the forty-two parts were delivered spasmodically rather than regularly, as promised, the final part appearing nearly seven years after the first advertisement. Despite selling an extraordinary 50,000 copies (each part cost five shillings, way beyond the reach of average wage-earners) the Atlas was a financial disaster. By the standards of Diderot’s Encyclopedie, for which subscribers had to wait decades, the Atlas was not a bad effort, but it still managed to generate negative publicity. That most of the sales staff were smooth-talking Americans did not help. In New Zealand, newspapers took to warning their readers that Atlas salesmen – ‘the book fiends’ – were heading into town: the good folk of Naseby greeted the ‘Picturesque man’ with a lynch mob (Monthly Record, Wellington, 27 June 1891). It might not be drawing too long a bow to suggest that the Atlas inadvertently helped to foster the anti-Australian sentiment that would ultimately see New Zealand withdraw from Federation.

Nevertheless, the Atlas did sell 50,000 copies and, whilst there is no concrete evidence that anyone other than Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has ever read the entire thing right through from cover to cover, it does seem reasonable to suppose that a large proportion of those who shelled out for it would have at least dipped into it from time to time, and allowed other members of the family an occasional glance.

The Atlas was in every way a product of its time, an embodiment of Whiggish imperialism. If any single book codified the ‘white blindfold’ view, which even now makes it impossible for some people to admit that their ancestors did anything wrong in robbing and murdering Aboriginal people, it was the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. Those who want to argue that frontier violence was neither widespread nor systematic in colonial Australia will doubtless find a way to discount passages like this, by William Traill: ‘The mortality due to the treachery and hostility of the natives continues at the present day on frontier settlements … There is scarcely a station which has not its graves of murdered men.’ Traill’s justification of European violence is accompanied by an illustration of ‘Native Troopers Dispersing a Camp’ – a black man shooting a black man. The treachery and hostility of the natives. It all started when he hit me back.

Edmund Kennedy must be drawn dying a martyr’s death, stabbed from behind. To have shown him as a trespasser, or going down fighting, would have ruined the whole story.